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Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise
'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 if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!'
Launched in the early 1970s in the United States, Italy and the UK, Wages for Housework was a political movement making the case that women who did all the care work at home deserved to be paid. Like many revolutionary ideas, it remained an unfulfilled promise. It is a feminist path not taken.
Here historian Emily Callaci tells the enthralling story of this international campaign and its intellectual roots by exploring the lives of its key figures. We follow Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa as they lay the foundations of the movement, then explore how Silvia Federici reframed the campaign in the context of 1970s New York, while Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod brought the insights of Black feminism, expanding the movement even further with an anti-imperialist perspective.
Uncovering fascinating stories and debates thanks to new archives and interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the campaign, reaching across Europe, America and Africa. She shows how these women imagined potential futures under capitalism — and beyond — as the questions they raised continue to resonate today. What would it be like to live in a society that rewarded caring for people as much as consumption? How would we relate to the natural world if, rather than emphasizing productivity and growth, we valued maintenance and repair? And what would the women of the world do with their lives if they had more time?
Launched in the early 1970s in the United States, Italy and the UK, Wages for Housework was a political movement making the case that women who did all the care work at home deserved to be paid. Like many revolutionary ideas, it remained an unfulfilled promise. It is a feminist path not taken.
Here historian Emily Callaci tells the enthralling story of this international campaign and its intellectual roots by exploring the lives of its key figures. We follow Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa as they lay the foundations of the movement, then explore how Silvia Federici reframed the campaign in the context of 1970s New York, while Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod brought the insights of Black feminism, expanding the movement even further with an anti-imperialist perspective.
Uncovering fascinating stories and debates thanks to new archives and interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the campaign, reaching across Europe, America and Africa. She shows how these women imagined potential futures under capitalism — and beyond — as the questions they raised continue to resonate today. What would it be like to live in a society that rewarded caring for people as much as consumption? How would we relate to the natural world if, rather than emphasizing productivity and growth, we valued maintenance and repair? And what would the women of the world do with their lives if they had more time?
277 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 13, 2025
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April 2, 2025
Academic yet informative. This book serves firstly as a biography of five women behind Wages for Housework (a radical campaign launched in the 1970's) and secondly as an introduction to the political goals of the movement.🧹 (Extended thoughts below.)
Here are some things that jumped out at me while reading:
INTRODUCTION
I honestly want to quote every other line from this introduction but have forced myself to narrow it down to these few:
CHP 01 - SELMA JAMES
^ It's generally understood that when people have children, they're easier to exploit. Further, people who are busy working multiple jobs to raise their family have less time to organize and rebel against a corrupt government. It's just one of many reasons why a government with corrupt motives would push people to have more children (going so far as to impose something as horrific as forced birth).
Selma James once wrote:
^ Just one example of why a government would push to eradicate the middle-class (i.e., the people more likely to have time to align, coordinate, and rebel against a corrupt government).
Selma James had a heightened awareness of racial segregation, noting the lack of Black women in the Miss Universe pageant, as well as how her factory workplace was divided into white women working on the assembly line and Black women being given lower-paid janitorial positions.
In her 1952 political pamphlet "A Woman's Place", Selma James wrote about:
^ Interesting to note that times have changed enough for us to no longer assume the husband's boss is a man, and the woman's husband could in fact be her wife (nonetheless, it's a reminder that being a stay-at-home parent is a challenging job). Nice to see some progress, at least.
CHP 02 - MARIAROSA DALLA COSTA
As a college student, Dalla Costa was drawn to a new philosophy called operaismo (aka workerism), which prioritized workers' self-realization over capitalist development. In other words: the belief that the powerless should be free to define their lives on their own terms, rather than by the terms of those in power over them.
When Dalla Costa joined Potere Operaio (the organization behind operaismo), she hoped for equal treatment among her revolutionary counterparts, but instead the men assumed the role of thinkers, writers, and speechmakers while relegating the women to all of the menial labor or printing, copying, and distributing manifestos. 😑
^ Once again, we're reminded why a government would be motivated to enact forced birth. It's not about saving lives, it's about churning out workers to generate more profit.
In her manifesto "Programmatic Manifesto of Housewives in the Neighborhood", Dalla Costa imagined a utopian pro-capitalist neighborhood:
^ Intriguing vision. Would you be interested in this? I can't say I'd enjoy those communal spaces, as I thrive in my quiet alone time, but I'm intrigued by the idea that this labor becomes more visible when it's done outside of the house.
What I find most fascinating about Mariarosa Dalla Costa was her laser focused attempts to unite women. It's clear she was aware of how much the patriarchy is terrified of women finding community with each other. A patriarchal, capitalist government benefits from keeping women uneducated, pregnant, working at home, and isolated from other women.
CHP 03 HOUSEWORK IN GLOBAL LONDON
CHP 04 POTERE, BACI E SOLDI!
^ When people say "marriages used to last" they're often referring to this period of time when women were legally and financially chained to their husbands.
CHP 05 SILVIA FEDERICI
This section on Federici is more biography heavy than chapters on the other women, outlining her youth, finding feminism in college through her friend Ruth Geller, and coming late to the Women's Liberation Movement. Callaci writes that Federici felt most at home (politically) in the Women's Bail Fund (a coalition of women from the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Youth Against War and Fascism).
CHP 06 THE NEW YORK COMMITTEE
^ It's interesting to see the many areas where this movement floundered. In addition to the above, people struggled to unify over class and race differences. And there was still further division between women who wanted to be paid to work at home and others who feared that by demanding a wage for work at home, they would lose their freedom to work outside of the house.
CHP 07 WILMETTE BROWN
Brown made it a point of emphasizing that much of the (unpaid) work necessary to protect and sustain human life is created by capitalism.
Further, Brown asserted that under the American system of plantation slavery, Black women were viewed as animals and treated as breeders. After emancipation, marriage was dangled as an antidote to slavery, to which Brown said:
As a Black lesbian, Brown was unwilling to be subordinate to heterosexuality and Black men.🔥
It's interesting to note that Brown believed Black lesbians could only access their "radical potential" if they were autonomous from Black men, white woman, and Black heterosexual women. Here again we see the campaign weakened by an inability to unite various subgroups within the movement.
CHP 08 MARGARET PRESCOD
Prescod co-founded Black Women for Wages.
Prescod saw the importance of unifying subgroups within the movement, stating:
CHP 09 RECLAIMING THE EARTH
^ This is almost a direct quote from Chapter 07. 🫤
CHP 10 AFTERLIVES
Many women fell away from the movement when they decided to have children because they could rebel against being married, but if they become mothers, they weren't about to neglect their children.
^ Once again, we're reminded of the motivation behind forced birth.
Holy hell. . . In the 1980's, there were a string of serial murders sweeping the West Coast. Police suppressed the story until after eleven victims (all Black women) had been murdered. When Black Women for Wages for Housework demanded that police explain why the public hadn't been notified of these murders earlier, their answer was basically "they were only hookers". Because the victims were Black sex workers, their deaths were met by police with indifference. The lack of humanity is astounding.
EPILOGUE
Here are some things that jumped out at me while reading:
INTRODUCTION
I honestly want to quote every other line from this introduction but have forced myself to narrow it down to these few:
To be able to work, we rely on paid childcare; to pay for childcare, we need to work; and this entire cycle relies on the fact that the extremely skilled women who care for our children are paid less money for their work than we are for ours. There is no way around it: I am a beneficiary of an exploitative social arrangement.
...when governments cut social services, such as childcare, education, healthcare, elder care, and disability services, they exploit the fact that women will step in and provide these services without pay.
Wages for Housework puts austerity politics in a new light: what politicians call fiscal conservatism or 'belt-tightening,' Wages for Housework reframes as freeloading on the unpaid work of women.
CHP 01 - SELMA JAMES
...how do you go to a political meeting in the evening if you are the one who is expected to make dinner and look after the children?
^ It's generally understood that when people have children, they're easier to exploit. Further, people who are busy working multiple jobs to raise their family have less time to organize and rebel against a corrupt government. It's just one of many reasons why a government with corrupt motives would push people to have more children (going so far as to impose something as horrific as forced birth).
Selma James did not see feminism as separate from the struggle of working-class people against capitalism, but as a radical expansion of it.
Selma James once wrote:
It is true that, in one sense, the middle-class woman is even more degraded than the working-class woman. Even less is demanded of her. So she feels that she is even more obsolete . . . Yet these are the women who become abolitionists and suffragettes.
^ Just one example of why a government would push to eradicate the middle-class (i.e., the people more likely to have time to align, coordinate, and rebel against a corrupt government).
Selma James had a heightened awareness of racial segregation, noting the lack of Black women in the Miss Universe pageant, as well as how her factory workplace was divided into white women working on the assembly line and Black women being given lower-paid janitorial positions.
In her 1952 political pamphlet "A Woman's Place", Selma James wrote about:
the drudgery and isolation of housework, the joys and stresses of motherhood, and the feeling of utter powerlessness that came from being materially dependent on not just one man, but two: a husband and his boss.
^ Interesting to note that times have changed enough for us to no longer assume the husband's boss is a man, and the woman's husband could in fact be her wife (nonetheless, it's a reminder that being a stay-at-home parent is a challenging job). Nice to see some progress, at least.
"Women have two jobs: the one they get paid for, and the one they don't." —Selma James
CHP 02 - MARIAROSA DALLA COSTA
As a college student, Dalla Costa was drawn to a new philosophy called operaismo (aka workerism), which prioritized workers' self-realization over capitalist development. In other words: the belief that the powerless should be free to define their lives on their own terms, rather than by the terms of those in power over them.
When Dalla Costa joined Potere Operaio (the organization behind operaismo), she hoped for equal treatment among her revolutionary counterparts, but instead the men assumed the role of thinkers, writers, and speechmakers while relegating the women to all of the menial labor or printing, copying, and distributing manifestos. 😑
Dalla Costa thought that [...] not only do women produce, but they produce the single most valuable thing, without which capitalism could not exist: labor power itself. Before a worker appears in the factory to have profit wrung out of his body, he must be gestated, fed, nourished, clothed, socialized, educated in school, provided a home.
^ Once again, we're reminded why a government would be motivated to enact forced birth. It's not about saving lives, it's about churning out workers to generate more profit.
In her manifesto "Programmatic Manifesto of Housewives in the Neighborhood", Dalla Costa imagined a utopian pro-capitalist neighborhood:
In this new world, everyone who performed housework, whether men or women, would be paid for it by the government. The neighborhood would have communal kitchens, laundry rooms, nurseries, and elder-care facilities, all free of charge and high-quality so that those who performed housework would not do so isolated in their homes but in each other's company.
^ Intriguing vision. Would you be interested in this? I can't say I'd enjoy those communal spaces, as I thrive in my quiet alone time, but I'm intrigued by the idea that this labor becomes more visible when it's done outside of the house.
What I find most fascinating about Mariarosa Dalla Costa was her laser focused attempts to unite women. It's clear she was aware of how much the patriarchy is terrified of women finding community with each other. A patriarchal, capitalist government benefits from keeping women uneducated, pregnant, working at home, and isolated from other women.
CHP 03 HOUSEWORK IN GLOBAL LONDON
The Wages for Housework campaign inspired coalitions of lesbians, single mothers on benefits, and women trying to escape domestic violence. They came together as women who cared for children but were vilified by the state, which tried to ensure that the work of mothering was confined to the heterosexual nuclear family, with women dependent on wage-earning men.
Anne Neale, an early member who was part of the autonomous sister group, Wages Due Lesbians, recalled how one of their early struggles was to protect lesbian women who were threatened with loss of custody of their children if they came out. They shared this fear in common with poor mothers and single mothers.
CHP 04 POTERE, BACI E SOLDI!
Across Italy at the time, feminists were fighting for the right to divorce—but what good was the legal right to divorce if women did not have the economic power to live independently of marriage? With money in her hands, a woman could choose, refuse, or leave a marriage not just in theory but in reality.
^ When people say "marriages used to last" they're often referring to this period of time when women were legally and financially chained to their husbands.
CHP 05 SILVIA FEDERICI
"They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work."—Silvia Federici
This section on Federici is more biography heavy than chapters on the other women, outlining her youth, finding feminism in college through her friend Ruth Geller, and coming late to the Women's Liberation Movement. Callaci writes that Federici felt most at home (politically) in the Women's Bail Fund (a coalition of women from the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Youth Against War and Fascism).
Public education was increasingly geared toward cultivating disciplined workers, rather than independent minds. Social services like public transportation and housing prioritized shuttling people to and from work on time, rather than on fostering community and connection. Capitalism did not serve the needs of the people; instead, American society molded human bodies and minds to serve the needs of capitalism.
CHP 06 THE NEW YORK COMMITTEE
[Wages for Housework] required [people] to participate in a struggle that had no clear immediate objective—if money was necessary but also not the point, how would you know when you had won? Intellectually, people were fascinated, but as a political movement, many found it simultaneously too material and too abstract.
^ It's interesting to see the many areas where this movement floundered. In addition to the above, people struggled to unify over class and race differences. And there was still further division between women who wanted to be paid to work at home and others who feared that by demanding a wage for work at home, they would lose their freedom to work outside of the house.
CHP 07 WILMETTE BROWN
Over the next several years, Brown would radically expand the scope of Wages for Housework. She took the campaign decisively out of the kitchen, out of the heterosexual nuclear family, and directed her gaze into some of the darker spaces of global capitalism—into cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils, into scenes of political violence and harassment on street corners and at the lesbian bars where she hung out, and into the war zones where women cared for ravaged bodies and land.
Brown made it a point of emphasizing that much of the (unpaid) work necessary to protect and sustain human life is created by capitalism.
Further, Brown asserted that under the American system of plantation slavery, Black women were viewed as animals and treated as breeders. After emancipation, marriage was dangled as an antidote to slavery, to which Brown said:
"...the price we had to pay was subordination . . . to the power of Black men, under the guise of Black liberation."
As a Black lesbian, Brown was unwilling to be subordinate to heterosexuality and Black men.🔥
It's interesting to note that Brown believed Black lesbians could only access their "radical potential" if they were autonomous from Black men, white woman, and Black heterosexual women. Here again we see the campaign weakened by an inability to unite various subgroups within the movement.
CHP 08 MARGARET PRESCOD
Prescod co-founded Black Women for Wages.
Prescod saw the importance of unifying subgroups within the movement, stating:
"Our autonomy is not a splitting of our power but really an extension of our power. Because the more we are able to articulate each and every one of our needs and to organize on the basis of those needs, the stronger we become."
CHP 09 RECLAIMING THE EARTH
Wilmette Brown took Wages for Housework decisively out of the kitchen, out of the heterosexual nuclear family, and directed her gaze into some of the darker spaces of global capitalism—into cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils, into scenes of political violence. She looked into the bar hangouts of lesbians and sex workers, and into the war zones of the aftermath of American imperialism where poor women cared for ravaged bodies and land.
