Latest news with #WagesforHousework
Time Magazine
10-06-2025
- General
- Time Magazine
Adam Smith, The Inventor of Capitalism Lived With His Mother. Here's Why That Matters
The man largely credited with inventing marketplace capitalism, Adam Smith, lived at home with his mother. While he wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, she cooked and cleaned for him. This juicy morsel of history makes for such perfect satire, I can hardly stand it. How magnificent that the person responsible for defining what capitalism needed in order to function had unpaid help at home making his paid work possible! Notably, the necessity and value of domestic labor was absent from his reflections on men acting in their own self-interest. These were the real 'invisible hands' in Smith's accounting of the market, and their conspicuous exclusion is hardly surprising. It was a foregone conclusion that a woman's biologically predetermined role was to be the de facto caretaker of society. In the United States in 2025, not much has changed. Women are still more likely than men in heterosexual couples to do the work that never ends—the work that must be re-completed every single day, as Silvia Federici writes, a feminist who founded the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. A 2021 profile of Federici summarized the message of her life's work: Unpaid domestic work is a form of gendered economic oppression, and in some ways, the core exploitation upon which all of modern capitalism is built. In her 1975 book Wages Against Housework, Federici wrote, 'We have cooked, smiled, f-cked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice . . . we want to call work what is work, so that eventually we might rediscover what is love.' She rejected the idea that a 'labor of love' existed, or that any person in society was preordained to be more naturally subservient. For all our progress, women continue to consistently shoulder more than their fair share of the load. An aggregation of years of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Time Use Studies found that when both parents work for pay (whether part-time or full-time), the average employed man spends fifty-seven more minutes per day doing paid work than the average employed woman—but the average employed woman performs about one hour and ten minutes more unpaid household and caretaking labor per day. If you want to know why a woman might be spending less time and energy doing paid labor, the answer is: She's doing unpaid labor. As one way to measure the financial consequences of these differences, consider that women today retire with approximately 22% less Social Security income than their male counterparts, and about 57% as much retirement income overall. Worse yet, going years (or even decades) without any 'real' work while you're taking care of family members translates to zeroes in the Social Security work records, which means forfeiting access to Social Security payments of your own. Approximately one in five divorced women ends up in poverty, a rate 56% higher than that of divorced men. Sixty-one percent of women report that they left paid work for 'family responsibilities,' compared to 37% of men. These statistical disparities are often painted as gendered inevitabilities. When cultural attitudes dictate that women are society's 'natural' primary caregivers, not only is their paid labor valued less, but the attitude directly enables a complete dearth of support for families from the government—why do you need childcare or paid family leave if a woman's natural role is 'full-time mother'? As such, the universal logistical and financial burden of childcare falls on individual parents, with the lower-earning partner, often the mother, more likely to downshift their career to accommodate their family's needs, thereby all but guaranteeing a lifetime of financial disparity. Navigating our current paradigm requires a huge expense and serious sacrifice, and the majority of U.S. households find life without two incomes to be too precarious. Seventy percent of families are dual income, meaning both adults work for pay and need assistance from someone else to care for other family members while they not just that more families have two earners now: Of these dual-income households, women earn as much or more than men in 55% of them. Despite women's workplace gains, Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin found in her research that one adult often leans into their career and keeps the 'greedy' job, as she calls it, which may be more demanding and higher-paying. The other adult typically downshifts, and while they may stay employed in some capacity, they tend to be the one who's on call to leave work to pick up a sick kid from school, take care of the laundry duty, coordinate the goodie bags for the class party, and—ultimately—defer the type of paid work that would lead to the accumulation of resources. Goldin theorizes this is the primary reason the wage gap widens as women age and their familial responsibilities increase; that it's the reason why more men end up in leadership positions, and why men are far more likely to earn