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Emily Callaci, "Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor" (Seal Press, 2025)
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So welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Nicole Bourbonnet, an associate professor of international history and politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. And I'm joined today by Dr. Emily Colacci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And Emily is author of Wages for the Story of a Movement, An Idea, a Promise, which was published by Penguin Press and Seal Press in 2025. So, a very new new book. The book tells the story of the Wages for Housework campaign across five decades, focusing on the lives and ideas of five of its creators. Thelma James, Maria Rosa, Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmot Brown, and Margaret Prescott. So, Emily, the book starts with this poster, this kind of classic poster for the Wages for Housework campaign. It's this image of the Statue of Liberty with a broom in her hand and, like, dirty dishes at her feet and children tugging on her dress. And it says, the women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And then you kind of open by painting this image for us, of you sort of having that hanging on your wall and looking up at it as you're mashing bananas for your kids and, you know, working late at night on your laptop in the kitchen and so I kind of wanted to start there with that mingling of your, you know, your professional life, your interest in this historical movement, and your own personal life. So basically, what drove you to research this and how did researching it actually also shape your own understanding of your own housework?
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Sure. Thank you so much for that question. And thanks also so much for having me on the podcast. So that poster, I'm actually looking at it right now. It's right across from perfect. I've had that hanging on my wall for years. I got it from the Library of Congress. Anyone else can get it too, but I think I had it initially, before I had children. And as just a piece of feminist artwork, it was kind of cool. It seemed kind of, kind of quirky, kind of like a provocation, you know, like wages for housework, you know, sounded to me more like political theater than like a serious political idea, you know, back when I first kind of encountered it, you know. And then like, you know, around, you know, 2017, I had my first child. And I think that, you know, like, so many people who have this experience, you know, there's just nothing that can prepare you from how totalizing the work is, right? How it's just, you know, around the clock. And, you know, I'd had a profession for years before that, as you mentioned. I'm a college professor. And I think what was so kind of shocking to me is that I was doing this work around the clock in addition to my paid full time job, and yet that work was basically invisible to the outside world. It was unsupported by the outside world, particularly from where I am in the US in terms of the kinds of supports there are, let alone compensation for that, you know. And so I found myself, like so many parents, kind of struggling to figure out how do I do essentially, you know, a second shift, as, you know, early Hochschild, the sociologist called it. And, you know, like many sort of new parents, I found myself just inundated with lots of, like, well meaning advice about how to do this, how to have work, life balance, how to, like, be more efficient, you know, how to get tenure and have a personal life. And all this, you know, advice that all really kind of amounted to life hacks, you know, like none of it actually got at the actual root of the issue issue, which is that as a society we rely on all this work predominantly done by women, and there's not support for it. So I really found myself wanting something much more ambitious than a series of life hacks. So that's when, like, you know, my historian kind of, you know, personality or identity came in, you know, and so I started kind of looking to how earlier generations of feminists thought about this problem. You know, and growing up as I did in the 90s, you know, it was a kind of an era where the, you know, kind of feminist messages that I got were all about girl power and all about career success. And housework was really not at all mentioned at all, you know. So when I started looking into the archives of, you know, what earlier generations of feminists had to say about this issue, one of the first things I came across was this really brilliant creative movement called Wages for Housework. So, you know, I started in Silvia Federici's archives, which had just at that time been deposited at Brown University, which is the town where my parents live. And when I was in her archives, I realized for the first time how extensive a movement this was. I think that I initially thought it was just this kind of, you know, small, just New York based, just, you know, for a couple years in the 70s movement. But when I saw her kind of correspondences in her archives with feminists all over the world, when I saw the different kinds of Wages for Housework branches around the world, then I started to realize what a global movement this was and how ambitious this movement was. And so that really, you know, activated my historian brain, and I decided this was worthy of a book. And so, as you mentioned, I ended up being a book that largely focused on five of the key feminist thinkers and activists that were behind this movement. Yeah.
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Although, I mean, you do through those five, you also get to see a lot of other actors and. Yeah, a lot of other people's interest. And, I mean, do you have a theory as to why this attracted so many different people from such different backgrounds? What was it about this, Logan, but also the campaign itself that pulled in different people?
