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Wages Against Housework

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They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.
They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.
More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.
Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

8 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1975

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2055 people want to read

About the author

Silvia Federici

103 books1,925 followers
Silvia Federici is an Italian and American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist and anarchist tradition. She is a professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor. She worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years, is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
Profile Image for The Conspiracy is Capitalism.
380 reviews2,464 followers
October 14, 2024


The Good:
--This brief pamphlet is by a feminist sociologist who (along with Nancy Folbre) completely turned my understanding of "Economics" on its head. I had started to explore "heterodox" economics (reading the likes of Ha-Joon Chang), but feminist perspectives (along with environmental!) always seem to be conveniently omitted as "externalities".
--Mainstream economics does a stunning job re-arranging common sense, so this pamphlet takes such market fundamentalism at its word and applies it to the externality of housework.

The next steps...:
--"Reproductive labour" has been further expanded on by re-examining the social value of "work", seeing it not just as the creation of commodities (particularly the stereotypical male factory worker creating commodities, which increasingly faces automation by machines) but also seeing the human caring involved. This "care work" and its social value contradicts the market's exact quantification.
i) Foundations: "use-value" (social use) vs. "exchange-value" (market exchange), see Varoufakis' Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
ii) Feminist Economics 101: how market exchange-value devalues care-work, see Folbre's The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values.
iii) This can further be applied to numerous social needs, from environmental health (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World) to housing (Why Can't You Afford a Home?). Also, see Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.
Profile Image for Maura Gancitano.
Author 28 books2,987 followers
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September 22, 2022
Questo è un testo degli anni Settanta di Silvia Federici sul lavoro domestico.
Caspita se è attuale, quante cose erano chiare già allora, quanto poco è cambiato da questo punto di vista.
Profile Image for Jassmine.
1,145 reviews71 followers
September 12, 2023
They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.
They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.

This is very audacious work. It's...
... alright, maybe I should start with saying I didn't get this. I don't understand some of the statements in this. Federici is very... she wields her opinions in a very swift poetic way, she doesn't stop for you to catch up. She sometimes tells a punchline of a joke, before sharing the joke itself. It's very confusing sometimes. But in parts it's also really charming. I guess I'm strangely attracted to her spirit, even if I'm not even sure with how big part of her claims, I even agree.
The thing that is certain is that this piece aged. I wouldn't say poorly, but not that well either. As you can probably already tell from the quote. Saying that "homosexuality is workers control of production" seems kind of privileged to me. (If I understand this correctly, she is saying that homosexuals have control over their reproduction - which... you know, harder to get kids doesn't necessarily have to mean bigger control... but maybe she was trying to say something completely different, who knows...
In short, this is an essay about getting wages for housework. The arguments aren't really practical in nature... If I'll have time, I'll probably re-read this, because I don't have any proper notes from it...
Profile Image for Margarida.
85 reviews28 followers
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November 29, 2021
It is one thing to set up a day care centre the way we want it, and demand that the State pay for it. It is quite another thing to deliver our children to the State and ask the State to control them, discipline them, teach them to honour the American flag not for five hours, but for fifteen or twenty-four hours. It is one thing to organise communally the way we want to eat (by ourselves, in groups, etc.) and then ask the State to pay for it, and it is the opposite thing to ask the State to organise our meals. In one case we regain some control over our lives, in the other we extend the State's control over us.
Profile Image for Norah Sanders.
38 reviews2 followers
December 7, 2023
Not me counting all the essays i need to read for uni as books 😅
Profile Image for Kate.
669 reviews23 followers
November 6, 2022
Finally tracked this down and read it. Cited in two different books I read this week (both recently published). Brief, incisive. Still completely relevant 50 years later.

“We say: stop celebrating our exploitation, our supposed heroism. From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it.”
Profile Image for Fadwa.
130 reviews15 followers
April 4, 2024
"إنه الطلب الذي به تنتهي طبيعتنا ويبدأ به نضالنا؛ لأننا وبمجرد المطالبة به نعلن رفضنا اعتبار أن العمل المنزلي تعبير عن طبيعتنا، وبالتالي رفضنا دور الأنثى الذي اخترعه رأس المال لنا."

