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Wages for housework: the daring 1970s campaign that challenged women's roles
00:28:41
Emily Callaci discusses a bold – and controversial – feminist movement that campaigned for women to be paid for household labour in the 1970s
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Podcast Introduction Narrator
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In the 1970s, a global group of feminist activists banded together with one demand wages for Housework. Emily Callachi explores this campaign in her Cundle History Prize nominated book Wages for Housework. And in this episode she she speaks to Ellie Cawthorn about why the idea of women being compensated for unpaid household labour caused such a stir at the time and continues to resonate today.
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Emily Calachi
We're going to be talking about the wages for housework movement of the 1970s today. So what first drew you to this story?
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Podcast Host
So you know I'm an historian, but actually what drew me to this topic originally was making sense of my own Life. Back around 2017, I had my first child. And like many new parents, you know, I found myself doing a double shift, taking care of this. This helpless infant all through the night. And then, you know, after my maternity leave ended, going back to my full time job. And like many new parents, you get all kinds of advice about how to handle this work, you know, how to be more efficient, how to have work, life balance, whatever that means, how to outsource some of it, you know, to nannies and house cleaners and that kind of thing. But, you know, while much of the advice was really well intentioned, I really found it frustrating. You know, I really wanted to understand the bigger picture here. You know, why do we organize our society in this way? Why do we make it so hard? Why is this work unrecognized, given how important and essential it is? So, you know, being an historian, when I have a question about the present, often my first step is to turn to the past. And so I found myself going back to what earlier feminists had to say about reproductive labor and this kind of really essential work. So one of the first places I turn to is this, you know, what I thought of as this quirky little movement from the 70s that I didn't really know much about other than their title, which is Wages for Housework. And it just so happened at that time that Silvia Federici, one of the founding members of this movement, had deposited her archives in the same town that my parents live. So I was visiting them and I went to the archives and it just opened up this whole world of these radical, ambitious feminists that were concerned with precisely this question, you know, how is it that this work that is essential for the running of capitalism and the modern economy is completely unrecognized and uncompensated. So that just sent me down this massive rabbit hole. And several years later it turned into this book.
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Emily Calachi
And I have to say, I mean, I'm seven months pregnant at the moment. So this book felt incredibly relevant to me, and I'm sure it would feel very relevant to many people reading it today. But if we focus for a moment in the past, give us a sense, if we're looking before the 1970s, when this movement emerg most women's relationship with housework. I know it's gonna be difficult to generalize, but what can we say about that?
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Podcast Host
Yeah, and this is part of why this movement was so controversial, I will say, is that, you know, in when second wave feminism, or what we call second wave feminism, emerged in like the late 1960s, early 70s. One of the central kind of, I think, impulses was to sever this relationship between women and housework, to get rid of this assumption that women, it's their natural destiny to look after children, to stay in the men are the breadwinners. Right? You know, given how oppressive this work is, given that it's uncompensated, given that women do it for free, and given that it's, you know, has historically been attached to this idea about essentialism, that women are naturally suited to it. And so in that moment, for this group of feminists to say no, we are going to actually explore that link, right? We're going to try to understand how that functions in capitalism as a way of fighting that system. I think in many ways it sounded counterintuitive at first, you know, that we're going to, rather than reject housework, we're going to actually recognize it and demand compensation for it.
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Emily Calachi
So where exactly does this movement begin, if we can pinpoint an origin?