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Yeah, that's a great question. I think part of what made it so appealing across these different kinds of spaces is how universal housework is. So just to give you a sense of the five people who are in the book and their different kind of backgrounds. So Sama James is the first person I focus on. And she grew up in 1930 in, you know, working class, immigrant Brooklyn, you know, and she grew up in a family that, you know, sympathized with the American Communist Party. Her dad was an organizer with the Teamsters Union. Her mom was an activist with, you know, tenants rights and, you know, women's organizations. And she. So she really grew up as kind of someone who Saw herself as part of the class struggle. And, you know, she ended up getting married to the great, you know, intellectual activist, man of letter, C.L.R. james, and organizing with him. But as she's organizing with all these organizations, you know, that are committed to liberating the working class, you know, and, you know, the rise of the proletariat and, you know, fighting capitalism, you know, she observes that, you know, women are largely left out of this definition of the working class. Right. For the left at that time, the working class is somebody who goes to work for an employer and gets wages. But for Selma, you know, she saw in the neighborhood where she grew up, so much of the activism that was very much part of capitalism was the women who were caring for those workers who were raising their children. You know, so. So for her, you know, the housework part was the missing part of the class struggle that she was so committed to. So that's really kind of, I think, her angle on it or one of her angles on it anyway, you know, and Mario Losa Della Costa, you know, so she grew up in a very different kind of background. She's, you know, a middle class, college educated woman in northeastern Italy. You know, she's a student during the kind of, you know, great kind of workers uprisings across northern Italy in the late 60s, you know, and so for her, I guess similar to Selma James, you know, for her, all this kind of activism around the working class is missing again, you know, women, you know, like. So she has this great kind of line that talks about how, you know, you know, you talk about the importance of the assembly line and what that does to workers and that as a site of political, you know, conflict and struggle. She says you have to imagine the assembly line stretching all the way back to that worker's home where someone is caring for that worker, washing his clothes, cooking his food, raising children. So she's a middle class educated college professor. Selma James left school as a teenager, was a single mother. They had very different backgrounds, but they both, as part of this workers movement, really saw how women were left out of that picture. And then, so Silvia Federici comes from a different context as well, but she comes from Italy as well, but from central Italy. She's a brilliant student, a creative person. She goes to university, but she finds herself really kind of chafing against the expectation that at the end point of this journey of a young person that she'll become a housewife. She really aspires to different things for herself. And so she describes herself as just absolutely hating and resisting any form of that kind of gendered labor and its expectations. So she went to the US and she was getting a PhD in philosophy, and she's probably the most kind of academic of the group. She has this kind of background in philosophy and in reading and translating different kinds of thinkers. And so she moves to New York when she's a student, and she joins Wages for Housework and starts a branch there, you know, and another kind of aspect that she, I think, really brings to Wages for Housework is the idea of the emotional coercion of housework, right? The idea that women are naturally suited to do this work, you know, and how that kind of operates is a kind of blackmail against women, you know, like telling them that you should do this for free because you love doing it. It's what you're meant to do, you know, it's. And how that discourse of love becomes a form of coercion. So then the fourth person I talk about is Wilmette Brown, who, again, has a very different kind of background that she brings to this struggle. So she's a black lesbian woman. She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, one of the most segregated cities in the country at that time. And she's a brilliant student. She goes to Berkeley. She's involved in anti war movement there. She eventually joins the Black Panther Party, participates in the struggle for ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. So she has a really wide range of, you know, she's a really kind of seasoned activist, you know, and in the 70s, you know, what she was kind of looking for was to think about how gender fit into that, you know, into the different forms of activism that she had been thinking about. And so for her, when she reads the work by, you know, Dalla Costa and Selma James at Wages for Housework, for her, the thing that clicks is that, you know, she sees this as an extension of the black freedom struggle, right? She thinks about the forms of coerced and unpaid labor that black women historically have been subjected to. And so for her, you know, the idea of Wages for housework is a project of extending that fight for justice. And also it's part of the fight for reparations, you know, and the kind of historic injustices that, you know, operate on the axis of race as well. And then the final person I'll talk about is Margaret Prescod. So she's born in Barbados when it's still under colonial rule. And she grows up in a community where so many of the people in her community, due to poverty, have to migrate abroad to work Low paid jobs in New York and London and send back remittances. So for her, as a young child, she sees