^ This is almost a direct quote from Chapter 07. 🫤
CHP 10 AFTERLIVES
Many women fell away from the movement when they decided to have children because they could rebel against being married, but if they become mothers, they weren't about to neglect their children.
Others in the movement wanted to have children and found that the demands of motherhood were incompatible with the demands of political militancy.
^ Once again, we're reminded of the motivation behind forced birth.
Holy hell. . . In the 1980's, there were a string of serial murders sweeping the West Coast. Police suppressed the story until after eleven victims (all Black women) had been murdered. When Black Women for Wages for Housework demanded that police explain why the public hadn't been notified of these murders earlier, their answer was basically "they were only hookers". Because the victims were Black sex workers, their deaths were met by police with indifference. The lack of humanity is astounding.
EPILOGUE
In recent years, Wages for Housework has resurfaced in public discourse like an unearthed treasure, presented as a relic from a different era that could help save our own. When schools and daycare shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more people were working from their homes, women's unpaid labor of social reproduction became impossible not to see.
But in the campaign, housework was not something to uplift as virtuous but something mundane and necessary to the economy and to human life: a site of economic exploitation, an Achilles heel in the capitalist system, and a place from which we could organize to overthrow it.
Read
December 11, 2024Very enjoyable read- especially on Selma James. Was Wages for Housework a collective, a movement, or a cult? The book depicts what feels like a realistic reflection on women’s lives that got channeled into an ideology. A good addition to our understanding of 1970’s and 80’s explosion in creative thought about women.
dnf
January 25, 2025DNF’d @ 55%.
I want to preface this by saying it is very clear how much work and research Callaci put into this book, and for that I cannot fault her. My struggle with this book came with the sheer volume of information that was thrown at the reader. While I initially loved this book, especially the first few chapters on Selma James, I eventually found myself struggling to pick it up. There was so many facts and figures and quotes that it felt like a textbook at certain points, and I simply couldn’t finish it. Perhaps I wasn’t in the right headspace for it, as it does seem like a very interesting book covering a topic I hadn’t heard about before. But for the time being, I couldn’t wade through the heavy text.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #WagesForHousework #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
I want to preface this by saying it is very clear how much work and research Callaci put into this book, and for that I cannot fault her. My struggle with this book came with the sheer volume of information that was thrown at the reader. While I initially loved this book, especially the first few chapters on Selma James, I eventually found myself struggling to pick it up. There was so many facts and figures and quotes that it felt like a textbook at certain points, and I simply couldn’t finish it. Perhaps I wasn’t in the right headspace for it, as it does seem like a very interesting book covering a topic I hadn’t heard about before. But for the time being, I couldn’t wade through the heavy text.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #WagesForHousework #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
May 31, 2025
A vivid history of the provocative demand "Wages for Housework," focused on its 1970s and early 1980s heyday. Told as a collective biography of five of the main organizers, this book was a page-turner for me! Despite the snappiness of the WFH phrase, it all gets quite complex and I thought that Callaci delved into those ambiguities and tensions so well.
April 21, 2025
ESSENTIAL
February 8, 2025
Wages for Housework is an engaging and personable history of the WFH movement, following the stories of some of the key figures. Callaci doesn't shy away from some of the complexities of the campaign, not least translating the theory into something more concrete.
It was interesting to read about how this international movement intersected with feminist, civil rights and anti-capitalist activism around the world. It's thoroughly-researched and thoughtfully presented, academic in its approach while being very readable - although if you don't have an interest in Marxist Feminist ideology you might this might not be for you.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
It was interesting to read about how this international movement intersected with feminist, civil rights and anti-capitalist activism around the world. It's thoroughly-researched and thoughtfully presented, academic in its approach while being very readable - although if you don't have an interest in Marxist Feminist ideology you might this might not be for you.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
March 19, 2025
I needed this book. As a working mother, or even a woman in general, I feel like I am drowning in housework. I even attend my husbands dietitian appointments to learn what he can eat, because of course I do most of the cooking, shopping, and management.
But even if we divide all those chores, just keeping the floors swept and the laundry put away takes most of my nonworking/awake hours. How do people have clean houses while working fulltime?
There are some quotes in this book I will never get over. One is about being materially dependent on two men: a man and his boss. I think that still fit today, at least here in Utah, women only make 67% of what men do. I feel like this book review is a good place to say "do not blame our choices for certain industries paying a lot less." a teacher is just as valuable as a programmer, but our wages don't reflect that.
And the part about it destroying romance (same paragraph) is completely imbedded in my soul now.
I also love the part about how everyone has a claim to women's time.
This has me thinking about how women have always had to step up and do a lot more in times of crisis. During the world wars women went to work but they also gardened and rationed and made clothes. Now we can't afford things in America so women are cooking more, gardening, and taking on gig work. We are all developing new skills and ways to prep and survive. But we are not getting more out of it.
Love the book. It has given me a lot to think about.
But even if we divide all those chores, just keeping the floors swept and the laundry put away takes most of my nonworking/awake hours. How do people have clean houses while working fulltime?
There are some quotes in this book I will never get over. One is about being materially dependent on two men: a man and his boss. I think that still fit today, at least here in Utah, women only make 67% of what men do. I feel like this book review is a good place to say "do not blame our choices for certain industries paying a lot less." a teacher is just as valuable as a programmer, but our wages don't reflect that.
And the part about it destroying romance (same paragraph) is completely imbedded in my soul now.
I also love the part about how everyone has a claim to women's time.
This has me thinking about how women have always had to step up and do a lot more in times of crisis. During the world wars women went to work but they also gardened and rationed and made clothes. Now we can't afford things in America so women are cooking more, gardening, and taking on gig work. We are all developing new skills and ways to prep and survive. But we are not getting more out of it.
Love the book. It has given me a lot to think about.
March 22, 2025
Emily Callaci, Wages for Housework The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor, Basic Books | Seal Press, March 2025.
Thankyou, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
Emily Callaci has brought together five activists for whom wages for housework was a part of their feminist work for improving women’s lives. It is important to recognise that this is what the movement sought to do, and to come to the writings, and Callaci’s introduction and commentary, with this understanding. It is also vital to acknowledge that wages for housework as an effort to address the unequal burden placed on women who might work outside the home, and then work unpaid inside the home, was complex. The women in this collection have addressed the complexities, making an important contribution to the history of the women’s movement, as well as making salient points in a debate that remains the subject of research today – who does most of the housework?
The collection is noteworthy for its inclusion of working class and black women, together with discussion of the middle-class nature of many of the 1970s feminist conferences and gatherings. Of particular note is Selma James’ work, including reference to the documentary, Women Talking, and her appearance at Ruskin College for the National Women’s Liberation Movement. Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s story begins sadly. Hoping to hear her voice on a tape, access won with great difficulty, Callaci was subjected to a male commentator’s reflections, and a small contribution by Dalla costa. Fortunately, this brief appearance belies the material Callaci was able to garner though further investigation, including discussion with Dalla Costa and a marvellously detailed description of her stage appearance in a working-class area in Venice. Silia Federici begins the section set in America, as she speaks in Brooklyn, decrying the idea of housework as ‘love’. The New York movement features heavily, with British women joining a conference organised by the New York Committee. Wilmet Brown is charged with expanding the movement and is a particular focus. Lastly, the chapter introducing Margaret Prescot, co-founder of Black Women for Wages for Housework, is an amalgam of her work, International Women’s Decade and attempts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Here, the conflict between aspirations for women became apparent, only sustained lobbying leading to the inclusion in the National Plan of Action a plank, Women, Welfare, and Poverty aimed at replacing ‘welfare’ with ‘wage’.
The Epilogue discusses housework as it is being discussed in the 2020s, after the Covid epidemic. Callaci suggests that current debates are free of the friction raised in past discussion and activism. There is a useful list of abbreviations and notes, as well as some illustrations, listed at the front of the book. Callaci has brought together a fine collection of material, interspersed with her commentary.
Thankyou, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
Emily Callaci has brought together five activists for whom wages for housework was a part of their feminist work for improving women’s lives. It is important to recognise that this is what the movement sought to do, and to come to the writings, and Callaci’s introduction and commentary, with this understanding. It is also vital to acknowledge that wages for housework as an effort to address the unequal burden placed on women who might work outside the home, and then work unpaid inside the home, was complex. The women in this collection have addressed the complexities, making an important contribution to the history of the women’s movement, as well as making salient points in a debate that remains the subject of research today – who does most of the housework?
The collection is noteworthy for its inclusion of working class and black women, together with discussion of the middle-class nature of many of the 1970s feminist conferences and gatherings. Of particular note is Selma James’ work, including reference to the documentary, Women Talking, and her appearance at Ruskin College for the National Women’s Liberation Movement. Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s story begins sadly. Hoping to hear her voice on a tape, access won with great difficulty, Callaci was subjected to a male commentator’s reflections, and a small contribution by Dalla costa. Fortunately, this brief appearance belies the material Callaci was able to garner though further investigation, including discussion with Dalla Costa and a marvellously detailed description of her stage appearance in a working-class area in Venice. Silia Federici begins the section set in America, as she speaks in Brooklyn, decrying the idea of housework as ‘love’. The New York movement features heavily, with British women joining a conference organised by the New York Committee. Wilmet Brown is charged with expanding the movement and is a particular focus. Lastly, the chapter introducing Margaret Prescot, co-founder of Black Women for Wages for Housework, is an amalgam of her work, International Women’s Decade and attempts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Here, the conflict between aspirations for women became apparent, only sustained lobbying leading to the inclusion in the National Plan of Action a plank, Women, Welfare, and Poverty aimed at replacing ‘welfare’ with ‘wage’.
