Broad History | "All work is sh*t" or the anti Girl Boss feminism of the 1970s

In the 1970s, Wages for Housework demanded pay for cooking and cleaning without any illusions about making it in the workplace. What if work was never our liberator?

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Chapters:

(00:00) - 03 Wages for Housework (Emily Callaci)
(01:31) - Addressing housework in the women's right struggle
(02:50) - Two workers for the price of one
(04:00) - "All work is shit"
(07:51) - Not wages for housewives
(10:43) - Biographies of 5 campaign leaders
(11:20) - Selma James
(13:48) - Mariarosa Dalla Costa
(15:38) - Silvia Federici
(17:49) - Wilmette Brown
(19:58) - Margaret Prescott
(22:21) - Welfare
(26:53) - How far did the movement go?
(29:32) - The care work of the climate crisis
(32:39) - How housework got remarketed as care work
(36:48) - How the campaign ended
(38:45) - The long tail legacy of Wages for Housework

Creators and Guests

Host

Isabelle Roughol

Journalist & public historian

Guest

Emily Callaci

Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

What is Broad History?

The history you think you know, with women in it this time

[00:00:00] Isabelle Roughol: Hello and welcome to Broad History. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

Have you ever spent hours slaving over a holiday meal or for that matter, over the relentless repetition of everyday meals, cleaned up after a sick child, or devoted an entire Saturday to catching up on the chores that piled up during the week?

Have you ever done that and thought, exhausted and bored, " man, I should get paid for this?" Well, some women tried.

Today we are continuing our exploration of women and work with an episode on a movement that I have to admit I'd never heard about until now: the Wages for Housework campaign. It's exactly what it sounds like, a campaign to compensate women monetarily for the work that they do for their families.

And if you're thinking that that sounds radical and utopian, well yes, but that's what the seventies were like. So for some of you, this will be lived memory, but I grew up in the Girl Power era and I matured in the Girl Boss era, and this is neither of those things. This is a very different kind of feminism that I got curious about.

So my guest today is Dr. Emily Callaci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who has just published Wages for Housework and has had access to incredible archives as well as the surviving organisers of this movement. And she's going to take us back to this unique moment in feminism.

Emily, hello and thank you.

[00:01:20] Emily Callaci: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:22] Isabelle Roughol: My pleasure.

So I think we need to introduce first the central idea. What is Wages for Housework?

[00:01:31] Addressing housework in the women's right struggle
---

[00:01:31] Emily Callaci: As you point out, it is exactly what it sounds like. And I think,perhaps the best way to introduce the idea is to think about the moment in which it arose. So you mentioned second wave feminism. It's a time when women all over the world. were coming together to really questionwomen's role in society and to really fight for more power, more resources,for liberation.

That included demands like right to abortion, like equal pay for equal work, equal opportunities for education, all these really, really crucial things. But one of the insights that some women had at that time, from this movement was that. while all those gains and all those struggles are critical for women's power and for liberation, they don't address one of the core issues that women face, which is that they are doing so much unpaid work to make society function. You know, think about all the work of caring for children, all the work of caring for the elderly, caring for the sick, preparing the workforce to go to work every day through housework.

Their insight was that a lot of thatdid not address the core issue, which is that women were working this double shift, And so to really address women's empowerment, you can't just think about legal rights in the, in the legal sphere. You have to think about all these economic factors that have women doing all of this work, and yet not sharing in the wealth that it produces.

[00:02:50] Two workers for the price of one
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[00:02:50] Isabelle Roughol: And I think one idea that, when I was reading you, that I thought was unique or different from the way that I had heard people talk about housework before, is that it's not [00:03:00] just something that they're doing for their families: they are helping capitalism run by cleaning and cooking.

[00:03:07] Emily Callaci: Exactly. This is, I think, the critical insight here. just to start with one of my favourite quotations from Selma James, one of the founders of this movement, she had this insight. She said, "you can't make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time."

This insight that, when a boss hires somebody to work. they're basically getting, two workers for the price of one. They get the person who shows up to work every day to work on the assembly line or, mine the coal out of the ground, or, work in an office. But they also get the labour of the person who cares for them, the person who cooks their meals and cleans their house and prepares them to go to work each day. What Mariarosa Dalla Costa, one of the other founders of this movement, said was that, the critical thing that women produce for the economy, which is not recognised, is they create labour power itself.