the women in her family, their labor abroad, having to be separated from their children in order to kind of subsist. So for her, that's clearly a form of kind of, you know, extraction of this really vital labor that keeps communities alive. And then when she eventually her family gets the resources to move to New York in the 60s, you know, she encounters this discourse in American politics that immigrants are freeloaders, that they're here taking advantage of American largesse. You know, like when what she could see was the exact opposite was true, that the US was, you know, the economy that was extracting labor from Barbados and other, you know, places in the global South. So for her, the Wages for Housework, you know, campaign really kind of helped illuminate a politics of, you know, gender and labor and economic exploitation that went across national boundaries. So I really found, you know, these five women, again, they had such different backgrounds and different perspectives. But at the core of all of it was an idea that capitalism in theory is a kind of free market kind of system. People freely sell their labor and that's what makes the system efficient and what makes it free. What they all share is the insight that is actually a myth that hides that so much of that economic system relies on coerced labor, uncompensated and extraction. And they were united by the idea that if you reveal that labor, if you show how it actually works and demand compensation for it, you can challenge that system and through that other forms of hierarchy and oppression.
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Right. And then there's this kind of debate of the. Okay, so we have the housework part. We've kind of broken down what housework does for the economy. But then there's also that second element of asking for wages for it. Right. So what does it do to demand compensation, as you were just saying, and you talk in the book about how there was a lot of confusion about this when people were approached with wages for housework work. And also not everyone within the movement kind of agreed on the demands. So can you maybe just plot out a bit what who saw it as important to demand wages? What did they mean from who? What were some of the different ideas around that call for compensation?
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Sure. Yeah. And you're right, that's the part that's the most kind of controversial and the part that there's the most disagreement. And so I'll start with just observing that within the wages for housework kind of history of the Campaign, you know, prior to actually articulating that as the core demand, there was a whole bunch of different ideas floating around, you know, with Mario Sedella Costa and her group Lotta Feminista in Italy, and Selma James with her, you know, the various feminist groups she was part of in London, including things like, you know, a 20 hour workweek, you know, things like universal basic income, free childcare, free public housing. Right. All these different kinds of, you know, ideas that were getting at this idea about actually making space in society and valuing unpaid work as a way of liberating women from it, you know, and it was in, you know, it was in the context of the first place I've seen in the historical record, wages for housework as a demand was Selma James wrote this pamphlet for one of the women's Liberation movement conferences, I think, in 1971. And she had six demands, you know, you know, free daycares and nurseries, you know, abortion, free and readily available, several other demands. But waits of housework was one of the demands, one of six demands. And when she saw how much that ignited people, that kind of set the wheels in motion for that to become the demand on which they would kind of hang all the rest of the sort of aims of the movement. So it's kind of cool to see that one demand then crystallize into the move. Now you can imagine why that would just really be controversial at that time. So this is, you know, 1971, 72, when you have, you know, what people sometimes call second wave feminism, but basically this growing feminist movement, you know, and, you know, within that movement, there's a real desire to liberate women from, you know, roles that had been kind of. They'd been coerced into, particularly the role of the housewife. Like, there's a real, you know, desire to leave that, you know, to kind of sever this link between women and housework, you know, and to claim a place in public life and in the workplace. Right. So I think for a lot of people, when they see these, this group coming around and saying, demanding wages for housework, you know, it seems like what they're demanding is that women should actually double down on that connection between women and housework, you know, at a time when people are trying to get rid of that link, you know. So that really made it controversial, you know, I think for women in the movement, it was essential to make that link because the work has to be done, you know, regardless of if women, you know, are equals in the workplace. If, you know, regardless of the Other ways you can get equality. If you are still doing all this unpaid work and that work is necessary for capitalism to function, you still, first of all, are being exploited. And second of all, you have this source of power that's being untapped, which is that the system relies on you. You know, so what do you actually do to that system? How might you challenge that system if you make that visible, refuse to do it for free, you know, and demand compensation for it. So that was, you know, how it kind of became a sort of idea that it could actually be a source of revolutionary power. And, you know, it was demanding that, you know, you know, women unite across classes. Even if you don't identify as a housewife, you identify that you are subjected to that same kind of regime in solidarity with, you know, other people who do that work.