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Podcast Host
So it really started in 1972. And the two kind of founding figures of this movement were Selma James and Maria Rosa Dalla Costa. Selma James was based in London in the uk. She was married to CLR James, the great Trinidadian, anti colonial Marxist revolution intellectual. And, you know, she was very involved in anti racism in the UK and also in feminism before the kind of second wave feminist movement emerged. She grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and really identified herself as part of working class struggle, you know, the struggle against capitalism, the struggle against, you know, the oppression of workers. And one of the kind of pieces of the puzzle that was missing for her earlier in her career as an activist was, was women and unpaid work. Right? She grew up around women who were working constantly, either in factories or in their neighborhoods, fighting for their welfare benefits, for their rights to housing. So for her, the working class movement was really incomplete if it didn't include all of this unpaid, unrecognized work. So when feminism really became this massive cultural force in the 70s, for her, this was the aha moment. Like this is an extension of this working class struggle because it's recognizing, you know, this massive part of the working class that I've been talking about or that she's been talking about since earlier days. So she gets together with Maria Rosa Dalla Costa. And Dalla Costa was based in northeastern Italy in Padua. She was brilliant scholar at the time. She was one of the first women to be on the faculty at the University of Padua. And she was also involved in a lot of student movements or in the student movement in Italy in the late 1960s, early 70s, a group called Poterio Poraio, which means workers power. And it was, you know, in the context of all of these wildcat strikes across Italy in the 1960s and 70s, really trying to fight for workers rights in the context of industrialization and rapid post war industrialization. But similar to Selma James, she had this epiphany that this working class struggle that I am fighting for, that I am so involved in, is really leaving out my own life in the lives of all the women that I'm organizing with. She started to think about, again, women's unpaid work and how that fits into this bigger picture of class struggle. So when she and Selma James met, you know, they had pretty different backgrounds. You know, Selma James never went to university. She really had been involved in grassroots activism since her childhood. Mari Rosa Dalla Costa is an activist, but also a scholar, someone who was very involved in kind of the intellectual movement as well as the kind of grassroots movements. And when they got together, they started to collaborate. And wages for housework really came out of that collaboration.
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Emily Calachi
And just to make something explicit that has been kind of implicit in our conversation so far. We're talking really about women here and women's lives. This was a movement that was focused only on women at the time. Is that right?
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Podcast Host
It's about women. Although I think they would say it's not wages for housewives, it's wages for housework. So from their perspective, it's about the work. Right. Anyone who does that work was part of this kind of struggle to recognize that work as part of how capitalism works. So historically it's been women who've done that work. And they talked about how the kind of cultural forces that make that so. You know, in Italy, for example, Mare Rosso Della Costa talked about the Catholic Church and the kinds of ideas about gender roles that really kind of played into that role of women doing housework. The kinds of cultural pressures that women face to do that work. That said, I think for everyone involved, you know, they would say that in an ideal world, this wouldn't just be women's work. This would be work that all people do and all people are respected for doing. So it was very much a movement about women, but they were explicit that it could include men as well.
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Emily Calachi
Yeah, important to outline, I think, that central slogan, that three word slogan, wages for housework. It seems super obvious, super simple, but I wonder if we could unpick it a bit. Did this movement actually want and think that they could get Money for housework? Or was this about a symbolic recognition of the work that women did in the home?
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Podcast Host
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. It's kind of the million dollar question for everyone involved. It was not symbolic, it was literally asking for money because that is the first step towards the kind of revolution they had in mind. However, one thing that is clear is that money was never the goal of the movement. The idea wasn't just, well, once women are getting a paycheck for this work, that ends the struggle, right? The point was that capitalism relies on this unpaid work to create value, to create workers, right? The work of caring for children, caring for future generations of workers. This is the work that makes all forms of profit possible. So for them, demanding compensation for that reveals the truth about capitalism, about how it works, which is that it relies on all this unpaid, invisible, coercive work. So demand compensation for that is to challenge that entire system as a whole and potentially to end that system by making it unaffordable. Instead of relying on cheap unpaid work to show the actual kinds of work and then to make that system inefficient and potentially end it, the critical thing was to make that work visible as a way of challenging that system. For others, the money was more central. Like Selma James, for example, was always very clear, we want money in our pockets. But again, for her, that was not the end point. The point was to give women a tool to struggle over, right? The same way that workers, once they are recognized as workers, they can fight for better working conditions. The idea is that when we recognize this work and start compensating it, that's a starting point for a longer struggle against capitalism and the forms of exploitation that women face.
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Emily Calachi
So did those in the movement come up with any suggestions of how this might be implemented?
