Many of us spend an enormous amount of time at home. Remote work persists, despite the return-to-office push. Some of us are full-time parents and caregivers, even homeschoolers. For others, home can be a place of unimaginable cosseting, with or without TikTok videography. No matter its nature, home remains central to our lives. But how do we characterize what goes on there? Is the home a refuge from the ravages of capitalism or a center of its maintenance? How do those who do the physical and emotional work of the home—still largely women—experience it, and what do they deserve in return?
Studies of housework tend to stay within narrow disciplinary furrows, focusing on either the economic or the affective, the exploitative or the gratifying. Yet in many years of teaching, I’ve found students quite sensitive to the complexities of housework and the surround-sound approach necessary for understanding it. When asked if the large, luminous female figure at the center of François Bonvin’s 1858 oil painting Woman Ironing (see illustration on page 36) was being exploited, they routinely generated a research agenda that academics have yet to undertake. In a recent class, for example, the mostly female undergraduates led off with speculations about the social relations in which the work was embedded, though they didn’t put it that way. Whose shirt was it? they wanted to know. A lover’s? An abusive husband’s? Or perhaps the shirt of a generous neighbor who left some eggs or fixed a chair? The garments hanging just beyond the woman’s reach prompted them to wonder how much ironing she faced every day. Was there time left to care for herself and others? Was she rewarded fairly?
No one thought her a domestic slave, as Lenin once described housewives. Most assumed she was a servant—though the vase of red flowers gave them pause. Only a few guessed that she might be the painter’s wife. (Elisabeth Dios, Bonvin’s first wife, worked as a laundress to boost their meager household income.) Still, housework was work, the class agreed, and doing it could elicit an unsettling mix of feelings: exhaustion, pride, boredom, pleasure, fury.
I can imagine them eagerly puzzling over the depictions of housewives and housework from Wages for Housework, the Marxist feminist movement launched in 1972 to win recognition and income for unpaid domestic work and caregiving in the home—and in so doing, to undermine capitalism. Yet until recently the movement’s ideas were not apt to be taught, and its radical strategies for transformative change in how we live and what we value have been largely overlooked. Emily Callaci has now rendered these paradoxical and polarizing views in all their daring originality and prescience. A social as well as intellectual history, Wages for Housework is, as the book’s UK subtitle puts it, “the story of a movement, an idea, a promise.”
Callaci’s timing is impeccable. Her recovery of the movement and its bold challenge to injustice lands at a moment of unparalleled assault on state social services, clamor for women to return to their supposedly God-decreed role of mother and homemaker, and reassertion of control over women’s bodies (including pregnancy and childbirth)—all in the midst of staggering inequalities of wealth and income. Wages for Housework may not have had the intellectual and policy impact that Callaci attributes to it during its 1970s heyday, when it agitated on multiple continents for revolutionary change. Nor were these activists primarily responsible for the (partial) successes of the long feminist battle, which picked up speed later, to include women’s unpaid work in economic theory, count it in official government data, and accommodate it in public programs funding childcare and parental leave. Nonetheless, after a lull of some fifty years, the Wages for Housework anticapitalist “perspective” (a word repeatedly used by its founders) has come roaring back. Indeed the movement may end up having a greater catalyzing effect on its twenty-first-century children and grandchildren than it had on earlier generations.
As interest in all things Marxist and materialist resurfaced after the financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession, the Marxist feminism of Wages for Housework found an energetic new audience. Kathi Weeks’s appreciative reading of the cause in her 2011 academic best seller, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, was a sign of what was to come. Beginning in 2012, the three principal architects of Wages for Housework—Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici—published new writings from PM Press in the United States, an independent publisher of radical texts. Media appearances, interviews, and books followed, including, in 2017, Federici and Arlen Austin’s edited collection of documents from the New York Committee of Wages for Housework and, in 2018, an English-language translation of the French Canadian Louise Toupin’s Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77, the first book-length history of the movement.1
In 2025 so far we have at least three new offerings. A small Toronto press, Between the Lines, reprinted Toupin’s interviews with Federici and Dalla Costa in a slim chapbook, The Crisis of Social Reproduction. Verso brought out a new edition of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital, first published in Italian in 1981, by the Wages for Housework theorist Leopoldina Fortunati.2 Now we have Callaci’s volume, wrapped in a pulsating pink-and-velvet-purple cover, packaged for a broad readership.