the high incomes necessary to build wealth be high earners than women. Being financially prepared for these circumstances can provide more optionality when you face them. There's a practical, mundane reason why many women in the U.S. today find themselves in a position where they must downshift or leave work altogether to raise children. It's as boring as it is disheartening: the absurdly high expense of childcare. Taking your unpaid domestic labor and transforming it into someone else's paid labor costs money, and many couples look at their respective salaries and choose to forfeit or deprioritize the lower paycheck so one parent can save the family the cost of care by performing it for free. (Some people prefer this arrangement and choose it regardless of the availability of another choice. Others feel it's their only rational choice.) This state of affairs disadvantages women across the socioeconomic spectrum—it's not just those who must find space in their budgets to pay for care work, but those providing it. Right now, this work is almost always low-wage, which means these jobs are often worked by women, too: 94% of childcare workers and 97% of prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers are women. Black and Latina women are disproportionately represented in this group, comprising shares of the early childcare sector that are nearly twice as high as their shares in the overall workforce. This work is undeniably valuable—but it's not currently valued, and it won't be until we begin paying fair wages for the labor that allows the rest of society to function. Understanding how to save and pay for childcare before you ever need it such that you're not automatically and singularly faced with this career-versus-family dichotomy is just about the only practical option families have to prevent women from being sidelined in the workforce as a gendered default. The U.S. leaves families with few other 'choices' if they want to have kids, which is why the conversation about a mother's 'choice' to stay home often rings so hollow: How can one make fully autonomous choices in a system that structurally incentivizes one path over another?This is not a discussion about our choices. It's an examination of which real options are available to us in the first place. Our true goal is not a superficial 'choice,' but liberation from the systems that limit which paths we feel we can choose. In the meantime, in America's version of Adam Smith's capitalism, diligently saving ahead of time is the best choice we have.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The World That ‘Wages for Housework' Wanted
In the United States, as in many nations around the world, people are having fewer children. According to the CDC, the country's birth rate is at a record low, a trend that may eventually threaten tax bases and strain social services as the population ages and the workforce shrinks. But some who are concerned with this trend line see the problem less in practical than in spiritual terms. Among right-wing 'pronatalists' who view having children as a moral good, the declining birth rate betrays a growing reluctance on the part of American women to have babies in traditional family structures. President Donald Trump has responded to this anxiety by promising a 'baby boom.' To that end, Republicans have proposed putting $1,000 in a 'Trump account' for all newborns; the White House has also been considering an array of proposals that include giving mothers $5,000 for each birth, as well as awarding a medal to those with six or more. (As Mother Jones has noted, Stalin and Hitler handed out similar awards.) A goal for this ascendant strain of pronatalism is, as CNN recently put it, to 'glorify motherhood.' Of course, a medal is meaningless, and $5,000 is at best a few months of help, relative to the economic factors—a nationwide housing crisis, wildly expensive child care, debt—that cause many Americans not to have children or to have fewer than they might like. Glorifying motherhood, meanwhile, in practical terms, may only make mothers' daily lives worse. Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, has found that contemporary birth rates are declining fastest in highly developed, patriarchal countries—places where women can have any career they like but where it's assumed that they will do the bulk of child-care and household labor, such that motherhood and a fulfilling work life become incompatible. This is somewhat the case in the U.S.; a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center showed that though husbands and wives earn roughly equally in a growing share of heterosexual marriages, women in these households still spend more time on child care and chores. Encouraging childbearing by attaching prestige to motherhood without material support would surely make this disparity worse. But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn't have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement's most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn't consign them to a life without anything else. Not even at the height of the Wages for Housework campaign was it