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Podcast Host
Yeah, so there was a range of ideas about this. I mean, so I think that again, for those that had a more sort of revolutionary standpoint, you know, Silvia Federici, Mario Rosa della Costa, for example, they would always say when asked, that's a question to deal with after we've established our movement. The point now is to make that work visible, to start this struggle, to really kind of change the conversation about labor and capitalism. But really the idea was that governments should pay for it, that this should be something that you're demanding from the government. And in that sense, wages for housework really saw itself as an extension of and building upon the struggle of what in the US we call the welfare rights movement, similar in the UK to the family Allowance campaign. This is payments that are in recognition of the work of raising children. So the idea is that this should be more generalized, not just as a kind of one off payment, but into a broader recognition of the value of this work.
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Emily Calachi
You spoke there about the first aim being to make this campaign visible. How did the movement go about doing that?
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Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, a lot of ways. A lot of it, you know, in the early days was political theater, really being out there. So, for example, the New York Wages for Housework Committee, they, on Mother's Day would go to Prospect park, you know, with flyers, you know, saying Mother's Day should be called Labor Day, and really calling for recognition of Mother's Day. Don't give us roses and chocolates. Give us recognition for our labor. They had protests, they published their own kind of zines. They went on media, they spoke on the radio, on radio talk shows. They had a series of street trials where they put the government on trial for pimping off the labor of women. They did a range of things to really kind of bring attention to their cause. And you know what? For a while, it really seemed like they were going to succeed. This was something that was discussed in major newspapers and proposals that made their way to Congress and to Parliament. Yeah, so they really struck a nerve. It's hard to remember that decades later, when the 80s came along and did so much to dismantle those gains, you know, but it really was provocative.
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Emily Calachi
So they did break through to the mainstream then?
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Podcast Host
I think so, yes. I mean, for example, in the uk, their kind of pamphlets they published, you know, they were discussed in the Guardian, but also in Daily Mail and publications like that. It really kind of, you know, was discussed across the political spectrum.
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Emily Calachi
One of the ways that you look at this story is through individuals. Why did you choose to do it that way? And tell us about some of the challenges or the interesting parts of reconstructing history through the lives of individuals.
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Podcast Host
So I chose five individuals who, in the course of doing my research, I found them to be really productive, generative, unique individuals in terms of their contributing something distinctive to the ideas behind wages for housework. So I've already mentioned Selma James. She's the first individual I focus on. And the second person I focus on, again, who I mentioned, is Maria Rosa della Costa, you know, who really kind of grew up in this kind of activism of the late 1960s in Northern Italy and the kind of. Of wildcat strikes at the factories at Fiat and in Turin and in Milan. And she had this line that the workers struggle is focusing on the assembly line. But we have to understand that that assembly line does not end at the gates of the factory. It actually extends all the way into the worker's home, where someone is cleaning his clothes and cooking his food and sustaining him. And that's where the struggle against capitalism should start. The third person is Silvia Federici. And she grew up in Italy in Post World War II Italy, really in the shadow of fascism, you know, Mussolini and the strict kind of gender roles associated with that, you know, and she was a really kind of rebellious, you know, sort of a tomboyish kid, a phrase we'd use in my childhood. And she really rebelled against those gendered expectations. She ended up going to the US to get a PhD in philosophy. And when she joined the movement in the 1970s in New York, she started the New York Wages for Housework Committee. And one of the things that I think she really brought to the movement that's distinctive is a focus on the emotional side of housework. The ways that women are conditioned to think that this is what love is, that this is what they're naturally conditioned to do, and how that makes it so coercive and manipulative, the idea that you should be doing all this work for free because of love, because of the loving nature of women. And she wrote some of the most beautiful and elegant distillations of this idea in some of her publications. And then the fourth person I focus on, and really she's the one that made me think, oh, I've got to write a book about this, is Wilnette Brown. So Lynette Brown grew up in Newark, New Jersey, at the time one of the most racially segregated Cities in the U.S. she grew up in the civil rights movement. At university, she was an anti war activist. And then she ended up joining the Black Panther Party. She's a black lesbian woman. And so she eventually left the Black Panther Party in large part because of the gender politics of the. Of the Panther Party. And when she came across wages for housework after a stint that she spent working and living in Southern Africa, she really saw it as an extension of the black freedom struggle. Right. Understanding how both in the present, but also historically black women's reproductive labor has been really central to racial capitalism in the era of slavery, colonialism, and up to the present day, when in the US welfare mothers were being scapegoated for all of social ills. So she really understood wages for housework as an extension of that longer history. And then Margaret Prescott is the fifth person I focus on in this book. And Margaret Prescott was born in Barbados during the later years of colonialism. And she grew up in a society where despite having been so critically important to the slave trade and creating much of the, of the slave trade, she grew up in relative poverty. And she saw so many people from her community, particularly women who had to travel abroad to New York, to London, Amsterdam to work as domestic workers and send back remittances to their families. So when Margaret Prescott moved to Brooklyn in the 1960s, and she saw these same women who had traveled from her community coming here and working, and then she encountered this political discourse that called immigrants like her freeloaders, people who were living on the largess of the American government, it was clear to her that the opposite was true, right, that these women were the ones who were being exploited, who creating all this wealth. So for her, she really understood wages for housework as an argument that transcended national boundaries, that really helped to explain the exploitation and extraction of women's work across national borders. So it was these five different life stories and perspectives that I found really interesting because they all brought a different kind of, of peace to understanding how this works. But they all kind of shared in common a single theme, which is this idea that women's unpaid work is critical to the entire function of global capitalism and that addressing that is the place where you really challenge that system.