The Epilogue discusses housework as it is being discussed in the 2020s, after the Covid epidemic. Callaci suggests that current debates are free of the friction raised in past discussion and activism. There is a useful list of abbreviations and notes, as well as some illustrations, listed at the front of the book. Callaci has brought together a fine collection of material, interspersed with her commentary.
September 2, 2025
Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework is not simply a history of a movement. It is a cartography of how struggles around unwaged reproductive labor braided themselves into broader insurgencies – across feminism, anti-racism, environmental politics, and beyond. What might appear, from a distance, as a narrowly defined demand opens up, in Callaci’s hands, as an unruly assemblage of contestations: about how life itself is produced and maintained, and how this work has been persistently devalued, invisibilized, and treated as inexhaustible. Callaci captures what was radical in the original Wages for Housework campaigns: the refusal to separate the political from the intimate, or the economic from the affective. Rather than relegating social reproductive work to a private realm outside politics, figures like Silvia Federici and Selma James insisted on situating housework, childcare, and other forms of reproductive labor at the heart of capitalist accumulation. In tracing their ideas, Callaci shows how Wages for Housework was never only about pay but about recognition, redistribution, and the possibility of reorganizing social life altogether.
What distinguishes this book is its attention to the voices too often neglected in the standard recounting of feminist history. Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod emerge here not as footnotes but as vital protagonists who articulated how the devaluation of reproductive labor intersected with racial capitalism. Their organizing, especially within Black women’s collectives, demonstrates how the Wages for Housework demand resonated differently across lines of race and class, and how it pointed to systemic injustices embedded in the very structure of care and survival. The text also gestures outward: to the environmental dimensions of unwaged labor, to the way the extraction of care mirrors the extraction of resources from the planet. By foregrounding these interconnections, Callaci situates Wages for Housework less as a bounded campaign of the 1970s and more as a prefiguration of today’s struggles around climate justice, migration, and the crises of social reproduction.
In the spirit of Wages for Housework itself, the book refuses to let ideas be domesticated into tidy academic categories. Instead, it keeps alive the movement’s promiscuous energy, its tendency to trouble the boundaries of politics, to open unexpected solidarities and conflicts alike. Callaci’s narrative does not romanticize or flatten the campaign but shows its contradictions, its unfinished edges, and, most importantly, its enduring promise. This is where the book resonates most: not in telling us what Wages for Housework was, but in suggesting what it still might be. A reminder that every unpaid hour, every act of care extracted without acknowledgment, is not just a private burden but a terrain of struggle. A reminder, too, that the politics of reproduction is never just about the home, but about the world we might reproduce otherwise.
What distinguishes this book is its attention to the voices too often neglected in the standard recounting of feminist history. Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod emerge here not as footnotes but as vital protagonists who articulated how the devaluation of reproductive labor intersected with racial capitalism. Their organizing, especially within Black women’s collectives, demonstrates how the Wages for Housework demand resonated differently across lines of race and class, and how it pointed to systemic injustices embedded in the very structure of care and survival. The text also gestures outward: to the environmental dimensions of unwaged labor, to the way the extraction of care mirrors the extraction of resources from the planet. By foregrounding these interconnections, Callaci situates Wages for Housework less as a bounded campaign of the 1970s and more as a prefiguration of today’s struggles around climate justice, migration, and the crises of social reproduction.
In the spirit of Wages for Housework itself, the book refuses to let ideas be domesticated into tidy academic categories. Instead, it keeps alive the movement’s promiscuous energy, its tendency to trouble the boundaries of politics, to open unexpected solidarities and conflicts alike. Callaci’s narrative does not romanticize or flatten the campaign but shows its contradictions, its unfinished edges, and, most importantly, its enduring promise. This is where the book resonates most: not in telling us what Wages for Housework was, but in suggesting what it still might be. A reminder that every unpaid hour, every act of care extracted without acknowledgment, is not just a private burden but a terrain of struggle. A reminder, too, that the politics of reproduction is never just about the home, but about the world we might reproduce otherwise.
August 5, 2025
I obtained a copy of this via Netgalley. Which means that this review is also a form of unpaid work*. However, that's a consideration for another time.
I really, really wanted to like this book. I absolutely agree with the central premise of the work within the home being both central to society and unvalued by society. But this was such a trudge. Callaci tries to cover the entire movement, which means that there is a huge amount of backstory and not really enough about the movements themselves or what they actually achieved. Part of the reason for this is that the groups themselves were often unclear about their objectives. Still, it's the role of the author to provide that clarity instead of being overly starry-eyed.
We have a big chunk of the book on the history of the Italian movement, but its work is then ultimately and swiftly dismissed later in the book. Elsewhere there is a focus on individuals, despite the fact that a lot of their work and activism was outside of the Wages for Housework movement.
It's hard to believe something is fascinating and important, when the author's own attention is clearly so easily distracted elsewhere. This is an issue with a lot of books and activism generally by US feminists. They seem to guiltily struggle with the idea of writing about woman as a class and so instead a very prone to going on tangents about other movements.
Considering this book is already published in the US, this felt quite poorly edited. Spelling mistakes abound and a chapter about the afterlife of the movement turns into the author's own personal acknowledgements. This book should have been so good, but feels like a lot of wasted work.