mainstream, and, as can happen on the left, it suffered from a utopianism that kept it from achieving tangible victories, as the University of Wisconsin historian Emily Callaci shows in her new survey of the movement, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor. But the campaign's ideas are worth another look. Wages for Housework was, in a sense, the opposite of $5,000 and a medal: Its activists dreamed of a society that would give women the economic freedom to do and be anything they wanted, not one that would narrowly incentivize motherhood. Callaci's deeply researched book is a compelling guide to the world the movement wanted. Callaci came to Wages for Housework through motherhood. After having children, she found that the dual demands of her professorship and her family life meant that she was doing some sort of task 18 hours a day. Caring for her sons was, she writes, 'work that I knew I could never refuse,' but so was her job. Having grown up with the girl-power feminism of the 1990s and joined the workforce in the 2010s (the era of the girlboss), she'd absorbed the lesson that professional success 'was the source of my liberation, autonomy, and sense of accomplishment.' Added to this tension was the day-care loop that many American parents of young children know well: Callaci and her husband '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.' This is unjust, Callaci argues, and also implicates parents in the devaluation of child care, which is their labor as well as that of their children's nannies or day-care providers. She wanted another way. In the contemporary United States, most families don't have one. But in the writings and archives of the Wages for Housework activists Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, Callaci found a pitch for a society in which care work isn't unpaid or poorly paid—because, without it, everything else falls apart. Callaci explains that Wages for Housework began with a question prompted by the Italian philosophy of operaismo, or 'workerism,' which wanted to change the workplace so that worker well-being was no longer a distant second to productivity. Dalla Costa, one of Wages for Housework's co-founders, was a militant operaista, but she was also a feminist, and she wanted to understand how operaismo was relevant beyond job sites full of men. Callaci writes that Dalla Costa started by asking, 'If factories were the places where exploitation happened, why didn't women who stayed at home feel free?' From there, she 'began to rethink the entire history of capitalism from the standpoint of the housewife.' [Read: The devaluation of care work is by design] Dalla Costa's questions led her to the idea that women who don't work outside the home produce 'the single most valuable thing, without which capitalism could not exist: labor power itself.' Mothers create workers, and especially in Italy in the '70s, mothers and wives more often than not fed those workers, clothed them, did their laundry, made the beds in which they slept at night. Dalla Costa shared her ideas with other feminists, including Selma James, who lived in London and had been married to the eminent cultural historian and Pan-Africanist C. L. R. James. Having grown up working-class in New York and come to politics partly through Black liberation, Selma James espoused a more inclusive and more intuitive feminism than that of many of her white, middle-class peers. She saw money for housewives as not just fair pay for labor but also a source of liberation from men. At the same time, she wanted the feminists she knew to identify themselves more closely with waged workers and their struggles, because, as Callaci puts it, 'women were working all the time, even if their work conditions varied.' When James added this concept to Dalla Costa's reframing of labor power, Wages for Housework was born. Dalla Costa and James spread their ideas from Europe to James's hometown of New York, where they caught on with a young Italian graduate student named Silvia Federici—perhaps the most well-known of the movement's members today. As more famous American feminists concentrated on the Equal Rights Amendment and on equity in white-collar workplaces—a focus on achievement outside the home that would later appear, in glossier form, as girlboss feminism—Federici and her Wages for Housework committee advocated instead to get cash to all women, but especially those not presently earning money for their labor. In their estimation, only economic power could lead to freedom. For instance, when various states began to recognize rape within marriage as a crime, Federici pointed out—though no legislators or more prominent feminists listened—that this recognition 'gives women the right not to be raped; but only money would give them the power to actually leave a violent relationship.' Federici's committee acknowledged that, in a sense, welfare served as the wage they wanted—but it was both restrictive and stigmatized. Margaret Prescod, who was part of Federici's committee before co-founding Black Women for Wages for Housework with Wilmette Brown, spearheaded the only material victory Callaci describes by