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- [19:33]
Emily Calachi
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- [20:16]
Podcast Host
Wages for housework was incredibly disruptive at the time. You know, they really were seen by many as very polarizing and radical for some, particularly women who had working class backgrounds, you know, people who perhaps grew up in poverty, many of them found this perspective really refreshing because it spoke to their own lives, experiences that their mothers, you know, the experience really of poverty. For others, though, you know, this movement was really very counterintuitive and cut against the grain of what many feminists were talking about. This is a time when women were fighting to leave the home basically as a place of their destiny and their labor right. Trying to fight the idea that women are naturally suited to housework, fighting for equality in the workplace, fighting for equal pay for equal work, you know, and reproductive rights. So the idea then that you would identify with housework, not only identify with it, but then demand compensation for that and further entrench that relationship. That really seemed to people as kind of the opposite of what feminists should be fighting for, but for the women of wages for housework, while they would have agreed with many of the things that feminists were fighting for, you know, again, equal pay for equal work, the right to education and reproductive rights, they argued that these legal rights did not go far enough. When the core source of economic exploitation of women is left unaddressed, women could get equal pay for equal work at men who are doing the same jobs as them. But what if those women then went home and worked an extra eight hours a day with no compensation? How is that equality in the end? So for them, they really thought that to attain liberation for women, you had to address the root causes of economic inequality. And that requires addressing capitalism and the unique ways that it exploits women.
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Emily Calachi
But like so many idealistic movements with really passionate people in them, there was internal divisions within the movement. Can you tell us a bit about them and the implications of these divisions?
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Podcast Host
I would say the kind of heyday of this movement in terms of, you know, the women that I wrote about in this book and them, you know, collaborating was kind of, you know, the mid-70s to late-70s, you know, but by the late-70s, there were some internal divisions, as you mentioned, that really kind of split the movement. And by 1978, 1979, the New York committee led by Silvia Federici, the Italian movement led by Mario Della Costa, had largely closed up shop and come to an end. Whereas, you know, in the UK and you know, some of their allies in the US Selma James, Margaret Prescott, Wilmette Brown continued to organize, you know, and many of them again, continue to organize through the present day. It's difficult as an historian to at what some of those divisions were about. You know, some of it has to do with women who really felt a sense of urgency about this. There was a real sense that this is a matter of great importance and there was a lot of passion behind it. And so in that respect, there were divisions about how to go about addressing the problem of women's exploitation. The reasons for the divisions, you know, really differ depending on who you ask. You know, I think for some women in the movement, those who ended up leaving by the 70s, they talked about disagreements about leadership style and how you actually organize a movement. Mario Rosa Della Costa, for example, was really committed to a kind of decentralized grassroots organizing. So in Italy, there were groups, wages for housework, groups all over the country, all doing very different things, united in a kind of core movement. But really there was no kind of top down kind of structure to coordinate them. It was really understood as a kind of spontaneous grassroots movement. Selma James had a much more militant vision about how the movement should unfold. And for many in the movement, they found that very top down and hierarchical and at times overly controlling. And so there were divisions about that leadership style. And that was one of the main reasons. Another really important element here, I think, had to do particularly with the experiences of Margaret Prescott and Lumet Brown, who report that they faced racism in the committee, particularly doing their work in New York City. And at the time, they didn't name it, that they talked about black women not being respected in the movement, black women not being able to take leadership in the movement. And then in more recent years, Margaret Prescott has been on the record talking about personally facing racism within that movement and kind of moving away from that side of the New York Wages for Housework committee.