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Yeah, I mean, it's kind of interesting that actually very few of the. Well, really none of the women that you're focusing on would actually be considered sort of housewives in a. In a classical sense, maybe. Right. They're all not in. In a sort of traditional or. Or way that you would imagine. And yet it. It does have that power to kind of highlight. Exactly. As you said, that even if you're doing other work, you're still doing that. And they're really expanding also the concept of what work means. Right. What gets classified as work. And at the same time, they're also making a different argument about work than a lot of the mainstream feminists. Right. Work as. Not necessarily as empowering. Right. Or. I. One of the things that stood out to me was you had somewhere in the book where they say, you know, it's not the work, that we don't want more work. We want money, but we don't want more work, you know, so it's a very different idea of what work is.
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Exactly. Yeah. And I think that gets at how this particular strand of feminism, I mean, two things. One is how it comes out of a class struggle. Right. For Selma James, it's about an extension of working class politics. Same for Dalla Costa. I think a really important part of the history is also its connection to the welfare rights movement. So if you can think about, for example, a middle class, educated professional feminist who's fighting for the right to advance her career, to have equality with men in the workplace, to have female CEOs earn the same as their male counterparts, these are all things that I don't think anybody's opposed to. But the idea is that when you make that the focus and you assume that work is liberating. That's a very small proportion of women that you're talking about. You know, at a time when, for example, welfare is being cut back and you know, you know, women who are claiming that benefit, are you having all these work requirements pressed on them? Right. You know, and you know, it's the worst kinds of jobs, the lowest paid kinds of jobs, you know, like, so the idea that, you know, going, being forced to go take a job at McDonald's or to make minimum wage is a home health aide. Like that is a form of liberation. That doesn't make sense if you actually think about working class women or most working class women. Right. It's a very kind of middle class idea about what liberation looks like. So, yeah, they really rejected the idea that work in itself would be liberating. Right. And they talked about when you actually demand compensation for the work that's already being done, the work that's necessary, then you kind of reset the. The starting point for negotiating for more.
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Save the offer in the app to get 20% cash back when you pay in 4 from now through December 8th. PayPal expires 12. 8 see paypal.com promoterms subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com payinfor paypal inc. Nmls910457 right. And also, what would, what empowerment would look like? Not necessarily a job, you know, maybe a job, but also it might be time for leisure, time to engage in politics, you know, freedom from violence. There could be a much broader, a broader scope for a feminist movement.
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Absolutely. Yeah. That's part of what really attracted me too, because it was again, at the time I was, you know, working my ass off all the time, like, caring for a baby, doing my job. So when I saw these pamphlets that are like, we demand wages for housework, you know, and free daycares so that we can like, you know, go hang out with our friends, attend a political meeting, like, you know, take a nap, like, it was like, wow, that's, that's, that's just nothing I ever heard as a woman. You know, I feel like the version of liberation that's always been offered to me has been like, how can you work more? You know.
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Exactly. And at the same time, as they're, they're really taking a different angle on the feminist movement, they're also taking a different angle to Marxism. Right. So, and a lot of the women talk about at the time how, you know, any kind of gender related claim in the movement in the, in those early years was just like a non starter. Right. People would say, oh, well, we'll deal with that once the revolution happens. I've also it, I interviewed some Marxist feminists and they say the same thing, that that was always the line, Right. And then a lot of the Marxists also saw Housewives as this very kind of conservative category, right?
