'We demand wages for housework'

“We demand a guaranteed income for women and for men, working or not working, married or not. If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. The ruling class has glorified motherhood only when there is a pay packet to support it. We work for the capitalist class. Let them pay us, or else we can go to the factories and offices and put our children in their fathers’ laps. Let’s see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. All housekeepers are entitled to wages. (Men too).”

- Selma James, 1970

Arguably, the defining characteristic of housework is that it is unpaid. On one level, that’s sort of obvious. Without an employer or a customer, who would be offering payment? If I make my husband dinner or change my daughter’s diaper, aren’t I simply “caring for my family”? I’m certainly not producing goods or services for an employer.

But if you poke at it just a bit, the unpaid-ness of this work starts to seem rather strange. In a world where there was no unpaid labor, who would feed the workers? Who would ensure they had clean clothes to wear to work? That they were nursed to health when they fell ill? Heck, in a world without unpaid labor, where would the workers come from in the first place?

Without the unpaid labor (mostly) women do in their homes and communities, the entire capitalist enterprise would quickly disintegrate. Workers need to be sustained, in body and soul, between employment shifts. New generations of workers need to be gestated, and birthed, and raised, to keep the economy going (and to maintain employers’ profits).

“Housework,” writes historian Emily Callaci in her new book Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor, “is the most essential part of the capitalist system because it produces and maintains the most important source of value: the worker.”1

When an employer hires an employee, they effectively freeload off the people in that person’s life who feed, clothe, shop for, and provide comfort to that employee.

When governments fail to provide critical social services or cut existing benefits, they freeload off the people who step up to provide childcare and eldercare, often for little to no pay. (For more on this, see my colleague Jess Calarco’s recent book.)

These were among the core premises of the (mostly) 1970s-era Wages for Housework movement. Before reading Callaci’s history of the campaign, I’d heard of WFH2 but had no idea how radical it was. Nor did I realize how small it was (Callaci estimates there were only a few dozen active campaigners at any given time), how short-lived (it fell apart by 1980 or so), or how fringe (contemporaneous mainstream feminists considered the WFHers a bit…out there).

The history of this movement is intrinsically fascinating, if somewhat depressing. But it has particular resonance in 2025, as we seem to be suffering from a malaise Anne Helen Petersen recently diagnosed as “feminist exhaustion,” as the Left endeavors to reinvent itself for the Trump era, and as Tradwives and momfluencers continue to dominate certain corners of the zeitgeist.

I’m still sorting out all my thoughts on how these pieces connect. And while this is meant to be a space capacious and informal enough for half-baked ideas, some of them are more like quarter-baked. So to buy myself some time, this will be a two-parter!

This week: what exactly was the Wages for Housework campaign?

Coming next week: why did WFH fall apart, and what might 2025-era feminists learn from its arc?

Callaci structures her book around the stories of five women who were leaders in the WFH movement and each contributed something intellectually distinct to the project: Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod.

Most of these women were lifelong activists. Several got their start in another movement before growing disillusioned with its limitations vis-à-vis feminist issues:

• James was a committed Socialist frustrated with the way that party leaders ignored the revolutionary potential of “housewives” in favor of mostly male factory workers.

• Dalla Costa came up in the Italian “operaismo” (i.e., workerism) movement, where she and her fellow women experienced rampant sexism from their supposed comrades.

• Brown was part of the Black Panthers but eventually came to feel they placed too much emphasis on Black masculinity and heterosexuality, leaving little to say about her life as a Black lesbian.

But nor were these women satisfied with the second-wave feminism in vogue around them, which centered the needs and interests of White, middle-class (would-be) career women.

They were critical of the Equal Rights Amendment, for instance, arguing in one WFH publication that “equal pay for equal work is the Man’s best cover for getting us all to work more, for next to nothing.” Employment, they argued, was not a particularly appealing prize for many poor and working-class women, who could look forward to, as Callaci puts it, “degrading jobs at poverty wages.” To the extent the movement had a central protagonist, she was “a poor Black welfare mother resisting the demand that she work a second job outside the home.”

In the familiar conflict between fighting for a place within the existing system and fighting to overturn that system, these women fell squarely on the side of revolution. Though wages for housework was the centerpiece of their campaign, they defined “housework” extremely broadly. Sex work was a form of housework, as was reproduction, as was working to mitigate environmental devastation and other harms generated by capitalism.

Alongside their demand for wages, the WFH campaigners sought to change women’s understanding of their labor and of how it fit into capitalism. They sought access to contraceptives and abortion. They campaigned against racism, against colonialism and its legacy, against nuclear weapons. Over the course of the 1970s, in the UK, US, and Italy, they formed committees and coalitions; put out pamphlets and posters; and campaigned at global summits.

Their goals were lofty but, as their critics were quick to point out, they were rather vague on the specifics.

Who exactly would pay these housework wages, and how, wasn’t clear. More fundamentally, was the call for wages a symbolic provocation—closer to thought experiment than policy proposal—or an actual attempt to get more money in women’s hands? Despite all her research, Callaci never got a clear answer, though she’s confident “the wage was never the end goal but rather the first step in a much larger struggle for power.”

Looking around the U.S. today, it’s clear that they didn’t manage to accomplish that “first step,” let alone go beyond it. We’re still fighting to get unpaid labor recognized in figures like the GDP, let alone financially compensated.

Indeed, by 1980, the movement qua movement had fallen apart. What went wrong? Some of its demise can be attributed to familiar problems: activist burnout, ideological differences among movement leaders. But some of its downfall is more specific to the challenges of organizing around unpaid labor - challenges that many of us are still wrestling with today.

More on this next week! In the meantime, I’m curious: Had you heard about the Wages for Housework movement? Does it strike you as pie-in-the-sky fantasy or inspiring vision for the future? Or perhaps a bit of both…