The Reproductive Is Political: Author Issues Call For Change From Below

Everyone who’s raised a child has faced that moment, said professor Laura Briggs, when ​“you’re trying to get to work and you can’t because your kid won’t put on his shoes.”

It’s a problem because ​“there’s nobody else who’s going to be home. The kid has to go to day care, and we have to go to work.” 

The struggle of maintaining work and family, for many, got even worse during the pandemic. In a talk on Tuesday night, Briggs laid out the ways in which that acute problem is the result of larger fights about reproductive politics that have been raging for over 40 years.

Briggs, professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, outlined her argument — from her 2017 book How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics — in a conversation with by Matthew Jacobson, co-director of the Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale, as part of a series of talks called ​“Democracy in America,” a collaboration between the New Haven Free Public Library and Public Humanities at Yale. The series began on Feb. 15 and continues periodically through Apr. 26. (See the NHFPL’s event page for more details.)

Briggs is most recently the author of the book Taking Children: A History of American Terror, but Jacobsen wanted to focus on How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics instead. ​“It’s a 2017 book, but it’s so damn important it’s the one I asked her to speak on tonight,” he said. 

As the publisher’s description of the book details, ​“from longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline.” Briggs reaches back to the Reagan administration, when ​“politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction — stories of Black ​“welfare queens” and Latina ​“breeding machines” — were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families.” Today, ​“with decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, our households have grown ever more precarious over the past 40 years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways.” But all of those elements can be viewed together through the lens of reproductive politics — the fight over the control of women’s bodies, women’s life choices, and the responsibilities of caring for children and the elderly. ​“This crisis,” the book argues, ​“fuels all others — from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.”

“I’ve been writing about U.S. empire and the questions of gender and sexual politics” for years, Briggs said. ​“I’ve always been making an argument that sexuality and reproduction are central to how we should be thinking about politics.” Channeling a socialist-feminist viewpoint from the 1970s — or perhaps even the 1880s, Briggs said — allowed one to see how reproductive politics was a part of everything, from the welfare reform of the 1980s and 1990s to the ways the ongoing problem of police brutality is understood today.

At the heart of Briggs’s argument was an understanding of how the work done at home — ​“the reproductive work that we consider private,” such as caring for children and elders — is ​“real work, and creates value,” but ​“what we do in classic liberal economics is exclude that from what counts as work, what counts as the economy. If we want to understand what’s happening with privatization as a dominant figure in how the economy works, we have to understand where that work is going.”

That meant in large part looking at the work — all the work — that women and immigrants do, and that work, that ​“reproductive labor,” ​“got a lot more visible in the pandemic.”

Looking at economic activity from that more total approach, Briggs argued, allowed a more precise critique of neoliberalism, which Briggs defined as the transformation of the economy that we associate with Reagan and ​“the privatization of everything.” That shift, away from the previous Keynesian economic model that had shaped the U.S. economy since 1945, is still with us today, through Republican and Democratic administrations, with lasting effects on our political debate and the way we think we understand what kinds of political ideas are in and out of bounds. ​“Every time you hear the word socialism being thrown around in political debate, it’s doing a kind of work, telling us that it’s stuff that’s illegitimate for the government to do,” Briggs said. So Obamacare was socialism; fights over support for parental leave, or support for parents of children, ​“that’s called socialism.”

Briggs then went further in understanding its effects on reproductive labor, caring for young and elderly dependents: ​“The other thing that’s characteristic of neoliberalism is that, while government has no responsibility for those things, neither does private industry.” Under FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, the idea of a minimum living wage, the income needed to support others, was taken seriously. ​“Nobody holds on to even a sexist version of that” today, Briggs said. If, as a business owner, ​“I can pay you less than you need to survive, well, good for me.… Dependency becomes a problem of someone else. If I have children, that’s my problem. If I have elders that require care, that’s my problem.… Individuals become responsible for doing the work.”

The erosion of a living wage over time meant, in the past few decades, that everyone had to go to work making a wage — meaning someone else had to do the reproductive work. In the 1990s, for Briggs, that meant relying on immigration. ​“The vast expansion of the reliance on immigrant labor in the U.S. and elsewhere” was ​“to pick up the slack of the care labor that was being extracted by the shrinking of the government role and the shrinking of private industry.”

“As everybody gets pushed into the labor force, there’s less and less time to do reproductive labor,” so ​“the traditional middle class is much more stress.” Briggs said. Thus the scenario almost everyone knows: adults have to work, children have to go to day care or school, and no one is left at home to do the work that needs doing.

“As the formal economy got more and more brutal, the care economy had to grow,” Briggs said.