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Yes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sure. I mean, and the response that, you know, particularly Selma James and Mario Rosa Della Costa, because, I guess because they were doing this kind of first, you know, encountered, you know, there was again this idea that, you know, in order to become politically, you know, radicalized, you know, women had to leave the house and go and, you know, join the workforce. You know, like, that was kind of the idea, you know, and so that's really what Selma James pushed Against at first was saying, actually people who do work in the home are part of capitalism. Right. They're not existing in this separate kind of sphere, you know, apart from it, you know, if their labor is also being exploited. You know, I mean, she had this line that, you know, women, you know, the so called battle of the sexes, you know, it's meant to seem like, you know, it's wives against husbands, but actually it's against the husband's boss, you know, like, because that's the person everyone is working for. Right. You know, so recognizing that those people, you know, are part of capitalism and therefore might have some power to resist capitalism and might have political insights, you know, like, that was a really kind of controversial idea on the left at that time, you know, and then there's also the idea that, like, you know, well, that debates about whether housework could be considered productive in the classic Marxist sense. You know, so there's all kinds of, like, you know, articles that come out trying to refute wages for housework by proving that that work actually is not productive. And so it doesn't fit into a classic kind of Marxist paradigm. You know, there are those kinds of intellectual critiques happening as well. But then there's also, I think, more culturally just this real resistance to women organizing on their own, frankly. So like with Lotta Feminista in Italy, which was the Italian home of the wages for housework campaign, there was this idea that women were kind of the helpmates of the male revolutionaries. They called them the angels of the mimeograph, which is they were the ones who would print out the pamphlets and distribute them. But the men would be the real kind of geniuses who wrote them. And what I kind of found in looking at the archives are all this evidence of the early years of wages for housing work. You know, Sylvia Federici and Mario Sandela Costa and Selma James, you know, trying to participate in the left, trying to kind of be included, to have their perspective taken seriously and just getting, you know, basically just like shut out, you know, like. And in the case of Italy, you know, men would come and attack them at their meetings and, like, insist that women can't get together without men. That's not the nature of class struggle. And, you know, sometimes they broke windows down and, like, stormed into the meetings, you know, so it really was on many levels, I think wages for housework had to make a place for themselves on the left within Marxist organizing because they certainly weren't being given that space or allowed that space by the men.
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B
Yeah. And I mean, in A way they're kind of challenging everyone. Right. They're challenging the people in power, but then also the people who are pushing against power. So I guess it's not surprising then that in their own time. Sometimes you talk about how some people just saw them as either too ideological or too abstract. Yeah. But then it's interesting how now you look back and see the relevance, the continuing relevance of the critique that they made. And in that sense, I mean, we can see, you know, you distinguish also between thinking about it as a campaign versus thinking about it as a political perspective. And even if the campaign doesn't have quite the momentum it had before, that political perspective is really, if anything, become more obvious in this moment. I wanted to turn a bit to think about the actual researching and writing of the book as well. So you talked in the intro about how, you know, you decided to focus on biographies of these five women and kind of organize it around that, but you were also a bit hesitant to do that. Can you talk a bit about that? Were there other ways you considered organizing it? But why did you ultimately decide to go with the biographical approach?
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Sure, yeah. I mean, I think my main misgiving about the biographical approach is that, you know, it makes it sound like individual heroes or geniuses are the ones that make social change. Right. And of course, these women, you know, operate. Operated in complex systems of collaboration. I mean, they did not act on their own. Their ideas didn't come just out of their own heads. It came from the process of struggling together with other people. So, yeah, I mean, I thought about a lot of different ways to organize this. I thought about, for example, and maybe you'll appreciate this as a historian of the Caribbean, but I thought about organizing it around the Caribbean because of all the connections with CLR James for the Caribbean and later, much of the really cool activism and wages for housework in the 80s in particular was women from Guyana and Trinidad. Right. So I was just thinking about organizing it geographically, about how this movement meant different things in different places because of the different forms that capitalism and domestic work takes in these different places. Why I chose to write about these five women, in the end, I guess there are a few reasons. One was that I found these five women in particular so brilliant and innovative. And I thought that each of them illuminated a different aspect of this politics. You know, Wilmette Brown, for example, like just her history of activism, you know, in Black Liberation, like the way she connected wages for housework with Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, and thinking about, you know, unpaid work as this global kind of way of accounting for, you know, histories of injustice that, for me, was so innovative and different from anything else I'd heard anyone say. And then also, you know, she connects it to environmental justice in a way that I find just so compelling, you know, like, I could talk more about that later if you want. I know that I'm kind of going on here, you know, and, like, you know, similarly, like, you know, Mario Rosa Della Costa. I mean, her grounding in, like, the Italian left and the student movement, you know, and particularly thinking about coming out of a place, you know, very Catholic context, you know, a place where, you know, women were actually not entering the formal workforce in as great numbers as they were in, you know, the UK and the US and so, in many ways, for her, the kind of idea that the home was a workplace, you know, for Italian women, that made a lot more sense, I think, intuitively, than it might have other places. So I just liked how their different kind of contexts illuminated different parts of the. The story. So that was another reason I wanted to write about the five of them. And another reason, as I kind of mentioned in the book, is that there's a lot of disagreement within the movement, particularly about why it kind of split up in the late 70s, and many of them continue to do that work. But there was a big kind of fissure in the movement in the 70s, and as I tried to understand that by interviewing people and going to the archives, I realized that I couldn't get to the bottom of it in any way in terms of being able to adjudicate between the different accounts of it. Right. And so part of me thought maybe the way to tell the story is to let the different accounts of it kind of sit side by side, to kind of show some of the conflict and some of the contradiction and some of the different perspectives, rather than trying to tell the master narrative in a kind of omniscient sort of voice. So I thought that, you know, organizing it around five people with their different explanations for what happened to the movement would be another way to kind of tell that story in a way that did justice to it as best as I could.
- [32:28]
B
Yeah. And I mean, even, okay, it's organized in general along five people, but each of these is so deeply contextualized within their individual context that you actually, you know, if you read this book, you end up also getting the history of the Italian left and, you know, Caribbean family organization and miracle organizing. So you actually get to see all that context in a way, in deeper depth, I think, than if it had just been sort of an ideological, you know, a tracing of the ideology, and you actually see the connections between them so much. You know, you see how Selma is sending stuff to Mario Rosa and they're sending it back, and they're, you know, they're kind of dialoguing. So it's interesting because in the end, I don't feel like I come away with a sort of hero narrative. You know, you've succeeded in that, you know, in kind, using them as an entry point rather than as, you know, a kind of lionizing thing. And actually, I thought it was really great. At the end, you note that, you know, you write. I expect that not one among these five will agree with everything I've written here. But, you know, in the end, it's my own perspective, so. Which maybe brings me to the experience of working in the archives and especially of interviewing some of these women who, yeah, have a very long history of thinking about these issues. They have their very clear perspective. They know the narrative that they're telling. Yeah. How did you try to balance that and try to approach that in the archives, maybe, and the oral histories as probably somewhat different?
- [34:05]
A
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I should say I was lucky in that. Right at the time that I became interested in this topic for a host of reasons. The women in Wages for Housework were just starting to kind of put together their archives. So I think I started looking at this, I think, 2019 or something, and Mari Rosa Dalla Costa's archives were open to the public the year before that. And then when I went there in 2019, she had just put all the kind of correspondences into the archive. Right. So, yeah, so that was just really fortuitous. And I just felt like I was looking at all this material that I'd never read about before. So I think that that was really lucky. And then Sylvia Federici was just starting to put together her archives at Brown University. So I think that I thought at first, oh, I'll just go to all the different locations where there was a campaign and I'll do the archival research, and I'll be able to piece together the story in kind of like a, you know, kind of a straightforward sort of way, you know, kind of filling in the gaps. And, you know, but of course, as I mentioned, you know, these women have very different accounts of that history. So the archives themselves are very different in these different places, you know. So, you know, Mariosa Della Costa's archive is just. It's such a delight, but it's like she is she collects and curates stuff like she just has. She just saved everything from the movement. And I think, you know, if I were to try to talk about her approach to organizing, you know, she had a really kind of decentralized kind of idea that people could take up this idea and do different stuff with it, you know, and she wasn't going to try to coordinate it all from the center of the campaign. She was going to kind of just give advice and, like, encourage, you know, and be a kind of laboratory for these kinds of political experiments. So in Italy and in Dalla Costa's archives, you have, for example, an artist collective in Verese that dedicated itself to making art that was about women's domestic work and trying to subvert that through art projects. There's a factory council and a factory in Udine where women in the factory formed a council to think about the ways in which their dual shift as both working in the factory and working in the home, how that should relate to their kind of labor organizing. And there