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ince the late 1970s, a massive neoliberal shift has realigned the relationship between government, business, and households in the United States. The shocks and disruptions wrought by this shift have transformed everyday life: stagnant real wages have sent nearly every available adult into the labour force; longer work hours have eroded the time left for essential care work; and reduced government support has privatized dependency, devolving responsibility for the wellbeing of children, elders, and whole communities onto individuals. Massive disinvestment in families and communities has undermined our ability to bear and raise children, feed people, care for the sick, elderly, and those who cannot work, create safe communities, build kin relationships, and attend to people’s physical and psychic wellbeing. In How all politics became reproductive politics: From welfare reform to foreclosure to Trump, Laura Briggs chronicles how we arrived at this “time/wages/reproductive labour crisis” (page 11). How, she asks, did it get so hard to perform the labour necessary to reproduce human life while also earning the wages it takes to keep us all alive, never mind thriving?

Favouring empirics over abstraction, Briggs sets out to answer this question by examining neoliberalism from within families and households, “where we have most acutely felt the changes of neoliberalism” (page 14) and “lived out our immiseration” (page 190). Each chapter is grounded in an issue that has animated political debate in the U.S. over the last half-century: feminism and the Black freedom movement, welfare reform, migrant care work, infertility and infant mortality, gay marriage, and predatory lending. A disparate list at first glance, these issues are, for Briggs, organized along a single political-economic fault line: the growing and seemingly irreconcilable tension between productive and reproductive labour, or, put otherwise, between our capacity to work (for wages) and provide care (for free). Briggs’s orientation toward the household and the family places her book within a long feminist tradition that has grappled with large-scale economic changes by observing them at work in everyday life – in how we feed, clothe, house, teach, comfort, care for, and love ourselves and others. She is, in effect, turning a classic feminist slogan inside out. For Briggs, the political is personal – what happens in public policy is deeply informed by what happens in our households. With each chapter, analytical turn, and personal anecdote, Briggs illustrates the deep imbrication of ‘home’ and ‘economy,’ challenging longstanding and persistent efforts to construct these spheres as dichotomous. We are schooled, Briggs writes, to think of the home and the economy in straightforward binary opposition, the former belonging to a private sphere, the latter to a public one, also the realm of politics. And yet the major questions that have dominated political and economic debate in the U.S. since the 1970s have households and families at their core. From same sex marriage to immigration to the foreclosure crisis, economic restructuring turns on, and often operates through, a thoroughly ‘reproductive’ politics.

Deeply gendered – most reproductive labour is still performed by people understood to be women – this politics is also deeply racialized. For decades, the race-based denigration of reproductive labour has been a key piece of conservative strategies to increase private profits and shrink public expenditures. In the 1980s and 1990s, government conservatives transmuted accounts of Black “welfare queens,” Latina “breeding machines,” and sexually promiscuous single mothers into a powerful justification for the withdrawal of state support from ‘undeserving’ families and communities. A decade later, in the early 2000s, bankers targeted Black and Latinx borrowers, women in particular, for high-risk, high-interest, high-profit mortgages in a practice known as reverse redlining. ‘Subprime’, the industry’s term for a predatory loan, became a gendered and racialized demographic category as much as a financial definition. Systematically dispossessed across generations, subprime borrowers were among those hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis that followed. Today, the castigation of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and immigrant women’s reproductive behaviour continues apace. Structural inequalities in health, wealth, and access to care, including disproportionately high rates of infertility, infant mortality, poverty, and premature death, are individualized, blamed on women of colour’s reproductive choices.

The massive political-economic changes wrought by neoliberalism, Briggs argues, were enacted, at least in part, in and through these and other racialized stories of dependency, irresponsibility, and immorality. Reproductive labour is thus doubly productive under neoliberal capitalism: first, as has been well-established by Marxist feminists like Maria Mies (1986) and Sylvia Federici (1998), the free and under-valued labour provided in the home by people understood to be women is essential to the production of capitalist profits, not least (though not only) because it is required for the reproduction of the labourer; and second, as explored by Briggs in the text under consideration here, the demonization of reproductive labour, particularly that performed by women of colour, has legitimized the withdrawal of state support from costly social welfare institutions, thereby catalyzing (private) capital accumulation.

Briggs’s focus on the post-1970s period is timely and crucial. Recent events in the U.S. have thrown into sharp relief the centrality of racism in social and economic policy. Her analysis illuminates striking evidence of continuities between the politics that brought Trump to Washington and the four decades of social and economic restructuring that preceded his election. But the reproduction-race-economics triumvirate at the heart of her text finds purchase in older histories as well. Like the economic and political reforms under consideration in her book, the American eugenics movement, at its peak in the opening decades of the twentieth century, united sexist, racist, ableist, and classed practices into a broad network of institutions that affected the everyday lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The pervasive cultural myths used to justify and enact neoliberal restructuring – that immigrants are to blame for white working people’s poverty; that ‘traditional family values’ must be protected at all costs; that women of colour’s moral failings are responsible for the ills of their communities and for those of the nation – are contiguous with eugenics-era narratives of reproductive fitness. Then, as now, policies and laws on immigration, incarceration, marriage, education, and access to housing and health care were shot through with concerns about ‘proper’ reproduction at multiple scales: the family, the household, the economy, the nation. Attempts to discipline the reproductive behaviour of raced, classed, dis/abled ‘others’ – modeled on whites’ domination of slave women’s wombs (Roberts 1998) – were tethered to concerns about the economic  ‘health’ of the nation. Immigration bans and forced sterilizations were justified by recourse to a narrative of social and economic improvement: for a nation state to better its position relative to other nation states, its people had to be healthy, variously skilled, and mentally competent (McWhorter 2009). As late as the 1970s, the Office of Economic Development, under the direction of Donald Rumsfeld, was recommending sterilization in cases of mental defect (Stern 2016).

This very brief foray into the history of American eugenics isn’t intended as a corrective to Briggs’s temporal framing. Rather, it’s to evince the enduring persistence of her organizing thesis: that reproduction – of children, but also of life and community more broadly – sits at the heart of U.S. politics. Questions of who gets to reproduce (with) whom, how, and under what conditions have long saturated social and economic policy in multiple, if at times contradictory, ways, and with material effects in everyday life.  And they continue to do so. The politics of reproduction is thus “key to understanding our shared political life in the United States” (page 209).

Throughout the book, Briggs urges us to remember the feminist, labour, and racial justice movements that presaged our contemporary political moment. “They were all about reproductive politics,” she writes, “- imagining a just society that would see children fed, fighting to limit the overreach of business and the long workday, trying to halt involuntary sterilization and sexual assault, and ensuring communities, families, and households had the resources to raise healthy children and care for others who could not work” (page 30).  Her account of these movements provides an important record the past, of the fights for survival that “came before” (page 22) the turn to neoliberalism. But her desire to reactivate this history is also acutely futures oriented. In these movements – in the Black Panther’s free breakfast program for children, in calls for wages for housework and a forty-hour work-week, in fights against forced sterilization and for free childcare – Briggs finds concrete plans for a revolution in reproductive politics. She concludes her book with a list of suggestions for how we might bring about such a revolution, many of which recall the demands of mid-twentieth century activists – paid parental leave, “food stamps that don’t require waiting a day in line” (page 211), and free, high-quality preschool, to list a few examples. Acknowledging that these ‘fixes’ may seem out of reach in the climate of racial division that brought Trump to the White House, Briggs maintains that we can’t understand his rise to power or combat the forces he represents without them. Her ending is thus a call to action – a call to oppose neoliberalism and exploitation by renewing the fight for social support for families, households, and communities.