The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital – Leopoldina Fortunati

[Verso Books; 2025]

Tr. from the Italian by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono

Translators Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono, in their introduction to The Arcana of Reproduction, refer to Leopoldina Fortunati’s project multiple times as “rigorous.” Her philosophy is indeed mathematical in its intensity, laying out a feminist counterpoint to traditional Marxist understanding of labor that depends on the reader being similarly fluent with Marxist terms and principles. For all the specificity of its subtitle, conjuring women in aprons, flour on their hands, diapers soaking in a tub; prostitutes shivering on frosty street corners in tight little skirts, and workers in flat caps, wrench in pocket, there are few such visible characters in The Arcana of Reproduction. And reproduction is not as you might have imagined from the title, the act of bearing children. That might be part of reproduction as she means it, but not the whole she refers to. As in mathematics, where words like slope and irrational have quite specific understandings that are not the same as their everyday use, Fortunati’s terminology may sound like something we grasp, but refers instead to something within the sphere of Marxist thought. Neither does she have the mercy to define these terms, or ease you into them. Here’s one passage that is at least a partial explanation of the title concept, as applied to the worker’s dinner:

To the worker, it does not matter whether the food is prepared by the houseworker, by the waged domestic helper, or by the waged worker (of whatever gender) at the deli around the corner. All that matters to him is that he eats. Generally speaking, he proceeds with the first option, the exchange with the houseworker, because this is the most efficient solution for him in all aspects. First, the food costs less; second, the houseworker prepares meals of whatever he wants, however he wants it prepared, at the time that he wants it (within certain limits which are becoming narrower by the day.) She also guarantees him, in addition to food, the production of all material and immaterial values that he needs to reproduce himself. It follows that, for the worker, it is advantageous overall to exchange with the houseworker.

So one element of reproduction might be food, and its preparation, but it encompasses much more: “all material and immaterial values that he needs to reproduce himself.” Note Fortunati’s clinical tone, where the loving wife is now the houseworker, and the advantages of an “exchange” with her are coldly calculated. Fortunati exposes a steel skeleton lurking where the still duped see a romantic figment—family life.

In the 1970s and 80s, Italian feminists promulgated the Wages for Housework movement. The movement is associated in the U.S. most closely with Silvia Federici, who writes the foreword to this book. Fortunati’s opus belongs to this school, and the phrase Wages for Housework gives a thrill. What would it be like to get paid to take those kids to their soccer games, or to wipe their vomit off the floor at midnight, or to pack their fiddly lunches for them immediately after setting their breakfast on the table? Paid to dust and vacuum, you can imagine that, maybe, but paid to be that person who keeps the whole family mechanism going from dawn to dawn with countless little acts that no one counts as work—that’s interesting, isn’t it? How would you set a price on these “immaterial values”? Where would the money come from? Who pays it to whom? It should be clear that gaining entrance to paid work has scarcely lessened the other work women do, and that even if we vacuum less than our mothers did, it still mostly falls to us. We somehow mind when the bed isn’t made, so we make it. And possibly dad will take Maddie to her dentist appointment, but it was probably mom who made the appointment, and keeps the calendar. She has to first ask him, almost as a favor, to drive their daughter, and then remind him to do it. Or maybe not. Maybe your household is completely different. But this is the general drift, that the work that women do outside of waged work is overall unseen, uncredited, and not considered important. It is also not unified, as an identifiable part of the work of the working class, but remains fragmentary and private, as if a series of one-on-one agreements, rather than a mass societal arrangement.

This mostly invisible, unvalued reproduction has not been with us forever, but is part of the specific societal relations we live in under capitalism. Marx, and Fortunati with him, take us from primordial times through slavery to serfdom to the transformations of the era of waged labor, of capitalism. “Unlike slavery and serfdom, in which men and women were fundamentally subjected to an identical relationship of production,” she says, “capital establishes a relationship of production with men that is formally different from the one it establishes with women,” [italics in original]. “The woman,” she continues, “as the primary subject of reproduction, is forced into an indirectly waged labour relationship.” [italics in original] That is, a relationship of production is formed between man and woman, where he works for capital, and she in some sense works for him.

In addition to being rigorous, Fortunati’s text is ruthless, stripping away every plank of Marx’s platform to show the underside of labor, the women’s work that wasn’t worth his noting. Women, she explains, begin working as apprentices to their mothers, learning from childhood with their toy brooms and minor chores, and they continue working—that is, cooking, cleaning—well after the man of the household has retired. Thus within the family, she says, “women perform, at the mass level, child labour and labour into old age.” However chilling an observation this is, overall Fortunati’s analysis operates at a general level, and is not terribly historically specific, something like the tarot hinted at in the title. She’s using broad types to give us a way of seeing and understanding. She remarks that even as she’s composing the book in the late 1970s, women’s lives are changing. One rare domestic note that intrudes into this book about domesticity is Fortunati’s observation that women who worked for a wage in the 1960s mostly spent their money on their children. A decade later, they made a small concession to their own needs. “One of the few simple achievements made by women for themselves in these years in the realm of consumption,” she says, “was establishing a weekly appointment with the hairdresser.” This remark on presumably Italian working class women’s calendars shows that her argument, despite its broad characterizations, is based on an understanding of real people’s lives. And yet the book proceeds with its icy clang of mathematical formulae. Finally, in the chapter on surplus value, we get a ratio between surplus value and the variable part of variable capital, expressed as

If you haven’t gathered why this book is a difficult read by now, surely you’re slowed, halted or turned back by the solemn apparition of this equation. The biggest question the book begs is not how much reproduction, or women’s work, has changed since this book was written, making some of its observations dubious and some spot on, but rather, who is the reader it’s designed for? It takes a good deal of education and background to turn these pages. Those housewives spending a bit of their paltry wages at the hairdressers don’t seem to be included in the readership of this book that illuminates their situation. As Federici writes in her cogent foreword, “revealing the extent to which capitalism dominates our lives – and revealing all the unpaid labour that it has extracted from women through the organisation of marriage and the family – is an essential step for forging a feminist political agenda.” Yet this book might be a problematic aid in clarifying such an agenda.

Fortunati’s book seems to demand a united effort, even to grasp its basic concepts. (Your book club may turn to the excellent graphic introduction to Marx, Rius’s Marx for Beginners, as a necessary companion piece. You might also watch Marco Bellocchio’s absorbing new mini-series “External Night” on Amazon for a hint of the turmoil of Italian politics at the time Fortunati was writing. Clearly her context was vastly different from ours, both in the 1970s and today.) I imagine a new movement of reading circles slogging together, chapter by chapter. Maybe groups of five or seven devoted women can go down to the wine bar on Tuesday nights to read and explore The Arcana of Reproduction. Even so, the fruit of Fortunati’s labor can only be gathered with plenty of the reader’s dogged application. Possibly the ongoing cost of the unpaid labor that has been extracted from us is that we greet Tuesday night already too tired to read, to write, to talk, to plan to change things.

Angela Woodward’s short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in many journals including the Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Green Mountains Review, and the L.A. Review of Books. She is the author of the novels End of the Fire Cult, Natural Wonders, and Ink. Her latest, Afterlife, comes out in 2026 from Fiction Collective Two. Find more at angela.woodward.com.