Wages for Housework

In this first-ever international history of the influential feminist movement Wages for Housework, Louise Toupin draws on extensive archival research and interviews with the movement’s founders and activists from Italy, England, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Canada. Featuring previously unpublished conversations with Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the book highlights the power and originality of the movement, detailing its theoretical and organizational innovations around the unrecognized labour performed by women.

Challenging both classic Marxist theory and the mainstream women’s movement, Wages for Housework organized in the 1970s around the idea that domestic or “reproductive” labour is as crucial for the survival of the capitalist system as more typically male “productive” labour. Its activists demanded the wage as a way of ensuring that housework’s value be recognized, an idea still hotly debated today.

Wages for Housework is a major contribution to the history of feminist and anti-capitalist movements and a provocative intervention into contemporary conversations about the changing nature of work and the gendered labour market.