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Emily Calachi
Well, it's interesting having those different opinions on what happened, because many of these women are still alive today. How is that, as a historian, to work on the lives of people that are still here to tell their own stories?
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Podcast Host
Took a while to figure out how I would respect all the women I was writing about and how to take very seriously their experiences, but without feeling that I was playing the role of having to choose a side, you know, so, you know, in the book, for example, the way I handled that was by having their five stories kind of side by side, you know, kind of interwoven throughout. And, you know, you might see some conflicting things between different versions of the story. And rather than trying to resolve some of them, at least in cases where I couldn't resolve the disagreements, I tried to kind of let them be side by side and provide clarification where I could, but really kind of respect those kinds of different perspectives.
- [25:11]
Emily Calachi
And these internal divisions, did they signal the end of this movement?
- [25:15]
Podcast Host
Really, they didn't. They signaled a split in the movement, and I think perhaps a diminishment of them. But that also has to do with the fact that the 70s came to an end. The era of Thatcher and Reagan, you know, was not exactly a friendly time to be organizing against capitalism and in favor of women. Right. But, you know, Margaret Prescott, Selma James actually continued to organize to this day. And there's a contemporary sort of of the current iteration of wages for housework is the global women's strike. And they have a center in London that still functions. They've got a center in Philadelphia, and they're continuing to organize around these same issues. And now instead of wages for housework, they call it care income to recognize the different forms of care work that extend from women's unpaid work.
- [25:57]
Emily Calachi
I mean, you've made it clear that this is still something that is relevant and there's still activism around this. But 50 years on, how do you think that we should reflect on the movement in the seventies of wages for household.
- [26:10]
Podcast Host
One of the things that's most striking to me is how controversial they were at the time to people on all sides of the political perspective. You know, I mentioned feminists who really objected to the idea that women should identify with housework. You had men on the left saying, this is not what working class struggle is about, people on the right just being against a welfare state in general. So it was so controversial at the time, and yet so many of their insights were just so right on and continue to be incredibly relevant today. And I think that there's this moment during the COVID 19 pandemic where wages for housework was suddenly being mentioned in op eds, you know, in the New York Times and, you know, on NPR, National Public Radio years later. You know, more than 50 years, as you point out, there are incremental kind of successes, I think, to Me, it makes me very optimistic that even if you can't see the immediate results of a movement like this now, for example, you know, we see things like, like a movement for widows pensions in Venezuela that very much was influenced by this campaign. And this is many years later. You have people involved with the Green New Deal for Europe that are talking about the importance of compensating care work as a kind of sustainable development. Right. If we're going to grow the economy, maybe we should focus on care work, which is not as disastrous for the environment as other forms of growth. Right. We have movements like this is more relevant in the US than the uk, I think. But prison abolition, many people involved in that movement talk about what about investing in systems of care, you know, in the community, subsidized childcare, education, housing, these kinds of things that are critical to women's unpaid work rather than relying on policing and prisons to do that work. So again, I think you can see these connections, the ways in which what seemed like a really radical sort of quirky idea in the 70s has all of these fruits politically and intellectually all these years later.
- [27:58]
Podcast Introduction Narrator
That was Emily Calachi speaking to Ellie Cawthorn. Emily is professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, specialising in modern global feminism and decolonisation. Her book Wages for Housework has been nominated for this year's Cundall History Prize. To find out more about the Cundle Prize, go to cundleprize.com.
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Podcast Host
In prime big.
- [28:25]
Emily Calachi
Deal days, este siete yocho de octubre aprovich grande sofertas in un nuevo espa.
- [28:30]
Podcast Host
De piece te transformara in La Reina de la Relaxion.
- [28:42]
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