"قد لا نكون نخدم رجلًا واحدًا، ولكننا جميعنا في علاقة الخادم بمخدوم هو عالم الذكور بأكمله."
Profile Image for Gavin.
567 reviews42 followers
July 5, 2018
An interesting piece from 1975 where Silvia Federici, a feminist Marxist regarding the situation of women and housework in a Capitalist society. I'll be honest that I wasn't certain what to expect from this and actually found quite a range of thought from the writer.

For example:

"In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally and sexually-to raise his children, mend his socks, patch up his ego when it is crushed by the work and the social relations (which are relations of loneliness) that capital has reserved for him."

And then this:

"It is one thing to set up a day care centre the way we want it, and demand that the State pay for it. It is quite another thing to deliver our children to the State and ask the State to control them, discipline them, teach them to honour the American flag not for five hours, but for fifteen or twenty-four hours. It is one thing to organize communally the way we want to eat (by ourselves, in groups, etc.) and then as the State to pay for it, and it is the opposite thing to ask the State to organise our meals. In one case we regain some control over our lives, in the other we extend the State's control over us."

That's not entirely what I expected from a Marxist, but perhaps I'm not knowledgeable enough regarding the range of thought and theory.

In the end this I get:

"Wages for housework is only the beginning, but its message is clear: from now on they have to pay us because as females we do not guarantee anything any longer."

I think Silvia for 1975 and perhaps now is expressing a need to be respected and have substance and subsitence for a job that too long was considered as an expectation. One she characterizes as having the "occupational disease the housewife of neuroses, suicide, and desexualization."

A short 8 pages that I found interesting because I don't encounter this type of discussion, and certainly not from a Marxist perspective in my current social encounters and readings.
Profile Image for cactu5head.
3 reviews
May 27, 2024
“In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally and sexually” (p. 78)

Housework is not considered on equal footing as “real work” since housewives are not paid a wage, they aren’t even granted the capitalist validation of being recognized as a worker. Furthermore, this unwaged housework has not only been imposed on women but has been transformed into a natural attribute of what it means to be a woman. Demanding wages for housework is a revolutionary demand not because it will destroy capital but because it forces capital to acknowledge this invisible labour and to restructure social relations in better terms for women. It is a refusal of housework as the expression of women’s nature, a refusal of the female role that capital has invented (pp. 80-81).

Some women have second jobs that are actually paid, they become nurses, maids, teachers, secretaries… functions that not only increase their exploitation but that simply reproduces their role at home (“housewife condition”) in different forms. This is problematic for many reasons, one of which being the impossibility to distinguish between where work begins and ends and where their desires begin (pp. 83-84).

But won’t the struggle for wages make housework even more expected and entrenched? On the contrary, women are already expected to accomplish so much precisely because they are not being paid for their work, because it is assumed to be a “woman’s thing” that they enjoy doing. But once housework and care are recognised as labour, something that can be refused and that isn’t intrinsic to the state of being a woman; that is when the position of man becomes undermined.
576 reviews
May 10, 2022
Excellent pamphlet highlighting wages for housework as a revolutionary perspective and the only revolutionary perspective from a feminist viewpoint and ultimately for the entire working class

Dismantles housework as 'a labour of love', stating the effect of the naturalisation of housework as a feminine attribute that leaves the woman dependent on her husband's salary

States the revolutionary case that wanting wages for housework means refusing that work as the expression of women's nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for women
Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to women and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class. In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if women are paid they will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite, rather to advocate for money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes housework visible

The class unity of this work is underlined by highlighting the fear many women-particularly single women- have of the perspective of wages for housework because they are afraid of identifymg even for a second with the powerless housewife, and the call that all women should want and have to say that we are all housewives, we are all prostitutes and we are all gay, because until we recognise our slavery we cannot recognise our struggle against it, because as long as we think we are something better, something different than a housewife, we accept the logic of
the master, which is a logic of division, and for us the logic of slavery
Profile Image for Aditi.
69 reviews2 followers
May 6, 2020
“To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society.”

“When we struggle for wages we struggle unambiguously and directly against our social role.”

