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Emily Callaci is at home in Wisconsin, surrounded by the usual debris of family life. The bed behind her is unmade, she confesses, and there’s “a bunch of marbles and blocks on the floor” left by her sons, now seven and three. But on Zoom she has blurred her background so none of this is visible on screen, just as here, on the other side of the Atlantic, I’ve angled my laptop camera away from the mess on my kitchen worktop. We’ve both automatically hidden the domestic for the sake of looking professional, ironically given this interview is about making unseen, unpaid labour in the home visible.
Callaci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book, Wages for Housework, which chronicles the radical 1970s feminist campaign that argued for recognition of the economic value of domestic labour. In truth, she explains, it was a recipe for revolution, designed to smash capitalism and its underpinning myth that women just love keeping house so much they’ll do it for nothing.
Wages for Housework’s founders argued that when an employer hires a worker, they get the value not only of that person’s labour but that of the person at home enabling them to work in the first place by looking after the children and chores. No housework, no capitalism: yet, somehow, the housewife (and back then it invariably was a housewife) gets none of the profit. “The idea was that if you show how much capitalism relies on that work and then actually demand that it be compensated, you see that the system doesn’t work as it says it works,” says Callaci. “It’s supposed to be the most efficient way to organise an economy, but what’s hidden is how much work is extracted and exploited for free. The point is to expose that and bring it crashing down by putting a price on that work.”
In the book she profiles five of the movement’s stars: New Yorker Silvia Federici, a philosopher, who saw the nuclear family as a prison; Selma James, an American Marxist factory worker, who ran the movement’s British arm after her husband, CLR James, was expelled from the US under McCarthyism; Italian activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa; Wilmette Brown, a lesbian veteran of the Black power organisation the Black Panther party, who ran Black Women for Wages for Housework; and Barbados-born Margaret Prescod, who argued that American prosperity relied on black women’s unpaid labour.
From the start, there were differences of opinion about what exactly Wages for Housework meant.
For Federici – whose 1975 manifesto coined the phrase “They say it is love, we call it unwaged work” – it wasn’t literally about getting paid but about the revolutionary struggle. (Though she conceded the money might help women with no other means of earning, she argued that many had other options – including not having children, as she herself didn’t.) And if it wasn’t really about wages, before long it was only loosely about housework, with the definition expanding to include voluntary work or political organising, rent strikes (because homes were workplaces), surviving poverty or racism, and what might now be called “emotional labour”: essentially, anything women felt obliged to do unpaid.
It was when she had children, while working full-time, that Callaci began to take a professional interest in this dilemma. “I found myself working essentially 18-hour days, which seemed like a strange way to think about liberation. As feminists, I feel like we’ve gotten the message that the answer is to succeed at work, and of course I love my career. But that kind of exhaustion seemed to me not …” And we’re just discussing what exactly it’s not when, appropriately enough, she has to stop and take a phone call from her sons’ daycare centre. Anyway, she says, the well-meaning advice she received about time management for working mothers didn’t cut it. “I was hungry for more ambitious explanations about how we got here, why we live this way – even more than ideas about how we might do things differently.”
More unexpectedly, she found Federici’s manifesto resonated as a set text with her young university students. “A lot of students that I teach are responding to a society that really emphasises production and consumption, and just seeing what that’s done to the planet,” she says. But this generation, for whom home ownership and financial security feels out of reach even if they work hard, are also, she thinks, prioritising time with family and friends. “They’re questioning that kind of grind culture that tells us we need to be seen to be working all the time to justify our existence.”
Wages for Housework was, she says, similarly about clawing back time. Though James was more focused than Federici on putting cash in female pockets, she also favoured a 20-hour working week, and guaranteed income whether you were working or not – a forerunner of today’s campaign for universal basic income. Federici argued for government-funded daycare freeing mothers not to work but to do whatever they liked: making art, napping, seeing friends or having sex. (None of the five seems very interested in how any of this might be paid for, prompting some contemporary critics to see it as gimmicky, while others worried that linking wages to housework would trap women in the domestic sphere – though Federici saw making housework a paid job as a necessary prelude to quitting it.)
It was this idea of what Federici calls “joyful militancy”, or seeking to be happy rather than productive, that attracted Callaci as an exhausted new mother. “At the moment when I felt I most needed things like leisure, like exercise, like seeing my friends. I just couldn’t because I had too much work. And part of me feels like why do we expect that mothers are cut off from all those things that make life worth living? Why should women have to apologise for that, why should we have to say: ‘I need help so I can do my other job more efficiently’?”