was collectives in Sicily and in Rome and Milan and all over the place. And in the archives, you just get all these letters and pamphlets and people disagreeing with each other. And that, I think, really reflects, again, Mario Rosa's sort of style politically was to have this kind of big space for debate and experimentation. And whereas, I think Salma James. So her archives, or rather the British movement archives, became available, I think, in 2021 in London. And Salma, again, she grew up in the left. She was part of the Socialist Workers Party as a young woman. And I think that she had a much more kind of disciplined idea about how a movement should unfold and how the wages for housework could kind of make its demand in a kind of coordinated, unified sort of way. So her archives are just very different. You know, they don't include correspondences. They don't include, you know, messy kind of experiments or, like, failures of the movement or, you know, debates within. Internally within the movement. Right. It's very much a kind of movement that shows. It's very curated to show the kind of gradual extending and building on and accumulating of the ideas of this campaign. You know, so you get a much more coherent picture, which is a very different kind of idea than you get in the other archives. So as I kind of encountered. And then another part I should mention is that in a lot of the British Archives of Feminism, not specifically curated by the Wages for Housework campaign, Wages for Housework gets a really bad rap. A lot of people really did not like them both because they disagreed politically, but also because at times they could be really sort of domineering. They could really, you know, silence other voices, you know, take over a meeting. Like a lot of people really, you know, hated that, you know, so I also saw a lot of, like, debate and anger towards them in the archives. So I guess that kind of undermined my idea that I was going to just go and gather information and piece together the story. Right. I had to grapple with why do these sources say such different things? You know, and what does that tell me about the different approaches to wages for housework, the struggles within this movement about how it should unfold and all those kind of disagreements.
- [38:33]
B
Yeah. And you really get to see that kind of unfold. Right. It's almost in a way, one of the most interesting things is how many different ways you could take this movement. That one slogan, even just that one idea, that one slogan could be taken in so many different directions. And we can even see that, I mean, this. Which maybe even segues a bit into your next project. But we can see that today there is this discussion of care work. We saw it during COVID Covid. There was a lot of discussion about, you know, the impossibility of combining these labors. Suddenly the labor that was already being done was way more visible and way more disruptive to the economy. And in the book, you talk about how you still kind of like housework as the way to talk about this, that, you know, maybe there's something lost when we convert this idea of housework into care work or something like that. So can you maybe talk a bit about the, you know, how this idea has been taken up in the present and maybe why you like housework still? Or not like, sorry, not like housework necessarily, but for the word.
- [39:47]
A
Yeah, I mean, so. And I will say I've wondered whether that was the right thing to say, to be honest, But I'll make a case for it anyway. You know, so part of it is inspired by this really great article by Dorothy Roberts, you know, the feminist legal scholar. It's, what's it called? Spiritual and Menial Housework. And, you know, everyone should read it. I won't try to summarize all of it here, but it's from 1997. And one of the insights is that, you know, there is this tendency, you know, to basically kind of uplift and celebrate housework, you know, as skilled, as meaningful when it's done by white middle class women, you know, like. But nobody is, you know, making a TikTok Video about scrubbing someone else's toilet. Right. Or cleaning up vomit on the floor of a hospital. Right. You know, like. And so I think she, you know, and again, I don't want to put words in her mouth. Everyone should really read this incredible article. But, you know, she really got me thinking about, you know, this kind of current moment when there just seems to be such a kind of renewed interest in the value of care. You know, I had this kind of fear that, you know, in talking about all the wonderful, fulfilling, rewarding, highly skilled aspects of care. What about the aspects of housework that are just kind of shitty, that have to be done? Someone has to do them right. You know, like, I don't want. I. I think there's a, A potential danger in separating those things out, you know, like, so part of me wanted to keep the category, you know, unified, to recognize that, you know, like, yeah, not all of it can kind of be uplifted and commoditized and made into this kind of beautiful experience. A lot of it is, is really hard, you know, so that's one of the reasons I think housework is good, is that, you know, it doesn't allow us to romanticize it. Another kind of reason I liked it is that I think, yeah, I think that for me also the old fashionedness of it, you know, it's kind of like, it makes me kind of see what I have in common with earlier generations of women, you know, who did this work. Even as I can see myself as different, I'm a professional woman. I'm, you know, I'm modern in all these ways. You know, like, you know, I'm still connected to, you know, the work that, you know, has always been necessary for the reproduction of the human race. Right. And so keeping that link visible to me, I think is important. So those are the two kind of reasons I think I like the housework ring is that one, it again, makes it more difficult to romanticize and therefore kind of separate out the high status and low status versions of it. And two, yeah, that historical link, I think, was something that was important to kind of keep visible.