Amazing!!!!
Profile Image for michelle.
135 reviews18 followers
January 12, 2018
only rly took issue w the slavery analogy (as often happens)
Profile Image for Fipah.
260 reviews82 followers
July 20, 2023
Zdarma dostupné online, napr. text má University of Warvick, je to len osem strán.

Skvelé. Napísané v roku 1975, stále úderne aj dnes. O tom ako majú byť domáce práce (žien) platené, o tom ako kapitalizmus z tejto neplatenej práce nielen profituje, ale závisí od nej. Federici píše ako plat za domáce práce (a všetku ostatnú prácu žien, t.j. byť manželovi neplatená terapeutka, masérka, slúžka a prostitútka) umožňují slobodu a podkopanie kapitalizmu, ktorý drží na uzde ženskú a aj mužskú slobodu – ako tie peniaze sú použitím jeho vlastnej medicíny proti nemu.
Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it forces capital to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class. In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the’ opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.

Federici v krátkosti a trefne vystihla ako toto nastavenie kapitálu poškodzuje nielen ženy, ale aj mužov a celkovú vzťahovú dynamiku, jednoducho nás všetkých, celú spoločnosť, tým ako povoľuje a podporuje toxickú dynamiku medzi manželmi žena-muž:
It is not an accident that most men start thinking of getting married as soon as they get their first job. This is not only because now they can afford it, but because having somebody at home who takes care of you is the only condition not to go crazy after a day spent on an assembly line or at a desk.

Je to krátky text plný veľmi výstižných citátov, preto ich toľko vidieť v recenziách:
To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice.

Odporúčam!
Profile Image for james.
170 reviews19 followers
February 24, 2021
'We will fail in the struggle for free laundromats unless we first struggle against the fact that we cannot love except at the price of endless work, which day after day cripples our bodies, our sexuality, our social relations, and unless we first escape the blackmail whereby our need to give and receive affection is turned against us as a work duty, for which we constantly feel resentful against our husbands, children and friends, and then guilty for that resentment.’


Federici summarises the central thesis of the second-wave feminist movement 'Wages for Housework': the capitalist mode of social organisation has actively suppressed the reproductive labour of women in the household; exploiting and mechanising them within a patriarchal system, utilising their bodies for the production and maintenance of the labour force. This 'reproductive' labour role (cooking, cleaning, sex, child-rearing, emotional support), in being unwaged, is made invisible, and instead, a capitalist conception of 'femininity' is created to chalk up all this 'work' to merely 'the doings of women', the role of the 'good, loving housewife'.

Capitalism therefore exploits women in, Federici argues, a far more insidious and covert manner than their male, factory-bound, wage-working counterparts. The capitalist notion of 'woman' as willingly subservient, servile, sycophantic in their subjugation, surrenders women of the right to even claim their status as worker. Their volition is stolen as well as the entire value of their labour.