standing up to one of welfare's constraints. She led an activist group at Queens College that, along with Black Women for Wages for Housework, got a bill passed in the state of New York that enabled welfare recipients, whom the local press described as 'savvy scammers,' to get educational grants and loans without having that money counted against their benefits. Prescod seems to have been Wages for Housework's most practical member by far. Brown, in contrast, was an expansive, systems-level thinker who saw housework as including the effort of repairing society's damage, mitigating the harm that racism or gentrification or environmental devastation have done. Dalla Costa, James, and Federici land somewhere between them, but none of the three ever seem to have lowered their gaze from the campaign's lofty overall agenda to smaller proposals for which they could have fought one by one. Callaci quotes the English feminist Lynne Segal, who wrote in her 2023 memoir that Wages for Housework's activists, when asked to consider issues less grand than or different from their own, gave responses that were 'vanguardist' and 'hectoring.' [Read: The pro-family policy this nation actually needs] As a result of this attraction to the revolutionary over the practical, the campaign alienated many women who found its aims simply implausible. Callaci interviewed Alisa del Re, a feminist operaista who, rather than joining Wages for Housework, campaigned for improved public schools and day cares—one of Wages for Housework's many stated goals, but not one that its members seem to have actively worked toward. When Callaci asked del Re why she'd made this choice, the latter said that she was a mother, and 'maybe it was not revolutionary, but I had to put the babies somewhere!' It is this point that many of today's pronatalist advocates seem not to get. When you have babies, you have to put them somewhere: in a home you can pay for, in a safe day care where they can learn. $5,000 per child cannot do that; a living wage for housework would. Even if the Wages for Housework campaign was too radical to make real headway toward the conditions its members wanted—too busy explaining the need for universal, free day care to help del Re get a place to 'put the babies'—its members undeniably understood the gravity of mothers' need. In Wages for Housework, Callaci argues convincingly that the campaign's comprehension of women's reality is important to keep in view today, when the horizons of what governments offer families are shrinking. Wages for Housework may not have been a practical movement, but a government that acted on its ideas of what wives and mothers need would be more likely to stimulate a baby boom than one offering a single check for each birth. But Callaci thinks the campaign's revolutionary tendency matters too. Researching the Wages for Housework campaign, she writes, awakened 'something in my imagination, connecting my daily efforts to lives and labors beyond the four walls of my house.' This sense of connection makes Wages for Housework a relevant rebuttal to those who would like women to devote themselves to having and raising children. Wages for Housework's activists, as Callaci shows, linked seemingly disparate lives and struggles, extending a fundamental empathy for anyone who is exploited or overworked and cannot live in the way they wish to. The campaign, which began with the premise that cleaning and cooking are labor at least as vital as assembling commodities on a factory line, ultimately wanted all women to have access to the lives they desired. For some women, that might mean being able to afford to have six children and stay home with them; for others, that might mean never marrying or reproducing, and devoting their lives entirely to art. I, for one, would like to live in a country where that vision has—or might yet—come to pass. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
23-05-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The World That ‘Wages for Housework' Wanted
In the United States, as in many nations around the world, people are having fewer children. According to the CDC, the country's birth rate is at a record low, a trend that may eventually threaten tax bases and strain social services as the population ages and the workforce shrinks. But some who are concerned with this trend line see the problem less in practical than in spiritual terms. Among right-wing 'pronatalists' who view having children as a moral good, the declining birth rate betrays a growing reluctance on the part of American women to have babies in traditional family structures. President Donald Trump has responded to this anxiety by promising a 'baby boom.' To that end, Republicans have proposed putting $1,000 in a 'Trump account' for all newborns; the White House has also been considering an array of proposals that include giving mothers $5,000 for each birth, as well as awarding a medal to those with six or more. (As Mother Jones has noted, Stalin and Hitler handed out similar awards.) A goal for this ascendant strain of pronatalism is, as CNN recently put it, to 'glorify motherhood.' Of course, a medal is meaningless, and $5,000 is at best a few months of help, relative to the economic factors—a nationwide housing crisis, wildly expensive child care, debt—that cause many Americans not to have children or to have fewer than they might like. Glorifying motherhood, meanwhile, in practical terms, may only make mothers' daily lives worse. Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, has found that contemporary birth rates are declining fastest in highly developed, patriarchal countries—places where women can have any career they like but where it's assumed that they will do the bulk of child-care and household labor, such that motherhood and a fulfilling work life become incompatible. This is somewhat the case in the U.S.; a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center showed that though husbands and wives earn roughly equally in a growing share of heterosexual marriages, women in these households still spend more time on child care and chores. Encouraging childbearing by attaching prestige to motherhood without material support would surely make this disparity worse. But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn't have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement's most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn't consign them to a life without anything else. Not even at the height of the Wages for Housework campaign was it mainstream, and, as can happen on the left, it suffered from a utopianism that kept it from achieving tangible victories, as the University of Wisconsin historian Emily Callaci shows in her new survey of the movement, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor. But the campaign's ideas are worth another look. Wages for Housework was, in a sense, the opposite of $5,000 and a medal: Its activists dreamed of a society that would give women the economic freedom to do and be anything they wanted, not one that would narrowly incentivize motherhood. Callaci's deeply researched book is a compelling guide to the world the movement wanted. Callaci came to Wages for Housework through motherhood. After having children, she found that the dual demands of her professorship and her family life meant that she was doing some sort of task 18 hours a day. Caring for her sons was, she writes, 'work that I knew I could never refuse,' but so was her job. Having grown up with the girl-power feminism of the 1990s and joined the workforce in the 2010s (the era of the girlboss), she'd absorbed the lesson that professional success 'was the source of my liberation, autonomy, and sense of accomplishment.' Added to this tension was the day-care loop that many American parents of young children know well: Callaci and her husband '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.' This is unjust, Callaci argues, and also implicates parents in the devaluation of child care, which is their labor as well as that of their children's nannies or day-care providers. She wanted another way. In the contemporary United States, most families don't have one. But in the writings and archives of the Wages for Housework activists Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, Callaci found a pitch for a society in which care work isn't unpaid or poorly paid—because, without it, everything else falls apart. Callaci explains that Wages for Housework began with a question prompted by the Italian philosophy of operaismo, or 'workerism,' which wanted to change the workplace so that worker well-being was no longer a distant second to productivity. Dalla Costa, one of Wages for Housework's co-founders, was a militant operaista, but she was also a feminist, and she wanted to understand how operaismo was relevant beyond job sites full of men. Callaci writes that Dalla Costa started by asking, 'If factories were the places where exploitation happened, why didn't women who stayed at home feel free?' From there, she 'began to rethink the entire history of capitalism from the standpoint of the housewife.' Dalla Costa's questions led her to the idea that women who don't work outside the home produce 'the single most valuable thing, without which capitalism could not exist: labor power itself.' Mothers create workers, and especially in Italy in the '70s, mothers and wives more often than not fed those workers, clothed them, did their laundry, made the beds in which they slept at night. Dalla Costa shared her ideas with other feminists, including Selma James, who lived in London and had been married to the eminent cultural historian and Pan-Africanist C. L. R. James. Having grown up working-class in New York and come to politics partly through Black liberation, Selma James espoused a more inclusive and more intuitive feminism than that of many of her white, middle-class peers. She saw money for housewives as not just fair pay for labor but also a source of liberation from men. At the same time, she wanted the feminists she knew to identify themselves more closely with waged workers and their struggles, because, as Callaci puts it, 'women were working all the time, even if their work conditions varied.' When James added this concept to Dalla Costa's reframing of labor power, Wages for Housework was born. Dalla Costa and James spread their ideas from Europe to James's hometown of New York, where they caught on with a young Italian graduate student named Silvia Federici—perhaps the most well-known of the movement's members today. As more famous American feminists concentrated on the Equal Rights Amendment and on equity in white-collar workplaces—a focus on achievement outside the home that would later appear, in glossier form, as girlboss feminism—Federici and her Wages for Housework committee advocated instead to get cash to all women, but especially those not presently earning money for their labor. In their estimation, only economic power could lead to freedom. For instance, when various states began to recognize rape within marriage as a crime, Federici pointed out—though no legislators or more prominent feminists listened—that this recognition 'gives women the right not to be raped; but only money would give them the power to actually leave a violent relationship.' Federici's committee acknowledged that, in a sense, welfare served as the wage they wanted—but it was both restrictive and stigmatized. Margaret Prescod, who was part of Federici's committee before co-founding Black Women for Wages for Housework with Wilmette Brown, spearheaded the only material victory Callaci describes by standing up to one of welfare's constraints. She led an activist group at Queens College that, along with Black Women for Wages for Housework, got a bill passed in the state of New York that enabled welfare recipients, whom the local press described as 'savvy scammers,' to get educational grants and loans without having that money counted against their benefits. Prescod seems to have been Wages for Housework's most practical member by far. Brown, in contrast, was an expansive, systems-level thinker who saw housework as including the effort of repairing society's damage, mitigating the harm that racism or gentrification or environmental devastation have done. Dalla Costa, James, and Federici land somewhere between them, but none of the three ever seem to have lowered their gaze from the campaign's lofty overall agenda to smaller proposals for which they could have fought one by one. Callaci quotes the English feminist Lynne Segal, who wrote in her 2023 memoir that Wages for Housework's activists, when asked to consider issues less grand than or different from their own, gave responses that were 'vanguardist' and 'hectoring.' As a result of this attraction to the revolutionary over the practical, the campaign alienated many women who found its aims simply implausible. Callaci interviewed Alisa del Re, a feminist operaista who, rather than joining Wages for Housework, campaigned for improved public schools and day cares—one of Wages for Housework's many stated goals, but not one that its members seem to have actively worked toward. When Callaci asked del Re why she'd made this choice, the latter said that she was a mother, and 'maybe it was not revolutionary, but I had to put the babies somewhere!' It is this point that many of today's pronatalist advocates seem not to get. When you have babies, you have to put them somewhere: in a home you can pay for, in a safe day care where they can learn. $5,000 per child cannot do that; a living wage for housework would. Even if the Wages for Housework campaign was too radical to make real headway toward the conditions its members wanted—too busy explaining the need for universal, free day care to help del Re get a place to 'put the babies'—its members undeniably understood the gravity of mothers' need. In Wages for Housework, Callaci argues convincingly that the campaign's comprehension of women's reality is important to keep in view today, when the horizons of what governments offer families are shrinking. Wages for Housework may not have been a practical movement, but a government that acted on its ideas of what wives and mothers need would be more likely to stimulate a baby boom than one offering a single check for each birth. But Callaci thinks the campaign's revolutionary tendency matters too. Researching the Wages for Housework campaign, she writes, awakened 'something in my imagination, connecting my daily efforts to lives and labors beyond the four walls of my house.' This sense of connection makes Wages for Housework a relevant rebuttal to those who would like women to devote themselves to having and raising children. Wages for Housework's activists, as Callaci shows, linked seemingly disparate lives and struggles, extending a fundamental empathy for anyone who is exploited or overworked and cannot live in the way they wish to. The campaign, which began with the premise that cleaning and cooking are labor at least as vital as assembling commodities on a factory line, ultimately wanted all women to have access to the lives they desired. For some women, that might mean being able to afford to have six children and stay home with them; for others, that might mean never marrying or reproducing, and devoting their lives entirely to art. I, for one, would like to live in a country where that vision has—or might yet—come to pass.