She also liked the inclusivity of Wages for Housework, which recognised that for many working-class women, liberating careers were out of reach; they were doing low-paid, grinding work just to survive. The movement embraced sex workers, and “welfare mothers” protesting about being forced to take minimum-wage jobs, who argued that raising children was work enough. Initially it even tried to include men, arguing that this wasn’t a battle between the sexes but between workers and capitalism. James argued that men should also get wages for housework if they chose to do it; knowing they were no longer their family’s sole earner might give them confidence to stand up to their bosses without worrying about being sacked.
This cut little ice however with the British trade union movement of the 1970s, while in Italy Dalla Costa encountered fierce male hostility inside a leftist movement where women were expected to be happy printing off copies of pamphlets written by men.
The New York Wages for Housework committee, meanwhile, seemed to take a more confrontational approach. In her book Callaci quotes from its 1974 declaration, which she bought as a poster to hang at home: “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!” What leaps out is the phrase “indecent assault”, as if that were just part of the 70s housewife’s lot, along with scrubbing toilets, and something for which she should be compensated. The second line of Federici’s manifesto – “They call it frigidity; we call it absenteeism” – certainly suggests she saw marital sex as work, and consent as uncomfortably linked to financial dependency.
“One of the arguments Federici makes is that we think we know what it means to be liberated sexually, but how can we really know what that means if we are not financially autonomous, if we’re dependent on the men we’re sleeping with?” says Callaci.”
Perhaps the most radical thinker was Brown, who defined housework as anything involving repairing damage – environmental or more emotional – caused by capitalism. She opposed nuclear weapons on the grounds that they caused “nuclear housework” – such as having to look after people suffering from radiation sickness. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she described the endless medical appointments as “the housework of cancer”.
To Callaci, this is “really capacious, imaginative politics”. But, if practically everything is housework, does the word still mean anything? What about things that take work, but which we enjoy or find deeply rewarding? Seeing everything that humans do as a product of economic exploitation leaves little room for love, maternal or otherwise.
This is where she had misgivings. “For a while, my younger son wouldn’t fall asleep unless my hand was resting on his stomach, and I was like, ‘Is this work, or …?’ I understood that it was valuable; I guess I was glad I could do it even if it got very annoying sometimes. But did I want to call that work? I felt like I didn’t want to call everything in my life a commodity.” She notes that later in life, even Federici described caring for her ailing mother as a way of resisting capitalism, and not the exploitation her earlier writing might suggest.
If it could be contradictory at times, the movement had other tensions. Prescod and Brown have both since said they experienced racism within it, while Callaci’s research unearthed some Guardian reports of alleged bullying and supposedly cultish behaviour. Wages for Housework’s tendency to see everything through one lens could be irritating to other feminists (Federici even criticised US legislation banning sex discrimination at work, arguing that paid work was “liberation for nobody”). Eventually, after a series of personal fallings-out and tactical differences that may not surprise those familiar with revolutionary movements, the campaign splintered.
Half a century on, care did become paid work, but only when outsourced to others by mothers going out to conventional jobs. Callaci and her partner both work full-time and pay for childcare, but she writes that they are uncomfortably aware that this “exploitative social arrangement” adds up only because skilled childcare workers earn less than professors. It bothers her deeply that care is so undervalued, whereas “if you find a way to make me look at my phone for an extra one second and pause and click on an ad, you can make a fortune”.
Meanwhile the idea of getting paid to stay home has become a rightwing, rather than leftwing, cause – embraced by conservative politicians and “tradwife” influencers earning a living performing chores on Instagram.
“JD Vance made this case for child tax benefit to ‘bring back traditional gender roles, so women can stay in the home and raise children’, and it just infuriates me,” sighs Callaci. “I get frustrated that the Democrats couldn’t find a way to seize on that message in a way that was more liberating and supportive of women. Why does the right get to seize that territory?” Though she believes Wages for Housework influenced feminist thinking, she admits to feeling sad that it got nowhere in practice.
But researching it has, in some ways, changed her. “I feel much more confident in taking the time when I need it, like looking after my kid when he’s sick and not feeling guilty about doing that.” She is also, she thinks, more alert to invisible work everywhere, paid or unpaid: the unacknowledged cleaning, caring and collection of trash that makes the world go round. “It’s like you suddenly get X-ray glasses, or when you can see the electricity grid in a city and it’s like: ‘Oh that’s how everything works.’” After all, she says, we’re all products of such housework somehow. It’s just that some choose to see that, while others feel more comfortable if it’s blurred out.
Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci (Penguin, £25) is published on 13 February. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