In refusing this unwaged labour role, then, and taking to the streets in protest, women must reject the capitalist gender role devised for them. To ask for a wage is to make visible a woman's invisible labour, and once it is recognised as labour, she will have the right to reject it; in rejecting housewifery, she is then able to reconstruct her own conception of femininity - in so doing, reclaiming her right to love, fulfilling sexual relations, emotional and economic freedom.
Profile Image for Dustyloup.
1,324 reviews8 followers
February 26, 2023
It doesn't quite merit 5* but worth it because it's a quick read about Marxist-Feminist thought, and let's face it, you won't read those words together very often!
It was written in the 70s and so much has changed in terms of women's role in society, our attitudes about homosexuality have evolved, etc. And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Looking in the rearview mirror it's so clear that feminism totally ignored (and still ignores) the ways in which men suffer under patriarchy, the fact that they too were expected to provide free labor to be manly/a good provider (mowing the lawn, repairing things around the house, being good with cars)... But, just as the different waves of feminism have tried to repair the error of not recognizing the impact of race and other aspects of intersectionality, I think we're becoming more and more aware of this.
The thing to love/hate about this essay is the fact that she was right, the dangers of being assisted by the state, the risk of focusing on "being able to do Anything a man can do" instead of breaking free from this assumption that women are not just objects for free sex, psychology, nurturing/caregivers. She warns us that neither denigrating women who are "carers" nor in careers doesn't help advance society our change the condition of women.
And remember ladies, it's your "choice" to smile and be beautiful for the camera!
Profile Image for Prottoy Chakma.
15 reviews1 follower
July 30, 2025
The key argument here is not to ensure and fixate wages for housework in the literal term or in the economic sense as such. THAT will manifest as a by-product of breaking the shackles of patriarchy. And wages for housework is the ingredient for doing that. She questions the simultaneous relation between patriarchy and capitalism, how they both assist each other in enforcing exploitation of the feminine gender. And this gender is now reduced to becoming a mere punching bag for the working class ‘men' who work all day long in the factory. They kept women at home and in the kitchen so that men can come home after a long day of tiring work and brush off their anger at their wives. By transferring anger, the worker is now refreshed just as much to maintain productivity in the factory for the next day. This objectification, in no way possible to resist in any other way except putting a monetary value to housework of women which the ruling class dislikes so much. And by doing so, the engendered norm of housework as feminine will shift to their masculine counterpart without any sense of shame or guilt, or even egoistical complexities. I felt more interested in the language in which she spoke rather than the idea itself. It's more intriguing than ever to revise this in recent times.
Profile Image for kelly.
211 reviews7 followers
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May 30, 2024
"...not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work."

"By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone."

"It is precisely this peculiar combination of physical, emotional and sexual services that are involved in the role women must perform for capital that creates the specific character of that servant which is the housewife, that makes her work so burdensome and at the same time invisible."
Profile Image for Ben.
188 reviews30 followers
March 29, 2022
Great doc from Federici during the 70s on reproductive labor. The thesis that capital has mystified the violence and exploitation of unwaged reproductive labor and transformed it “into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character” is extremely compelling. Federici argues it follows that the struggle for waged housework demystifies this social relation, and forces capital to restructure class and gender relations such that conditions become more amenable towards working class unity. The slavery comparisons are off but this is a general problem historically with white feminism in the U.S. Haven’t started Caliban and the Witch yet so this is just prep
Profile Image for Aibhla.
260 reviews5 followers
July 27, 2025
“To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our over-sexualization has left us completely desexualized.”
Profile Image for Julia.
83 reviews
February 25, 2021
I had absolutely the best time reading this book. Some may think it is slightly outdated and it focuses on white feminism in Europe and the US, yet the concepts that it manifests are, as I believe, still very relevant to women nowadays. The language is great as well, very easy to read and accessible.
Profile Image for joyce.
45 reviews3 followers
June 19, 2022
"Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualisation has left us completely desexualised."

"As is often said-when the needs of the waged labour market require her presence there-'A woman can do any job without losing her femininity,' which simply means that no matter what you do you are still a cunt."
Profile Image for Hein Htet.
65 reviews9 followers
July 31, 2022
The way she described "marriage, family, and love" is mindblowing. "Wages for housework" is a concept I really like because of my personal experience regarding my mum and her struggle against the patriarchal religious teachings of my dad. This idea of "wages for housework" is revolutionary from both the class struggle and the feminist point of view.
Profile Image for Sergi.
116 reviews
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January 6, 2023
Breu assaig de la Sílvia Federici, una de les autores de moda dins del feminisme interseccional en l'època que anava a la uni (i potser encara ara?), en el que sosté la idea de que les tasques domèstiques que duen a terme les dones són part de la base de la seva opressió i haurien de ser remunerades.
El vaig llegir a tercer de carrera per l'assignatura Politics for Gender Equality.
Profile Image for ਸਿਮਰ ਕੌਰ.
7 reviews
October 2, 2025
“wages for housework a revolutionary perspective, but it is the only revolutionary perspective from a feminist viewpoint and ultimately for the entire working class.” Federici, one of my favorite radical feminists. This short read exposes how capitalism thrives on women’s unpaid labor. Important read for everyone
Profile Image for Victoria Yang.
227 reviews49 followers
October 15, 2019
On the front of my printout of this, I wrote 'INCREDIBLE.' I read this for a graduate seminar on Digital Labour--it's provocative and highly entertaining.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews

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