Newsroom
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Newsroom
The coalition Govt just doesn't care about women
Analysis: In the 1970s, women workers the world over came together for the Wages for Housework campaign. Beginning in Italy and spreading globally, the campaign focused on the invisible and unpaid labour of housework primarily done (then and now) by women. The domestic sphere, and the domestic labour required for society to function, became visible through mass feminist mobilisation. But these feminists – housewives, mothers, waitresses, and a myriad of other workers – weren't just trying to make domestic labour visible. Neither were they just focused on showing the direct relationship between gendered oppression and labour relations. Crucially, they were demanding the wages they were due for all of the work they had been doing for free. The demands of this movement are useful in illustrating why people are rightfully angry about the chopping of the pay equity claims for these so-called Budget savings. Women's liberation movements in 2025 should be far past having to fight for equitable pay in waged work, let alone having to fight to even seek legal recognition of pay inequity. Basic recognition of inequitable pay for the labour that is paid is the very least the Government could do for women. Market-traded and paid labour would not be possible without the care work done (with and without wages) by women. The work historically and presently assigned as women's work is systemically devalued, often unpaid, and almost always underpaid. The Government's dismissal and belittling of women workers is the latest in a long history of ignoring the life-making and society-sustaining labour of women. Like some sort of cruel joke, the pay equity claims were dismissed within days of Mother's Day and May Day. Mothers, women, and workers – and crucially mothers and women as workers – are struggling each day in Aotearoa New Zealand to navigate gender injustices. We live in a country that is far from any sort of women's liberation or even gender equity. Women comprised 90 percent of job redundancies during the Covid pandemic, and their experiences of intimate partner violence surged. Women did the majority of unpaid labour caring for children and the household throughout the lockdowns, often holding down paid work at the same time. Out of OECD countries, New Zealand ranks among the very lowest for paid parental leave entitlements and has some of the most expensive childcare. In 2024, a two-parent household in Aotearoa New Zealand spent 37 percent of their combined income on early childhood education fees. If parents can't afford childcare, it is usually women who leave paid work to do childcare – for free – thus losing job opportunities and their source of independent income. National campaigned on 21,000 families being $250 a fortnight better off under its government, yet fewer than 50 families have received this promised amount. Our statistics for sexual and domestic violence are stark. For incarcerated women, the numbers are even worse. At least 75 percent of women prisoners have been victims of intimate violence, and almost 70 percent of these are wāhine Māori. Not unrelatedly, their right to vote was removed shortly before the pay equity announcement. These examples barely scratch the surface of the structural gender oppression faced by women in Aotearoa New Zealand, and they are all connected to the ability to access material resources. We can better shape our feminist politics – and our society – if we consider the lessons from the Wages for Housework movement: labour relations and gender oppression are deeply entwined in our society. That is, the primary way we access money and resources in society is to work. If the labour that our society makes women's work is paid less or not at all, then women have less access to money and resources. They therefore have less power and freedom in society. The correlation between wages, work, gender and freedom will be true so long as capital, not life, is at the centre of our economy. It is not a coincidence that these gendered matters have remained off the radar (or actively made worse) under the coalition Government. The cutting of pay equity claims is the coalition once more loudly proclaiming they do not care about women, let alone their health, safety, and financial independence.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci review – dust off those protest banners
In the 1970s, the campaigning group Wages for Housework – women, lay down your dusters! – was thought to be cranky and cultish even by some of the second-wave feminists who should then have been most sympathetic to its cause. The story went that if someone stood up at a meeting and announced themselves as one of its members, the audience would groan, knowing a lecture was inevitable; in 1975, the Guardian compared its acolytes (it never had more than a few dozen official members) to Jehovah's Witnesses. By the time it finally fizzled out in the 1990s, its reputation was in the mud. Increasingly riven by factions, former members accused its leadership of bullying and intimidation. But some ideas take a long time to come into their own. In Britain in 2025, the issue of social care and its funding is impossible to ignore. This morning, I read of Andrea Tucker, who successfully challenged in court a demand that she repay £4,600 in carer's allowance overpayments (Tucker looked after her mother for 15 years; the Department for Work and Pensions claimed she breached weekly earnings limits, in spite of it having previously advised her otherwise). Post-Covid, just about everyone is aware of the fuzziness of the line between work and