Wages for Housework

'The women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!' Dispersed across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework!

Here historian Emily Callaci tells the fascinating story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades. In the early 1970s, Selma James, a working-class mother and political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy. A few years later feminist philosopher Silvia Federici reframed the campaign in the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis, while Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, a community organizer, brought the insights of Black feminism to expand the movement further. As Wages for Housework grew, so did its challenges. Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise.

Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism — and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that rewards caring for people as much as the production of commodities? How would we relate to the natural world if, rather than emphasizing productivity and growth, we valued maintenance and repair? And what would the women of the world do with their lives if they had more time?