The anticapitalist vision of Wages for Housework, with its focus on the most oppressed—from the unwaged working-class housewife to the wageless poor more generally—as the revolutionary subject, resonates with a sizable swath of the left. Marxism’s traditional obeisance to the brawny male wage-earning factory worker makes little sense in the twenty-first century, especially to young progressives who are no longer inclined to follow the lead of the industrial proletariat. After all, even in places where waged employment was once the primary way to make money, self-employment, gig work, and cash-economy jobs are on the rise. Jobs providing services outnumber those producing goods. And while labor force statistics notoriously fail to convey fully who works and where, it is still worth noting that female labor force participation rates hover just under 50 percent worldwide. Wages for Housework insisted on recognizing a big-tent working class—all who work, with or without wages—and foregrounded the leadership of those at the bottom, struggling against exploitations of gender, race, and geography as well as class.
The feminist politics of Wages for Housework is similarly of the moment. The liberal feminist romance with careers broke apart on the shoals of a double day filled with time-consuming, unedifying corporate work and taken-for-granted work in the home. Wages for Housework predicted the hollowness of that “liberation” and the collapse of girlboss career feminism, even as it warned about the illusion of fulfillment in the traditional role of the housewife and the difficulties of love and good sex in a world obsessed with moneymaking and dominance. The Brooklyn-based, Italian-born writer, teacher, and philosopher Silvia Federici, one of the most charismatic and quotable of the five founders Callaci profiles, put it this way in the opening to her 1975 manifesto, Wages Against Housework: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.” (Although Callaci does not include it, Federici continued with “They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.”)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
François Bonvin: Woman Ironing, 1858
Callaci writes with zest and assurance, and her saga of the movement and the women who made it is absorbing. Mariarosa Dalla Costa leaps out as the igniting firebrand of the rebellion. A veteran of the operaismo (“workerist”) left in Italy, she was one of the few women faculty at the University of Padua in the 1970s. Furious at the left’s inattention to women’s needs and talents, Dalla Costa helped start a women’s group in 1971, Lotta Femminile (later changed to Lotta Femminista, or Women’s Struggle), to press for a “post-capitalist neighborhood,” with cooperative childcare, free housing, communal kitchens, and state payments to everyone, men or women, who performed housework. That same year Dalla Costa unfurled her own version of radical Marxism in a searing indictment of capitalism and patriarchy, “Women and the Subversion of the Community.” Published in Italian in March 1972, the piece appeared in a similarly titled volume alongside a 1953 article by Selma James, “A Woman’s Place,” and a call for reproductive rights by Lotta Femminista. A few months later a group including James, Federici, and Dalla Costa gathered in Padua and declared themselves the International Feminist Collective, setting in motion the collaboration that became Wages for Housework.
In her seminal essay, Dalla Costa, like others on the operaismo left, judged the Italian Communist Party and its union allies as hopelessly reformist. These older institutions, she argued, failed workers by backing the capitalist regime of overwork, worshiping rising productivity and output, and clinging to the belief that negotiating with employers or the state advanced the revolution. Operaismo counseled workers to “self-organize,” refuse to work, and bring the system to a thunderous halt. Yet Dalla Costa went further. In a break with her male comrades, she insisted on the centrality of the proletarian housewife to the class struggle. Working-class women’s unpaid housework made capitalist exploitation possible, she declared. As long as housewives worked without monetary compensation and their labor remained invisible, capital bought the “labor power” of waged workers for less—unpaid housework was a subsidy to employers that allowed them to lower wages and reap higher profits. The wage system also confirmed “the myth of female incapacity” and inhibited working-class insurgency by pitting the unwaged and waged against each other.
