Between 1973 and 1975, three female artists undertook a survey of women’s labour at a metal-box-making factory in south London. More than 150 women took part, and the artists shared their findings through Super 8 films, audio recordings, photographs and written records, some of which were exhibited at Tate Britain’s “Women in Revolt!” exhibition last year. In a show inspired by women’s work, it was the breakdown of factory workers’ daily routines that stayed with me. Forty-year-old Jean Alexander, mother of two, began her day at 5.30am and went to bed at 11.30pm. Around her eight hours of factory work, she cooked, ironed, washed up and put her daughter to bed.
Also in the show was paraphernalia from the Wages for Housework campaign, an international feminist movement of the Seventies that aimed to make women’s domestic labour visible and – crucially – financially recompensed. Had the pleas of activists such as Selma James (a teenage mother from Brooklyn who became the wife of the writer CLR James) and the Italian scholar Mariarosa Dalla Costa been met, Jean Alexander would have been paid for her double shift. Paid so well, it was argued, that she might never have had to make metal boxes at all, but instead could pursue creative endeavours, take a nap or maybe even an afternoon lover.
In Wages for Housework, the American historian Emily Callaci admits that the titular movement is a curious relic of second-wave feminism. Its proponents were “seen by many as quirky, even cultish”; in 1975 the Guardian compared them to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Dale Wakefield, the lesbian activist who launched the LGBTQ phoneline Gay Switchboard, decried the Wages for Housework lot as bores who “utterly destroyed” places of fun and safety for lesbians with all their talk of overturning capitalism. Even at its peak, Callaci writes that the campaign “never [had] more than a few dozen members”. Evidently, it never succeeded: a study released in December last year showed that women take on an average 79 per cent of household chores – without a penny of remuneration.
And yet, what the movement asked for remains alluring: the notion of cold, hard cash for the domestic drudgery that, so often silently, falls on women in heteronormative relationships, especially in households with children.
Callaci was a new working mother when she felt drawn to research the movement: “I wanted to understand how motherhood had changed my relationship to capitalism,” she writes. Like Jean Alexander, she was working 18-hour days when she returned to work as an academic four months after the birth of her first son; she would finish the book as her second child turned three. “For most of my life, I did not think very much about housework,” Callaci explains, “but when I became a mother, housework became inescapable.” Her situation will be familiar to many women grappling with the modern feminist impossibility of trying to raise children while maintaining an often-equal financial contribution to the household. “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.”
So, then, to the Wages for Housework campaign. Callaci has attempted to narrate the development of a decade-long, continents-spanning anti-capitalist movement through five of its creators: James and Dalla Costa; Silvia Federici, who in 1975 wrote the movement’s still-resonant catchphrase: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”; Wilmette Brown, a former Black Panther; and Margaret Prescod, who together founded the New York branch of Wages for Housework. Callaci’s book, then, is as much a group biography as it is a study of a political perspective.
The efforts of these five women are astonishing. James turned the lives of her Brooklyn neighbours into a pamphlet, A Woman’s Place,then, in London, cared for an ailing husband 30 years her senior while raising their son, worked in a radio factory and founded the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination – all before she was 40. Dalla Costa rose at 4am to hand out political flyers to factory employees, before embarking on a day of work as an academic, only to spend the evening making new flyers for the next day. She also helped to produce a utopian manifesto for a post-capitalist neighbourhood containing community nurseries and communal kitchens.
Federici also balanced academia with activism for the Women’s Bail Fund, editing a journal and founding the New York Wages for Housework Committee. Brown’s CV could fill a book by itself, but her activism led to the establishment of a school for ethnic studies at San Francisco State University; she was among the first hires in the new Department of Black Studies there. Prescod co-founded Black Women for Wages for Housework, organising conferences and reading groups while advocating for the lives of the dismissed: women of colour on welfare, drug users and sex workers.
These women bump into one another through their collective determination, sometimes vividly. In 1972, James and Dalla Costa had a working holiday on the Sicilian island of Stromboli, “several hours by ferry from the mainland and with no electricity, the two women talked, typed and cooked while working on the English version of their book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community”. Their relationship was tempestuous; just a year later, Dalla Costa wrote to James explaining that she felt “an obsessive attitude from you in judging my speaking, my expressing in every form”. It would end in 1978, when James would credit herself as the co-author of Dalla Costa’s essay.
However, these telling flashes of personality are rare in a book that sometimes feels swollen with fact. The Seventies were not short of political drama, but Callaci struggles to prioritise the narratives of her players over the turbulent times in which they were acting, and takes us into rabbitholes that have scant relevance to their activism.
While the book triumphs in upholding these women’s work, it does so while maintaining a notable distance from the reality that women are still working for free alongside their professional employment today. Callaci “spent what are likely my most intensive years of housework immersed in the radical feminist tradition of Wages for Housework”, and her book feels most relevant when she lets us in to that juggle: explaining that she had to arrange her meetings with Selma James in London around breastfeeding her son, or the crushing disappointment of arranging ten days of childcare to visit an Italian archive to listen to an obscure recording of Dalla Costa, only to learn that she had been spoken over by a male comrade for most of it.
I wanted to know why the Wages for Housework movement failed, but Callaci puts greater emphasis on its creation, with a few sentences plus a short, late chapter dedicated to activist fatigue and shifts in political perspective. But if her bookshows us anything it is how broadly the concept was applied, a catchy slogan that was attached by Callaci’s characters to causes as varying as cancer victims and war children, and from middle-class housewives to black mothers on welfare. Wages for Housework was compared to reparations for slavery by some of its proponents and child benefit by others. Callaci points out that the movement knew what it was fighting against, but it didn’t know what it was for: “What was missing,” Dalla Costa wrote, “was something capable of moving me in a positive way, of inspiring a strong imagination.”
Perhaps the most potent part of the book is its epilogue, in which Callaci contextualises the movement in terms of the pandemic, its aftermath and the climate crisis. It is this analysis – from the perspective of women’s work today – that I longed for in other parts of the book. She suffers sleepless nights comforting her son while wildfires rage, and wonders “if his little body was an early warning of what is to come… if this was a glimpse of what the unpaid work of capitalism will look like for his generation”. Wages for Housework made me realise how far we have come regarding the division of household labour, and how far we still have to go. A future where women’s mental, emotional and physical work is acknowledged feels possible; one in which we are paid fairly for it, less so.
Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise
Emily Callaci
Allen Lane, 288pp, £25
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[See also: The woman who made the rape kit]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out