Beyond the Periphery of the Skin

On the surface, Freud’s theory seems to concern sexuality in general, but its real target was female sexuality. Freud’s work was a response to women’s refusals of housework, procreation, and sexual work.

behind the family crisis and the rush to divorce there was the rebellion of women

prostitution, though an object of social condemnation to be controlled by the state, has been recognized as a necessary component of the reproduction of labor power, precisely because it has been assumed that the wife would not be able to completely satisfy her husband’s sexual needs.

This explains why sexual work was the first aspect of housework that was socialized.

the construction of female sexuality as a service, and its negation as pleasure, have for a long time kept alive the idea that female sexuality is sinful and redeemable only through marriage and procreation, and it has produced a situation where every woman was considered a potential prostitute to be constantly controlled

a constant warning to women that everything was preferable to “losing one’s honor” and being considered a “slut.” But the whip that most has served to keep women in place has been the condition in which the prostitute, at the proletarian level, has been forced to live, as she increasingly was isolated from other women and subjected to constant state control.

With this regulation, that made the state, through the police and the medical profession, the direct supervisor of sex work, we have the institutionalization of the prostitute and the mother as separate, mutually exclusive female figures and functions, that is, the institutionalization of a maternity without pleasure and a “pleasure” without maternity. Social policy began to require that the prostitute must not become a mother

the “purification” of the maternal role from any erotic element.

This meant that the wife-mother should only enjoy the pleasure of “love,” conceived as a sentiment free from any desire for sex and remuneration.

Regulating housework would not be possible, however, without regulating sexual work. As with housework, what characterized the sexual politics of capital and the state in this phase was the extension to the proletarian woman of the principles already regulating the sexual conduct of women in the bourgeois family.

be reeducated to function like the “angels of the hearth,” cognizant of the arts of patience and subordination, especially since the work to which they were destined was not to be paid.

The idealization of “female virtue,” until the turn of the century reserved for the women of the middle and upper class, was thus extended to working-class women to hide the unpaid labor expected of them. Not surprisingly, we see in this period a new ideological campaign promoting among the working class the ideals of maternity and love, understood as the capacity for absolute self-sacrifice.

It was in this context that the “domestication” of the working-class family and the creation the full-time working-class housewife became a state policy, also inaugurating a new form of capital accumulation.