Okay - I finally found it. From What Are We Fighting For by Joanna Russ, Chap.9, p. 223-228.
First she's quoting Christine Delphy ( and everyone should read Christine Delphy, whatever you can find.) explaining how a woman doesn't belong to her husband's social class, and how marriage (and family) is a job. "When the same tasks are done outside the family they are paid for. The work acquires value - is remunerated - as long as the woman furnishes it to people to whom she is not related or marries... The marriage contract... is in fact a work contract. "
Then - it is actually Jesse Bernard who invented the word integry; Russ says, "to describe the kind of work women do in keeping communities together, the sort of thing Rosalind Coward has called 'social facilitation'. Like Dale Spender, who writes of women's communicative work in Man-Made Language, Coward describes as one facet of this work:
the domestic labor in routine social intercourse - "How are you? Who are you? What do you Do? Where do you live? Why the hell don't you ever say anything?".... Women function as the currency between men. Women's speech sustains men's impersonal relationships between themselves.
[still quoting Russ, p. 224]
Another phrase for the "integry" might be "social infrastructure" -- the kinds of formal and informal women's organizations, networks, and groups that function to make the life of a particular community possible."
She goes on to talk about southern black churches. and about networks women keep up in other communities --- "the usefulness of the integry to the community as a whole," citing Cynthia Macdonald's studies of public housing, how the men function as chauffers or handymen, charging for their work, while the women create "creative, fluid networks of practical and emotional support among the women."
Also - during epidemics...
from p. 225: "If creating community feeling is work, then work may be something other than we're used to describing by that name, or at least something broader. ....
If work is indistinguishable from politics in one direction (maintaining or challenging the status quo, as in Bernard's "integry") and from affection in another (caring for a sick child or a friend), then a good many activities may really be work, even though they're not really described that way. Is giving emotional support to a husband who is tired at the end of his day work? Is sending out three hundred New Year's cards work? The feminist answer to questions like these must, I think, be yes. To take another example, are emotions work? Is the "spontaneous" and "natural" activity of smiling work?"
I didnt' remember that it wasn't Russ's idea - but comes from Jesse Bernard. In the footnotes to the chapter - note 35 - "Bernard has taken the term from Kenneth Boulding but notes, as he apparently did not, that the integry is populated largely by women. " I think the book cited is The Female World, New York: The Free Press, 1981. Rosalind Coward's book cited by Russ is Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought, and Packaged (Grove Press, 1985).
Russ's book, besides being fantastic, is worth buying just for the notes and bibliography to any one chapter!
Also from the notes (note 40, p. 234)
"for example, the actual creation of political power is work.... such a concept of power is unlikely to lead to the kind of grassroots, mass-movement participation - the creation of "power" among the "powerless - that can not only challenge the polity-as-it-is and do so effectively but that can also change the nature of power from a discrete force at the top, which is ownable, to something that is part of a new integry."
Doesn't that make you think of blogging? Power (information) that is not ownable. At least we hope not.
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