However, it has left me really wanting to read a book about Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell and I hope however does write it is focused on them fully.
*I estimate that I have spent around five hours in work related to this book. The UK national minimum wage is £12.21 per hour, so that is labour worth £61.05.
I really, really wanted to like this book. I absolutely agree with the central premise of the work within the home being both central to society and unvalued by society. But this was such a trudge. Callaci tries to cover the entire movement, which means that there is a huge amount of backstory and not really enough about the movements themselves or what they actually achieved. Part of the reason for this is that the groups themselves were often unclear about their objectives. Still, it's the role of the author to provide that clarity instead of being overly starry-eyed.
We have a big chunk of the book on the history of the Italian movement, but its work is then ultimately and swiftly dismissed later in the book. Elsewhere there is a focus on individuals, despite the fact that a lot of their work and activism was outside of the Wages for Housework movement.
It's hard to believe something is fascinating and important, when the author's own attention is clearly so easily distracted elsewhere. This is an issue with a lot of books and activism generally by US feminists. They seem to guiltily struggle with the idea of writing about woman as a class and so instead a very prone to going on tangents about other movements.
Considering this book is already published in the US, this felt quite poorly edited. Spelling mistakes abound and a chapter about the afterlife of the movement turns into the author's own personal acknowledgements. This book should have been so good, but feels like a lot of wasted work.
However, it has left me really wanting to read a book about Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell and I hope however does write it is focused on them fully.
*I estimate that I have spent around five hours in work related to this book. The UK national minimum wage is £12.21 per hour, so that is labour worth £61.05.
December 17, 2025
Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci is a detailed account of the campaign in the 1970s to change the thinking around how work is valued, and while things have improved in that area there remains quite a lot of work to be done.
While it is clear that an immense amount of research has gone into this book, which tells the stories of several important figures in the movement and travels from America to Italy and back again, unfortunately it is not presented in a very engaging way. In some respects this book reads almost like a text book with its stream of dates and figures, and so I found myself lacking motivation to pick it up. For those with some knowledge of the subject matter it may be more interesting but as someone who knew nothing about the subject matter it was overwhelming.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.
While it is clear that an immense amount of research has gone into this book, which tells the stories of several important figures in the movement and travels from America to Italy and back again, unfortunately it is not presented in a very engaging way. In some respects this book reads almost like a text book with its stream of dates and figures, and so I found myself lacking motivation to pick it up. For those with some knowledge of the subject matter it may be more interesting but as someone who knew nothing about the subject matter it was overwhelming.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.
September 23, 2025
Okay, this book is heavy, a little to read at times and can be a tad difficult to follow but should you read it anyway? Absolutely.
It's meticulously researched, thoughtfully displayed and offers an amazingly wide oversight into the history of home makers and working women. Callaci lets the facts speak for themselves, offering plenty of evidence, real-life account and facts to get not only the true history but the impact still affecting women today and trying to explain the more complex issues hidden behind legal jargon in a more readable way.
It's meticulously researched, thoughtfully displayed and offers an amazingly wide oversight into the history of home makers and working women. Callaci lets the facts speak for themselves, offering plenty of evidence, real-life account and facts to get not only the true history but the impact still affecting women today and trying to explain the more complex issues hidden behind legal jargon in a more readable way.
July 17, 2025
Wow. Wages for Housework is a movement that unites us all, as housework is the work that keeps our world running. This book delves deep into the movement, following key figures and highlighting the nuances of differing perspectives. This book left me feeling inspired, enraged, curious and challenged. A must-read for anyone interested in creating a better world, one where everyone has what they need.
May 1, 2025
Emily Callaci did an amazing job of chronicling the evolution of the Wages for Housework movement throughout the world. Her account of the women who lead it and the cause was well written and interesting!
could-not-finish
October 23, 2025"To be able to work, we rely on paid childcare; to pay for childcare, we need to work; and this entire cycle relies on the fact that the extremely skilled women who care for our children are paid less money for their work that we are for our."
October 13, 2025
Accessible feminist history into the wages for housework movement, focusing on several key players. I found it to be a valuable read.
November 18, 2025
So energizing!
April 6, 2025
Wages for Housework highlights several women who campaigned internationally for rights not only for women but minorities as well. We follow the movement that began in the 1970’s; through feminist, civil rights and anti capitalism to the current movement of Members of Global Women.
A very informative book that details each women’s’ journey forming their groups and the conflicts they encountered. The work that went into forming and keeping these groups moving, bringing international attention to these ongoing issues is impressive. This book makes you think and debate some of the issues discussed. How would you feel then and how does it relate to today?
This book is well written and a lot of research went into creating such an informative read. There are several quotes that really resonated and I felt like I was highlighting the whole book; however the facts and figures become too much like reading a history or text book and lost some of it’s luster as you get close to half way through.
Although impressed by all the women who contributed and Emily for putting it all together, it felt like too much information and some redundancy as a whole.