Dalla Costa did not use the phrase “wages for housework”—that would come later—but she called on women to “smash the entire role of housewife” and refuse “housework as women’s work, as work imposed upon us, which we didn’t invent, which has never been paid for.” She saw “the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family” as “crucial” because “like the trade union, the family protects the worker, while ensuring that he or she will never be anything but a worker.”
An extraordinary passage of the essay left unexplored by Callaci argues that capitalism reduces sex between men and women to a reproduction of labor power—what Dalla Costa labeled the “capitalist function of the uterus”—and makes it “impossible for men and women to be in touch with each other.” In a swipe at both mainstream feminism and the radical left, she skewered the idea that outside jobs were any kind of solution for women: “Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.” Women must break “the tradition of the privatized female” and “leave the home for the struggle against capitalism.”
Men on the Italian left were outraged by Dalla Costa and her circle of Marxist feminists. When Lotta Femminista organized an all-woman conference in July 1972, L’Espresso reported that an unruly group of young men, including “some bold extra-parliamentary leftists,” went after them, breaking windows and throwing chairs, punches, and “condoms filled with water.” Such attacks seemed only to spur the movement forward. Italian women were tired of concocting elaborate meals and fighting the Catholic Church and men for control over their bodies and their children. They responded to the movement’s call for shorter hours and more money, its affirmation of their right to say no, and its valorization of their work and capacity for leadership.
Starting in 1974, women in Mestre, Milan, Naples, and other Italian cities organized Wages for Housework committees to fight for abortion rights, free day care, community laundries and health centers, a more equal distribution of housework, and women’s right to “their own money and their own time.” They rallied to Dalla Costa’s call on International Women’s Day for all women to express their collective power in a general strike. They read the Padua committee’s magazine, Le operaie della casa (the workers of the house), and cheered its stories of like-minded women’s groups springing up in Germany, Iceland, Canada, and elsewhere.
Not all those inspired by the creative militants of Padua adopted their revolutionary anticapitalist politics, but Lotta Femminista’s startling break with ways of being and inherited thought emboldened women to proclaim their worth and demand fundamental change. Callaci captures the intensity of these years, the sense of a world upended, of endless possibility. She also conveys the movement’s geographic reach, the centrality of female friendships to its birth and evolution, and the diversity of opinion among its leaders.
The story of Wages for Housework in New York City unfolds in three chapters. One chronicles the group of social workers and neighborhood activists, including Federici, who in 1973 formed the New York Wages for Housework Committee to fight for income and housing for poor families. The other two chapters feature the former Black Panther and San Francisco State professor Wilmette Brown and the Barbados-born community activist Margaret Prescod, who met in the 1970s in Queens while organizing mothers on welfare denied student tuition assistance at the City University of New York. After a brief stint on the majority-white committee, Brown and Prescod set up their own group, Black Women for Wages for Housework, which sought to realize “a world beyond racial capitalism.”
Brown, Callaci observes, also took inspiration from the Toronto-based Wages Due Lesbians, a collective that found in Wages for Housework “an argument for financial autonomy and freedom from compulsory heterosexuality.” By 1976 Brown was speaking about the radical potential of Black lesbians and the need for alliances between poor mothers and gay women, two groups denied family benefits and child custody by a hostile state. The international policy ambitions of the movement emerge most fully in Callaci’s portrait of Prescod, who, after taking Wages for Housework to the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, traveled to the United Nations World Conferences on Women in Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in 1995 to press for women’s unpaid work to be counted and compensated.
The formidable Selma James, the mainstay of the UK-based contingent, commands center stage early on in Callaci’s tale and never really relinquishes it. James, now in her nineties, remains a militant international activist, brilliant speaker and strategist, and rousing polemicist. The oldest of the founding mothers, she grew up in 1930s Brooklyn in a working-class immigrant Jewish family where the adults, Callaci writes, “studied and debated politics and history with passion and urgency.” After finishing high school, James decided against college and moved to Los Angeles to join the revolutionary left. The group she chose aligned with the Trotskyist-oriented Johnson–Forest Tendency, headed by the charismatic Trinidadian political theorist and writer C.L.R. James, then living in the United States. Although James bristles when Callaci calls her an intellectual, she read voraciously as part of her activist upbringing and (encouraged by C.L.R., whom she eventually followed to Great Britain and married in 1956) found a singular speaking and writing voice. As she explains in a 2001 talk on her husband’s political legacy, available in her collection Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, the Johnson–Forest group believed in a vanguard “third layer” of the most marginalized, whose talents must be encouraged and who must learn, despite ridicule and rebuttal, to stand up to the more “‘educated’ or…socially powerful.”
