Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor

In this illuminating study, historian Callaci (Street Archives and City Life) delves into the 1970s Wages for Housework movement. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, she focuses on the movement’s leading thinkers, among them Selma James, who hoped to organize women as part of a working class revolution; Mariarosa Della Costa, who contended that raising future workers was the uncompensated foundation of capitalism; Silvia Federici, who argued against the idea that carework is natural for women; and Margaret Prescod, who claimed that welfare payments weren’t a handout, but fair pay. Tracing how these philosophers and activists interacted and traded ideas, Callaci contributes the movement’s fizzling out partly to dissension among them over whether their demands were real or hyperbolic (i.e., simply a way of pointing out how fraudulent the entire capitalist system was); and partly to pushback from other feminists who worried that payment would actually tie women to housework. She also intriguingly describes how outlandish the idea was viewed as at the time, contrasting it with how relatively commonsense it feels today. (She strikingly recounts how her college students find it notably more convincing than other notions of the era, including the idea that access to higher education will set women on a path to liberation.) The result is an invigorating reflection on how personal freedom intersects with economic freedom. (Mar.)