There is much to take away and if you enjoy historical facts, then I highly recommend.
Thank you Net Galley and the author for the ARC to review
A very informative book that details each women’s’ journey forming their groups and the conflicts they encountered. The work that went into forming and keeping these groups moving, bringing international attention to these ongoing issues is impressive. This book makes you think and debate some of the issues discussed. How would you feel then and how does it relate to today?
This book is well written and a lot of research went into creating such an informative read. There are several quotes that really resonated and I felt like I was highlighting the whole book; however the facts and figures become too much like reading a history or text book and lost some of it’s luster as you get close to half way through.
Although impressed by all the women who contributed and Emily for putting it all together, it felt like too much information and some redundancy as a whole.
There is much to take away and if you enjoy historical facts, then I highly recommend.
Thank you Net Galley and the author for the ARC to review
January 25, 2025
In this book, Emily Callaci tells the story of the Wages for Housework movement, which came about in the 1970s. She structures the book around 5 of the women who were most instrumental in the movement's founding: Silvia Federici, Selma James, Wilmette Brown, Maria Dalla Costa, and Margaret Prescod. Each of these women came to the movement from different ideological positions, classes, ethnicities, and lifestyles. Some of them became friends. For others, the differences in opinion became too great. Inevitably, some ended up being disillusioned. Nonetheless, aspects of this movement remain to this day, albeit under different names.
The author came to this topic when she herself was struggling to balance her career as a professor with the demands of motherhood after her first child was born. She had the duties of both jobs plus housework, putting in 18-hour workdays. But she'd grown up at a time when the message to women was that their value should be measured by their career path and not by the work they did in the home. Callaci realized that to have a career, she must have childcare and that to pay for childcare, she must have a job that pays well enough for her to afford it. At the same time, she knows that the work she does is more respected and comes with higher pay than that of a child care worker. This led to her realization that, "motherhood had changed my relationship to capitalism" (p xii) because, "motherhood, the work I knew I could never refuse, made me vulnerable to exploitation." (p xii) She points out that Wages for Housework was a political movement that critiqued both women's oppression and capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, there were opposing views about whether wages for housework was a good idea. Some people didn't like the idea that well-off housewives would be getting paid for being housewives. The response to that was to emphasize that it was wages for housework, not wages for housewives. In reality, very few of the members were housewives. Another criticism, which to me carries more weight, was the question of whether or not women really wanted the government to have so much control over women's lives--if they were paying the wage, women would potentially have to answer for their activities and could not refuse to do the work. Given the increasing surveillance women are subject to in many places today, this seems like a valid concern. On the other hand, those who were on board with the movement argued that in a capitalist system, workers are the most important commodity and women giving birth to and raising new generations of workers are contributing to society and should be paid for their labor.
It's a fascinating argument and Callaci does a fine job of not only telling the story of the movement--the good, the bad, and the ugly--but also some of the stories about these women's lives. It's a great way to structure the book because we don't get a dry academic discussion on a theoretical level. The ideas and theories are there, but illustrated in an engaging way through the women themselves. There was much food for thought contained in this book and if you're at all interested in feminism (particularly Marxist feminism), women's history, women's activism, and/or oral history, then I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. I loved it.
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for a DRC.
The author came to this topic when she herself was struggling to balance her career as a professor with the demands of motherhood after her first child was born. She had the duties of both jobs plus housework, putting in 18-hour workdays. But she'd grown up at a time when the message to women was that their value should be measured by their career path and not by the work they did in the home. Callaci realized that to have a career, she must have childcare and that to pay for childcare, she must have a job that pays well enough for her to afford it. At the same time, she knows that the work she does is more respected and comes with higher pay than that of a child care worker. This led to her realization that, "motherhood had changed my relationship to capitalism" (p xii) because, "motherhood, the work I knew I could never refuse, made me vulnerable to exploitation." (p xii) She points out that Wages for Housework was a political movement that critiqued both women's oppression and capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, there were opposing views about whether wages for housework was a good idea. Some people didn't like the idea that well-off housewives would be getting paid for being housewives. The response to that was to emphasize that it was wages for housework, not wages for housewives. In reality, very few of the members were housewives. Another criticism, which to me carries more weight, was the question of whether or not women really wanted the government to have so much control over women's lives--if they were paying the wage, women would potentially have to answer for their activities and could not refuse to do the work. Given the increasing surveillance women are subject to in many places today, this seems like a valid concern. On the other hand, those who were on board with the movement argued that in a capitalist system, workers are the most important commodity and women giving birth to and raising new generations of workers are contributing to society and should be paid for their labor.
It's a fascinating argument and Callaci does a fine job of not only telling the story of the movement--the good, the bad, and the ugly--but also some of the stories about these women's lives. It's a great way to structure the book because we don't get a dry academic discussion on a theoretical level. The ideas and theories are there, but illustrated in an engaging way through the women themselves. There was much food for thought contained in this book and if you're at all interested in feminism (particularly Marxist feminism), women's history, women's activism, and/or oral history, then I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. I loved it.
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for a DRC.
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