James learned her lessons well. In Trinidad, where she and C.L.R. lived from 1958 to 1962, she devoted herself to “building a postcolonial future” and raising her son from an earlier marriage. Once back in London she joined the fight against British racism and imperialism as a fiery full-time agitator. James had championed the radical potential of working-class women, particularly housewives, from her first published writings in the early 1950s. In 1972 she included “we demand wages for housework” among a long list of revolutionary necessities in a blistering feminist takedown of the limited politics of British trade unions, Women, the Unions and Work, or What Is Not To Be Done. Against vehement opposition, she relentlessly pushed the UK women’s liberation movement to prioritize the struggles of the unwaged and most exploited. In the 1980s, staring down right-wing intimidation and threats, she campaigned against police brutality in Black neighborhoods, organized alongside mothers demanding housing and basic income, and protested the criminalization and harassment of sex workers.
As gifted as Callaci is in dramatizing the movement and its ideas, nothing really substitutes for the shock and pleasure of reading the writings of the women themselves. Federici, as noted, is especially rewarding: pithy, wide-ranging, generous. Revolution at Point Zero, a selection of her essays from 1975 to 2016 in the 2020 updated and expanded PM Press edition, is a good place to begin. She savors her time with Wages for Housework in the 1970s campaigns but has moved on. Given the “immense expansion of the world labor market” with its “multiple forms of expropriation,” Federici declares, it is “impossible for me to still write (as I had done in the early 1970s) that [Wages for Housework] is the strategy not only for the feminist movement ‘but for the entire working class.’”
Federici continues to view Marx as essential for understanding contemporary capitalism yet stresses the need to go beyond him, pointing to his incomplete understanding of family and gender relations and marginalization of the experiences of the wageless. She also remains impatient with those who lose themselves in exegesis and dueling Marxist texts.
“The main disagreement about the history of Wages for Housework,” Callaci writes in the book’s introduction, concerns the movement’s internal struggles in the late 1970s. Instead of offering an opinion on these splits, she decided to let “contradictory accounts exist side by side” and “sit with the messiness.” I initially appreciated the messiness, but by the end of the book I longed for someone to come in and tidy up. Callaci’s rich saga, based on investigative treks to archives on multiple continents and hours of interviews and online research, calls out for more evaluation. Why did the Wages for Housework campaign, “despite its influence,” remain so “small, with never more than a few dozen members”? Where did this single-minded effort—one Callaci concedes was “seen by many as quirky, even cultish”—go wrong? Or did it? What do we learn from the brief blazing of this international network about building sustainable democratic resistance? Callaci is long on narrative and short on social theory.
I longed for more background, too. Without a better sense of the other women’s movements of the 1970s or the long, robust history of the “feminist fight against unpaid labor,” Callaci misleads at points, positioning Wages for Housework as more pathbreaking than it was. Debates over housework and the family were everywhere in the feminist upsurge of the 1970s. Influential “second wave” texts—from Pat Mainardi’s “The Politics of Housework” (1970) to Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) to Heidi Hartmann’s “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” (1979)—held women’s relegation to the domestic sphere and their coerced performance of sex, mothering, and housework as primary drivers of female oppression. Canada’s Margaret Benston, less prominent and regrettably passed over by Callaci, sparked what came to be known in 1970s academic circles as the “domestic labor debates” with her 1969 essay “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” which identified housework as the neglected material basis of capitalism. And as Kirsten Swinth details in Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family (2018), many feminists, from mainstream liberals to radical liberationists, proposed schemes for calculating the dollar value of mothering and housework and for paying those doing it.
