why the ‘wages for housework’ movement is still controversial 40 years on

The 1970s campaign aimed to smash capitalism by recognising the value of childcare and chores. A new book looks back on how it fell apart – and how it’s relevant today. Emily Callaci is at home in Wisconsin, surrounded by the usual debris of family life. The bed behind her is unmade, she confesses, and there’s “a bunch of marbles and blocks on the floor” left by her sons, now seven and three. But on Zoom she has blurred her background so none of this is visible on screen, just as here, on the other side of the Atlantic, I’ve angled my laptop camera away from the mess on my kitchen worktop. We’ve both automatically hidden the domestic for the sake of looking professional, ironically given this interview is about making unseen, unpaid labour in the home visible.

Callaci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book, Wages for Housework, which chronicles the radical 1970s feminist campaign that argued for recognition of the economic value of domestic labour. In truth, she explains, it was a recipe for revolution, designed to smash capitalism and its underpinning myth that women just love keeping house so much they’ll do it for nothing.

Wages for Housework’s founders argued that when an employer hires a worker, they get the value not only of that person’s labour but that of the person at home enabling them to work in the first place by looking after the children and chores. No housework, no capitalism: yet, somehow, the housewife (and back then it invariably was a housewife) gets none of the profit. “The idea was that if you show how much capitalism relies on that work and then actually demand that it be compensated, you see that the system doesn’t work as it says it works,” says Callaci. “It’s supposed to be the most efficient way to organise an economy, but what’s hidden is how much work is extracted and exploited for free. The point is to expose that and bring it crashing down by putting a price on that work.”.

In the book she profiles five of the movement’s stars: New Yorker Silvia Federici, a philosopher, who saw the nuclear family as a prison; Selma James, an American Marxist factory worker, who ran the movement’s British arm after her husband, CLR James, was expelled from the US under McCarthyism; Italian activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa; Wilmette Brown, a lesbian veteran of the Black power organisation the Black Panther party, who ran Black Women for Wages for Housework; and Barbados-born Margaret Prescod, who argued that American prosperity relied on black women’s unpaid labour.

From the start, there were differences of opinion about what exactly Wages for Housework meant. For Federici – whose 1975 manifesto coined the phrase “They say it is love, we call it unwaged work” – it wasn’t literally about getting paid but about the revolutionary struggle. (Though she conceded the money might help women with no other means of earning, she argued that many had other options – including not having children, as she herself didn’t.) And if it wasn’t really about wages, before long it was only loosely about housework, with the definition expanding to include voluntary work or political organising, rent strikes (because homes were workplaces), surviving poverty or racism, and what might now be called “emotional labour”: essentially, anything women felt obliged to do unpaid.

It was when she had children, while working full-time, that Callaci began to take a professional interest in this dilemma. “I found myself working essentially 18-hour days, which seemed like a strange way to think about liberation. As feminists, I feel like we’ve gotten the message that the answer is to succeed at work, and of course I love my career. But that kind of exhaustion seemed to me not …” And we’re just discussing what exactly it’s not when, appropriately enough, she has to stop and take a phone call from her sons’ daycare centre. Anyway, she says, the well-meaning advice she received about time management for working mothers didn’t cut it. “I was hungry for more ambitious explanations about how we got here, why we live this way – even more than ideas about how we might do things differently.”.

More unexpectedly, she found Federici’s manifesto resonated as a set text with her young university students. “A lot of students that I teach are responding to a society that really emphasises production and consumption, and just seeing what that’s done to the planet,” she says. But this generation, for whom home ownership and financial security feels out of reach even if they work hard, are also, she thinks, prioritising time with family and friends. “They’re questioning that kind of grind culture that tells us we need to be seen to be working all the time to justify our existence.”.

Wages for Housework was, she says, similarly about clawing back time. Though James was more focused than Federici on putting cash in female pockets, she also favoured a 20-hour working week, and guaranteed income whether you were working or not – a forerunner of today’s campaign for universal basic income. Federici argued for government-funded daycare freeing mothers not to work but to do whatever they liked: making art, napping, seeing friends or having sex. (None of the five seems very interested in how any of this might be paid for, prompting some contemporary critics to see it as gimmicky, while others worried that linking wages to housework would trap women in the domestic sphere – though Federici saw making housework a paid job as a necessary prelude to quitting it.).