home, while the concept of a universal basic income, once thought radical to the point of loopy, is fast gaining credence. In England, a pilot scheme is running in central Jarrow, north-east England, and East Finchley, north London; Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, is a vocal adherent. Emily Callaci's new history of WFH – how strange and appropriate that its acronym is the same as for working from home – is, then, rather well timed, for all that it sometimes makes for unintentionally comic reading (when Callaci, an American historian, earnestly recounts the histories of myriad splinter groups, it's impossible not to picture – freedom for Tooting! – the old BBC sitcom Citizen Smith). But even before we get to the matter of who does what in the home, her book steps on familiar present-day territory. Hello again, liberal males. How interesting to read that the women whose stories she tells were attacked not only by the right, but by those men who were meant in theory to be on their side. In Italy, where Wages for Housework was led by a Marxist academic from Padua called Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the leftwing press characterised the movement's members as bourgeois castrators. It was scandalised by the fact that she and her colleagues had the temerity to describe unwaged women as members of the proletariat, a categorisation that gave them equal status with male factory workers. Dalla Costa is at the heart of Callaci's book, whose structure takes the form of a group biography, and she's perhaps its most appealing character. As a member in the late 60s of the anti-capitalist operaismo movement, one of whose rallying cries was 'Less work, more money!', Dalla Costa would rise at 4am to leaflet petrochemical plants before returning to Padua to teach her students Rousseau. For her, class and sex intersected, and this made her a natural ally for Selma James, the American founder of the international Wages for Housework campaign (the estranged wife of the historian CLR James, she was living in the UK). James's consciousness had been raised by motherhood and the low-paid factory jobs she'd done. In 1972, she and Dalla Costa published The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which effectively launched the debate over domestic labour by spelling out the fact that capitalist economies rely on those who care for the workers: who cook and clean for them; who raise their children; who tend to them when they're ill. As another activist, the Italian-American scholar Silvia Federici, later put it: 'They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.' Such ideas made powerful sense in the moment, printed on a pamphlet or shouted through a loudhailer. But when people asked questions, their incoherence became obvious. Was the wage intended to compensate housework, and if so, who was to pay it? The state or the man's employer? (The worker was then almost always a man.) Many second wavers resented the association of housework with feminism – they didn't care to be paid for plumping pillows; they wanted careers outside the home – while others saw the campaign's demands as nothing more than a productivity deal, pounds to be offered in exchange for spaghetti bolognese and clean sheets. Federici argued that money was not the point; she couldn't say how much the wage should be. But if this was so, how would anyone know when the battle was won? It seemed that WFH required women to participate in a struggle that had no clear immediate objective. For the casual reader, however, such nitty-gritty is perhaps less captivating than the book's atmosphere more generally, a mood that is at once ridiculous and rather magnificent. Whether logical or not, WFH's ideas seeped into the ether. When the school leaving age was raised to 15 in the UK, some girls believed they should be paid for their time, since they were no longer allowed to work. Should the cash go to their parents? A teenager called Gaye thought not: 'Like, if we was naughty, they'd say, oh, you're not getting your money today…' Amazingly, Selma James regarded such a standpoint not as cheek, but as a legitimate rebellion against the stranglehold of capital. In Italy, meanwhile, an artist called Milli Gandini turned WFH into an art project. Having allowed dust to accumulate on the surfaces of her house, she used her finger to draw feminist symbols in it, which she then photographed. The cooking pots she'd once used for pasta, she painted in bright colours, after which she bound their lids shut with barbed wire. For its leaders, one senses that WFH had a personal, psychic cost: the black activist Wilmette Brown is a case in point. Callaci tries repeatedly to interview her, but she's now a practising Hindu and yogi; the closest Callaci gets is to attend an event via Zoom during which Manisha, as she's now known, discusses immigration (the talk is sponsored by a Pinner-based organisation called Tattva). Many activists drifted away; others, battle-scarred, can no longer bear even to think of those times. WFH's last gasp in the UK was at Greenham Common in the 1980s, where Brown and others are said to have sowed discontent in the women's peace camp ('Pay women, not the military,' read their banners). It may be, Callaci suggests, that WFH's global demands were simply too wide-ranging. What, after all, do women in Peru really have in common with those in Plymouth or Pensacola? Or perhaps – a happier alternative – it's simply that its time is yet to come. For all the robot vacuum cleaners in the world still can't answer the vital question: what counts as work, and when and how much is a person owed for doing it? Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
