Wages for Housework

The riveting story of a radical campaign to change the way we value work 

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.
 

• “Wages for Housework is arguably the most misunderstood, maligned, and mythologized movement in the annals of radical feminist history. Its impact was, and still is, bigger than its numbers, and its liberatory possibilities greater than we’ve realized. Emily Callaci sweeps away decades of misrepresentation and wrestles with the archives, memories, and perspectives of its brilliant founders, producing a groundbreaking account of a movement that brought the war on gendered racial capitalism home. 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
• “Emily Callaci has given us a beautifully clear history of the light that feminist Marxists shone on home sweet home, exposing it as a site of radical exploitation. Through a deft analysis of key figures and ideas, the book shows the extraordinary reach of Wages for Housework as a devastating critique of global, racial capitalism, and containing within itself a way of reclaiming the earth.”
  Hannah Dawson, King’s College London
• “A subtle portrait of the Wages for Housework movement and its central figures. From Britain and the United States to Italy, Barbados and Zambia, Callaci traces the development of this complex political struggle that began from the important truth that housework is work. This is a timely history that should be read by anyone interested in how we might transform our everyday lives--both by those who live and breathe these feminist battles, and by those who have yet to join them.”
  Katrina Forrester, author of In the Shadow of Justice
• “This powerful book reminds us of the radical campaign to end capitalism by demanding recognition of the extraordinary extent it relies on unpaid work—of rearing children, caring for the sick, disabled, and for elders, of maintaining communities and tending the earth. Callaci’s account of this everyday socialism extends from Black Power to Italian feminism, from opposing structural adjustment programs to inspiring those demanding a Green New Deal. I can’t wait to teach this book and give a copy to everyone I know.” 
  Laura Briggs, author of Taking Children
• “Emily Callaci shows why wages for housework matters through the women who provoked a movement and her own attempt to juggle care work with academic labor. This stunning intellectual portraiture of Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod connects the personal with the political, illuminating the ways that racial capitalism has depended on reproductive labor—and how tending to people and the earth offers a perspective in which to fight back. Theory has never been more readable.”
  Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara