Wages for Housework

WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. Wages for Housework began as the International Wages for Housework Campaign, emerging in the 1970s as a distinct left tendency within the flourishing movement for women’s liberation. From its outset Wages for Housework was an international collaboration: the project took its first cues from the 1953 publication of Brooklyn-born Selma Deitsch’s essay, A Woman’s Place. By 1955 Selma Deitsch James was living in England and married to the influential West Indian socialist, C.L.R James.

As an organizer and journalist, Selma James reported conditions of women at work. She noted her own daily toils and observed wage workers on the job (productive labor, calculated at the workplace). She investigated the continuity, at home, of reproductive labor: the unreported, untimed and unwaged housework, so vitally necessary to the survival of working class families. By 1971 she was working with the Italian Marxist scholar/activist Mariarosa dalla Costa, whose solid and powerful article, “Women and the Subversion of [the] Community” was translated into English that year and presented at the third National Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester.

Dalla Costa wrote that women’s unreported and unpaid domestic work is “the central element of capital accumulation because it is the work that produces the workforce.” Unpaid domestic work thus “forms the uneven sexual division of labor and the material basis of sex discrimination under capitalism.” In 1972 dalla Costa and James co-authored their fiery and densely argued essay, The Power of women and the subversion of the community. In basing their arguments on material pressures in women’s lives they targeted the double duties of wage work and housework as the primary problem of capitalism; and they encouraged women of the working class to think anew and organize.

The nature of female oppression was a serious topic in feminist politics, and the “double day” duties of working-class housewives were central in James’ and Dalla Costa’s thinking. In 1974, just two years after the publication of James and Dalla Costa’s findings, the prominent US bank, Chase Manhattan, published its own report, “What’s a Wife Worth?” about the dollar value – approximately $13,500 – of the almost one hundred hours per week of labor that occupied the average housewife as she performed her household tasks.

Chase Manhattan’s calculations were formidable and useful, but James and Dalla Costa were already deep in revealing more than the raw math. Their analysis of uneven power balances between conventional productive labor and uncalculated reproductive labor became an inspiration to socialist-feminists and an offering to all working women. In many ways, including the controversies that followed, the focus on reproductive or household labor resembled the earlier works and tribulations of Mary Inman. Inman’s In Woman’s Defense (1940) led to her expulsion from the Communist Party. By the 1970s, Della Costa and James garnered the support Inman lacked, that of a vibrant, international feminist movement.

In 1972, at a feminist conference in Padua, Italy, James and Dalla Costa joined with the US-based Italian feminist academic Sylvia Federici to lay out new structures and goals for the Wages for Housework campaign of the International Feminist Collective. The campaign’s analytic and ambitious rhetoric offered left-minded feminists a new and powerful path towards creative organizing.

As comrades, Dalla Costa, Federici and James were constantly organizing and theorizing. They argued that all women are housewives and producers of surplus value; and they made speeches and developed analytic manifestoes to spread the word, from vibrant street actions to tightly developed speeches at movement or university conferences. Their key thesis was centered in the conventional heterosexual workplace of the household, where the woman takes on the necessary reproductive labor that keeps working-class wage earners fed, clothed, healthy and ready for another day of toil in the marketplace of capitalism. With their insights on the material burden of unpaid domestic labor and the consequences for women’s unique oppressions under capitalism, they inspired controversial essays and irresistible dialectical arguments that prompted a powerful following among feminist Marxists around the world.

As for women working for wages outside the home, typically they reproduced their “natural” nurturing roles as part of the kinds of jobs they were able to get, but their efforts to be hospitable were not reflected in their pay envelopes. The waitress who offered a menu and served a meal was expected to do so effortlessly, with the kind of caring smile that would add a “touch of home” to the male customer’s dining pleasure; tips were optional.

Wages for Housework activists criticized traditional Marxism for underrating women’s unpaid labor and the crucial advantages that the invisibility of that labor meant for capitalist production. The new movement likewise criticized liberal feminists’ advocacy of economic independence through a career and a paycheck. Wages for Housework counter-argued that the working-class woman is the “slave of the wage slave,” a woman who must support the struggle against more work, both on the job and in the home.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, feminist activists in Wages for Housework chapters developed strategic alliances with kindred movements in the USA and abroad. They forged connections with the welfare rights movement and the labor movement, and they supported campaigns for reproductive rights and resistance to forced sterilizations. Collaborative discussions among socialists and feminists developed broadly and closely via conferences, newsletters, music festivals and other communicative connections, from network TV to radio broadcasts. It continued in the 2000s with new media, Twitter, Facebook and other password-bound communities. These inexpensive, easily accessible close exchanges enabled links to vibrant dialogue, both theoretical and pragmatic, often originating and broadcasting beyond Western Europe and North America.

Other projects important to the campaign focused on the invisible labor of women in local and international sex industries. Wages for Housework advocates welcomed women sex workers to their meetings to open dialogues connecting pay for sex work with wages for housework. They focused on applying the same material issues – financial, legal and moral – that are common at all conventional workplaces under capitalism, from wage raises and safety to respectful behavior and regulation of working hours.

The Campaign for Wages for Housework grew internationally during the 1980s and 1990s. Women who came into the movement found a new understanding and critique of capitalist society and its mechanisms of exploitation, while they observed how Wages for Housework gave participants a more thorough comprehension and ownership of those mechanisms.

The Campaign for Wages for Housework touched the most personal aspects of women’s lives. At the same time, the rallies, writings and international conferences enabled activists to make their own connections and develop their own sense of solidarity. The insights of the founding organizers, Dalla Costa, Federici, and James, sparked exciting projects among working-class mothers, young students and veteran activists.

The movement maintained its own solidly left and international perspective. For example, Federici applied this analysis to the crisis in elder care in the twenty-first century: seniors were living longer, but elder care was not supported or socialized to meet this new global trend.

As feminist economists have argued, the crisis of elder care, whether considered from the viewpoint of the elders or their care providers, is essentially a gender question. Although increasingly commodified, most care work is still done by women and in the form of unpaid labor that does not entitle them to any pension. Thus, paradoxically, the more women care for others the less care they can receive in return, because they devote less time to waged labor than men and many social insurance plans are calculated on the years of waged labor done. Paid caregivers, too….are affected by the devaluation of reproductive work, forming an “underclass” that still must fight to be socially recognized as workers. Government austerity worsens this contradiction by cutting whatever Social Security income (or equivalent) seniors receive and by cutting the funding of care workers’ wages. The 2009 analysis of the global elder care crisis demonstrated that the 1970s body of theory on Wages for Housework was still relevant and valuable forty years later. The sexual division of labor in the home and its impact on women when they go out to work for wages remained a powerful force in world capitalism.

Dalla Costa, Mariarosa. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol, England: Falling Wall Press, 1973.

Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press, 2020.

Federici, Silvia, and Arlen Austin, eds. The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory and Documents. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2018.

James, Selma. Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning, A Selection of Writings 1952-2011. Oakland: PM Press 2012.