ABSTRACT
Allison Page examines the National Welfare Rights Organization’s (NWRO) unique feminist theorizing to suggest that the organization’s Black feminist critique of work during the 1970s has much to offer in the contemporary era, particularly as analyses of the racialized and gendered nature of twenty-first-century labor have garnered a wider audience. By layering an analysis of work’s disciplinary reach on top of histories of race and labor activism, we can more readily see how some modes of white feminism have functioned as anti-feminist for women of color, working class women, and poor women. Through an uncritical fixation on promoting certain kinds of work as self-actualizing, liberating, and necessary for state support, these forms of white feminism bolstered work’s role as a disciplinary apparatus and reflected racial capitalism writ large. The chapter draws together Marxist-feminist scholarship on work with Black feminist theory to demonstrate that the NWRO advanced an intersectional theorization of work inextricable from an evaluation of the welfare state and its hierarchical constructions of value and worth. By infusing a critical analysis of work in an anti-racist feminist politics, the NWRO offers both a challenge to and an alternative for current feminisms that encourage women to “lean in” and that continue to locate freedom within work.