- [42:17]
B
Yeah. And I mean, in that sense, it also just speaks to a lot across generations, Right. Not just across classes, but also across generations. And yeah, I mean, there's always just such a thin line between recognizing and romanticizing. Right. And maybe that's part of why the way the organization was or the way the campaign was structured as a demand, you know, really to me makes that difference. It's not like, look at all the housework we're doing. It's like, we want wages for this. So that shifts the whole. The whole tone.
- [42:54]
A
Yeah. And it wasn't, we want wages because this is really rewarding and wonderful. I mean, you know, because we want wages because this is exploitative. Right. You know, like. So, yeah, I think that anything that would then re. Entrench this idea that housework is feminized and should be made beautiful in that way, I think really kind of, you know, in some ways is counterproductive.
- [43:15]
B
So let's maybe just with the last little bit of time here, shift to what you're working on now. So where do you go from here? From this. From this movement?
- [43:26]
A
Yeah, well, I'm not sure. I mean, I've got a few things I'm thinking about. One is an ongoing project. I know that we've talked about that before. That's about reproductive justice in Sub Saharan Africa. And, you know, my earlier training is as an Africanist historian, you know, and my first book was about Tanzania. So, you know, I've got an ongoing project. Basically over years. I got kind of cut short by the pandemic that made travel impossible. But. But I was working on a book that looked at kind of the intersections of decolonization in Africa and visions about what decolonization could actually mean in a kind of meaningful sense beyond just kind of independence, how that intersects with reproductive politics. So that's ongoing. And then secondly, I've been interested in kind of building off of the Wages for Housework book. One of the things that I found really fascinating about the book that I hadn't realized was how much really interesting feminist thought was happening in the 1980s. I think that I just kind of thought of the 80s as a kind of dark decade when feminism kind of went underground. They lost so many of the battles for welfare and for all kinds of really important feminist goals. But in the course of researching wages for housework and seeing the ways this campaign made connections with activists in the global south, people resisting structural adjustment policies, and really thinking about how women's uncompensated labor, thinking about that as a part of global capitalism, could be a kind of starting point for some real kind of new kinds of feminist thinking. So I'm really interested in thinking about feminist activism in the 80s, how that connects with the kind of growing discipline of feminist economics during that decade. And. Yeah, just kind of making that a starting point for telling a broader story about the legacies of feminist thinking beyond the era of austerity.
- [45:17]
B
Yeah. And I mean, it also then allows us to again, think about different ways that feminists can think about work and think about economics beyond. We want to enter the economics. We want to have now power over this economic system versus a feminism that is more critical of the economic system system itself.
- [45:38]
A
Absolutely.
- [45:39]
B
And the way that it functions. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we can stop there. But thank you so much, Emily, for discussing the book and also for writing the book. I happened, I don't know if it was just like fate, but I happened to just started getting interested in this movement and then I was like, I wonder if there's a book that gives a nice history of this. And I think your book had come out a month before, so I was like, oh, perfect, there it is. It's such a fun book to read. It's so well written and engaging and, yeah, I hope that everybody reads it and enjoys it as much as I did.
- [46:16]
A
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for those kind words and thank you for your really fantastic questions. It's such a pleasure to talk with you.
- [46:22]
B
Thanks, Amadi.