3.2 The Gift Economy and Maternal Feminism: In this 2020 interview Carolina Allen and Shelli Spotts talk to Genevieve Vaughn about the maternal roots of the Gift Economy and the power of exchange

Currents: the Big Ocean Women Podcast

In this archive episode from 2020, Carolina Allen and Shelli Spotts discuss the origin and roots of the gift economy, and the way maternal feminism rests on an alternative structure, a way of living that does not depend on getting ahead but the responsibility to lift everyone up.

"We are born into a gift economy, one that starts with our own mothers. It is a far more natural way of living that does not depend on the economy of exchange, but on trust and generosity." Genevieve Vaughn

Genevieve Vaughan was born in Texas in 1939. She is an independent researcher. After finishing college in Pennsylvania in 1963 she married philosopher and semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi and moved with him to Italy where they had three daughters. The couple participated in the beginnings of the Semiotics movement in Italy as well as in the Italian Left, where Genevieve got her political consciousness raised.

After her divorce in 1978 Vaughan became a feminist, participating in the Italian and international feminist movements. She began to see the fact of women’s free labor in the home as a gift economy, the unacknowledged free economy of women from which communication and community derive. Her two early essays ‘Communication and exchange’ (Semiotica 1980) and ‘Saussure and Vigotsky via Marx’(1981) deal with language and economics, a theme introduced by her husband but which she elaborated in alternative directions, and which she has been working on throughout the rest of her life. In 1983, Vaughan returned to Texas where she started the Foundation for a Compassionate Society, a multicultural all-women activist foundation which initiated many innovative projects for social change based on the political use of ‘women’s gifting values’. The Foundation closed its doors in 2005 after two final international conferences: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible: The Gift Economy Inside and Outside Patriarchal Capitalism, 2004 and Societies of Peace: the Second Congress of Matriarchal Studies (under the guidance of Heide Goettner Abendroth), 2005. Several other conferences have been held including one in Toronto in 2011 called A (M)otherworld is Possible in collaboration with Goettner-Abendroth and in conjunction with the Association for Research on Mothering.

Carolina is the founder and leader of Big Ocean Women, the international maternal feminist organization representing perspectives of faith, family, and motherhood throughout civil society. Carolina holds a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Utah with an emphasis in cultural religions and philosophy of science. Her inspirational and philosophical work has been presented at various international U.N. conferences. She is a native of Brazil, and a fluent trilingual. She and her husband Kawika are parents to 7 children. She is an avid soccer fan and had a brief career as a semi-professional player.

ShelliRae Spotts is an essayist, advocacy writer, screenwriter, and sometime poet who teaches creative writing and composition at Brigham Young University. She is passionate about exploring the ways we use stories to build bridges within our communities and her essays delve into the connections we discover through languaging our lived experiences. Shelli has attended the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women as an advocacy writer for the last several years, and is dedicated to social justice and environmental causes. She was the co-director and writing mentor for "Words for Water: Dancing the Stories of our Home Waters," a collaborative writing/dance advocacy project focusing attention on the challenges facing our rural river watersheds. She is the author of a forthcoming essay collection, "Radical Creativity: On a New Economy of Care." When she is not teaching, writing, or reading, Shelli loves to spend time with her husband and four adult children watching great movies, attending live theatre, or dragging everyone outside to “look at the sky.”