Wages for Housework
The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The revelatory story of a radical campaign to change the way we value work
“Illuminating, honest, nuanced, Wages for Housework is a must-read for anyone seeking to make a just and sustainable world for all.” ―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Shortlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize • A Guardian Best Book of the Year
Women do more than three-quarters of all the world’s unpaid care work, contributing over $9 trillion to the global economy each year. Dishes don’t clean themselves; dinner is not magically made; children must be cared for. But why is this work not compensated?
Wages for Housework is the fascinating international story of Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, whose movement demanded wages as a starting point for remaking the world as we know it. Drawing on their campaign’s roots in 1970s America, Italy, and the UK, with original archival research and interviews, historian Emily Callaci explores the revolutionary potential of paying women for their work in the home, and how Wages for Housework reimagined potential futures under capitalism—and beyond—in ways that continue to be relevant today.
Wages for Housework is an essential feminist history of an overlooked movement for economic and social justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