Wages for Housework wasn’t the first or the most successful of the women’s movements fighting for state income for the work of the home. Callaci offers Eleanor Rathbone, the UK interwar advocate of state family allowances, as a pioneering foremother rediscovered by Wages for Housework. But agitation for recognition and income for mothers and other homemakers dates back to the nineteenth century and sweeps forward into the 1970s and beyond. Indeed the majority wing of women’s movements in the US, Europe, and elsewhere in the first half of the twentieth century prioritized and won child allowances, paid maternity leave, and other forms of state aid for mothers and families.3 The battle is not over, as we know. The US is among the few nations in the world without guaranteed state payments for childbirth and child-rearing, and under the reign of MAGA, our global outlier status as a nation denying resources to mothers and children is not likely to change anytime soon.
Callaci personalizes her investigative journey by revealing her own housework dilemma: as a new mother (on leave from her faculty job) she feels overworked, trapped, resentful. How did this happen, she asks herself, and is there a way out? Did the women in the Wages for Housework poster hanging in her Wisconsin kitchen have an answer? These critical questions hover over the book, largely unresolved. When Selma James asks if she wants wages for housework for herself, Callaci remains ambivalent. She’s attracted to the movement in the abstract but has reservations about accepting wages for her housework. As she confesses, she doesn’t identify as a “housewife” and never has. She experiences caring for her two children as not merely exploitative but a jumble of love and work, freedom and coercion, and she believes being paid for it might reinforce money and productivity as measures of value. The reader is left to wonder what, then, is the “promise” of Wages for Housework.
Callaci alerts the reader to the controversial nature of the movement’s core tenets yet fails to engage in any systematic way with the critiques by prominent figures like Angela Davis—whose extensive commentary on what she called the “hopelessly flawed” theory and politics of Wages for Housework in Women, Race, and Class (1981) is not mentioned—or the British socialist and feminist Sheila Rowbotham, who, as Callaci summarizes, thought the demand for wages was “unrealistic as a strategy for fighting capitalism,” “shoved women back into the home,” and was “little more than a gimmick.” The axioms of Wages for Housework—the necessity of revolutionary class struggle, the capitalist “wage system” as the primary mechanism of women’s devaluation, the implacable hostility to mediating institutions like unions and the state—go unchallenged.
Before writing Wages for Housework, Callaci muses in the epilogue, she “felt more at ease in political conversations about ‘care,’ ‘radical care,’ ‘carework,’ and ‘ethics of care.’” But she has “come around to the old-fashioned ring of ‘housework.’” I was sorry to hear the choices posed that way. I can understand her attraction to the “materiality of ‘housework’” and the way the word, as she says, “strips away the aura of virtue from these labors.” And yes, “carework” is a problematic term because it tilts attention toward the emotional dimension of reproductive labor and away from the supposedly nonaffective physical activities—laundry, cleaning, meal production—often done by racial and ethnic minorities. Still, the “ethics of care” literature is more than an attempt to label mothering or ironing: it is a rich body of philosophical and political theory for imagining alternatives to capitalism. In the writings of care theorists like Eva Feder Kittay and Joan Tronto we find bracing calls to accept the universality of human dependency, to refuse the reduction of all things to units of exchange, and to practice a “politics of interdependence” and mutual care inside and outside the home.4
We need the wisdom of the Wages for Housework women: their plain-speaking, unremitting focus on exploitation, money, power, revolution, and capitalism. But we also need defenders of the care ethic and commonsense yet complex versions of housework generated by my students. As important as it is to recognize activity in the home as work, we drain the life from it if we see it only that way. Whose shirt is it? What is the woman ironing thinking?
Today’s virulent, predatory, profit-obsessed variety of capitalism, ascendant across much of the world, searches us out wherever we are, and like characters in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we press ourselves against the wall to avoid its glare. It is crucial for our sanity and survival that we acknowledge that the home and the family are resources as well as traps, spheres to seek as well as leave.
English (US) · 