Meanwhile, Briggs reminded us, Reagan ran for office with a ​“big story on how he was going to save us from welfare queens.” It wasn’t called racist in mainstream discourse, but it was ​“flying the flag of White racism without naming it,” she said. She noted how, over time, that meant the statements could become more overt, to the point that ​“Trump comes down the escalator and says immigrants are rapists,” she said.

“The key thing about the welfare story is its horror with sex and reproduction: the so-called welfare mother is having babies just to get a government check. We hear anti-feminism running through this. Their particular talent is to blame feminism.” 

As reproductive work has shifted to immigrants, they have gotten demonized as well. People trying to have children through nontraditional means likewise get judged in the ​“the politics of infertility.” While Democratic administrations since Reagan may have been less likely to make overt statements about it, they did little to stop the general trend of labor and immigration policies that Reagan had put in place.

“Clinton is the figure that makes it central to the Democratic party,” Briggs said; his Third Way policy of ​“triangulation — his word” was often to ​“simply adopt Republican policies as his own.” That meant tightening immigration and espousing the rhetoric of ​“law-and-order politics.”

Briggs found reproductive politics in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-08. ​“Single moms were targeted for subprime mortgages, and lenders were referring to the subprime as a demographic category,” she said. That category was largely comprised of immigrants and Black women, who had a high need for secure housing and thus were particularly vulnerable to predatory mortgage rates. In 2008, as she observed, the Tea Party was born out of an attack on how the Obama administration was going to help out single mothers.

Jacobsen observed that politics since Reagan — and including the Clinton and to some extent the Obama administrations — could be understood as an ​“assault on Great Society and New Deal assumptions.” Before 1980, a CEO may have felt obligations to employees, communities, the towns they operated in; today’s CEOs feel mostly obligated to shareholders. ​“I want to think about that as a tear in the social contract and thinking about welfare more positively,” he said.

But at the same time, Briggs countered, ​“we don’t want to go back there” — ​“it was homophobic, it was sexist, it was White.” But perhaps it was possible to bring the more positive elements of the past into the present. She observed that ​“there was this moment at the beginning of the Joe Biden presidency where it seemed like those were the politics that had been brought into his administration,” in concerns about raising the minimum wage and building support for the labor of care. And she saw that ​“Bernie Sanders captured people’s imagination in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible,” and some of that appeared in Biden’s rhetoric as well.

But since then, ​“it has been beaten back by peeling off some of the members of the Democratic Party, which isn’t surprising. This is the party of the Dixiecrats… but nevertheless, it was disappointing.” She pointed out that even as ​“the right” — in which she grouped Republicans and many Democrats — ​“has hung on to the ability to make policy,”

“Just because it’s right-wing doesn’t mean Democrats can’t do it,” Briggs said, even as Great Society-style ideas have ​“once again become tremendously popular. The failure is not because people don’t support them. It’s hard to know what the future is going to hold.”

Meanwhile, today — thanks to both the pandemic and a largely unchanged immigration policy from one administration to the next, ​“virtually nobody has been able to enter the United States, and that’s creating an incredible labor crisis, and I keep waiting for the moment that’s going to blow up,” Briggs said. ​“I’ve been absolutely riveted by the questions of hospital workers and teachers, who are doing a form of feminized labor and caring labor. It’s dramatically underpaid, and it’s a group of people who got pushed to work without adequate protection.… People are starting to notice that they’re quitting in droves” and ​“there are few people to replace them.”

To a large extent, Trump’s policies were simply a continuation of his forbears. But his rhetoric also suggested that now ​“it’s OK to hate people as such.… It’s astonishing — I didn’t know that would work,” she said. She noted ​“how central homophobia, transphobia, and sexism were to the Trump project.… We were better at naming racism, but they were utterly intertwined.”

Which brought Briggs to the crux of her argument: what to do about it all. ​“In some ways,” she said, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics is ​“a BLM book, it’s a immigrant book, it’s a labor movement book, it’s socialist, it’s feminist.”

But what she was really arguing for was a reconceptualization of those issues, to understand them not as separate things, or even intersectional, but all part of a larger whole. A movement that understood that could amount to ​“a reinvigoration of the kind of left politics from the 1960s,” she said, a very-large-tent movement that understood that ​“we’re all in this” and ​“we’re not going to solve any of these problems without solving them all together.”

“I’m imagining a politics from below that can overturn neoliberalism” and create ​“humane jobs and autonomous communities where people can support each other.” She found the Obama years to be a time of complacency among progressives. Amid the upheaval of the past few years, she said, ​“I feel much more hopeful now that there are many, many more people feeling the same kind of angst. We can’t keep being the same kind of cruel place that allows people to go hungry.”