My life in production and reproduction

I have been fortunate to experience the inner workings of capitalist industrial production. Through the victories of second wave feminism (with a socialist feminist lense), I was among a handful of women who achieved employed in non-traditional (male) basic industry in the 1970s. I trimmed burrows from pieces of raw metal, screwed window cranks into car doors, drove my job into the hole when one extra task proved impossible to add as the Camaros piled up down the line. I was devoted to finding women’s liberation in equality in production. I spent many years of transformative learning and change making, achieving equal opportunity exploitation in male-dominated industries—as a machinist in submarine manufacturing, a boilermaker in the ship yard, an autoworker on the assemblyline.

As years have gone by I have awakened to the truth of my accumulated expertise in the reproductive labor that is the spider’s web of women’s work. I weathered two pregnancies proving my steel in the factory floor—I led a study group of would-be revolutionaries into the choice of not only working in basic industry but building revolutionary organizations while we built our families. We organized a city-wide childcare system for our cadre and fellow travelers. We constructed a culture of resistance to the assaults of US imperialism, a collective life that could support each individual to locate our talents in a massive multinational multiracial multi-generational system of political education and cultural reproduction.

I was fortunate to learn the theories of marxism-leninism and socialist-feminism in the practice of living the relationship between production and reproduction.

I hope that sharing my experience of this dialectic touches those who continue to develop our analysis of patriarchal imperialism and to strategize women’s liberation.