[00:03:53] Isabelle Roughol: So the boss pays for one worker, but really they're good getting a whole support team there that is unacknowledged.

[00:03:59] Emily Callaci: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:04:00] "All work is shit"
---

[00:04:00] Isabelle Roughol: One thing, that I think is quite confronting, in the analysis, of this movement for middle class women, for professional women and for the kind of feminism that, that maybe we're, we're used to, is that it's almost saying we're not interested in a better situation in the workplace. We're not interested in, you know, hiring discrimination or equal pay. I think it, is it Federici who says, "All work is sh*tThere is no work that we wanna be a part of. We don't want any of this. There is no fulfilment in work, which is something that, might be very foreign to people who think of themselves as, career women.

[00:04:39] Emily Callaci: Yeah,I also grew up in the kind of girl power nineties with the idea that, women's liberation comes through our careers. And I think there's a lot of validity to that, and I think that's very important. I mean, of course I'm in favour of equal pay for equal work. Of course, I'm in favour of education and all these things.

But one of the insights of Wages for Housework was that that idea about the value of work, the satisfaction of work, is a very middle-class perspective. For someone, for example, who's going to clean toilets for a living, or someone who's going to work in a coal mine and breathe in the coal dust, like these kinds of jobsare not liberating for anybody.

And again, one of the sort of insights in the, this is from Wilmette Brown who was, one of the founders of Black Women for Wages for Housework, is that, you know, the idea that going to take on another shift working at McDonald's is going to liberate you, is kind of insulting to people who do that work, you know?

So I think that's one of the things that I think was very shocking about Wages for Housework was that there's a very anti-work politics within that, at a time when so much of the feminist movement was about liberation in the workplace, having the ability to raise to the same ranks within a company that men raise to. I think that kind of questioning of the value of work and trying to recast that as something that was really in favour of the boss's perspective, which is that you should seek to work as a form of liberation, that was something they really tried to question.

[00:05:57] Isabelle Roughol: I think it's something that probably will start to [00:06:00] resonate more. I don't know. I, this might be, very much the bias just of what I'm seeing around me, but I'm certainly seeing a lot of middle-class Millennial and Gen Z women having lost a lot of illusions about fulfilment through career, these days, I don't know.

[00:06:13] Emily Callaci: Yeah,

[00:06:14] Isabelle Roughol: I think that's true. And I, because I teach, students of that, you know, of a younger age and,I think that a lot of feminists in the seventies, as I said, found Wages for Housework very controversial because it was basically seeking to, rather than leaving behind housework, it was about recognising housework.

[00:06:30] Emily Callaci: And at a time when you're trying to sever that link between the yourself and housework and challenge the idea that women are naturally suited to it, it seemed counterintuitive to demand compensation for it, right? A lot of people thought, won't that just entrench us in this role?

so that was one of the things I think that was really challenging and counterintuitive about it. But as you say, when I talk to younger people about it, people who have become somewhat disillusioned with the idea that liberation will come through work, people who are facing the possibility that their standard of living will be lower than their parents' generation, people who are finding themselves unable to afford housing, the idea that a job in the market economy is going to be their source of liberation, I think Wages for Housework and their critique of work is something that really resonates much more with younger people than I would've expected.

[00:07:15] Isabelle Roughol: And obviously, work that, you know, is a shift work, work that is, backbreaking, exhausting, maybe not glamorous, maybe not intellectually fulfilling, that is the reality of the global majority of men and women, right? I mean, it is a luxury to be, to feel stimulated by work.

But obviously as you say, one critique, which they received a lot, is this idea that, we're just entrenching women in the home as domestic workers. If we're paying them for it, are we saying like there is no escape from it? How did the campaign respond to that?

[00:07:51] Not wages for housewives
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[00:07:51] Emily Callaci: Sure. Yes. And I should say that's, it's, a critique that I completely understand, right? Again, you can imagine the 1970s, women who grew up fighting the expectation that your destiny in life is to do housework, the idea suddenly, someone comes to you and said, no, you should get paid for housework, that is something that I think really cut against the grain of,what feminism was about. But I think it's really important to recognise that wages for housework was not promoting the nuclear family ideal, was not promoting women as housewives.

And they were very clear that their campaign was not wages for housewives. It was wages for house work. It was about recognising that work is part of the economy, whether a man did or a woman did it. And so the idea, the kind of utopian idea here, was that what we have to do is recognise that work as part of the economy, recognise that historically it has been gendered.

And once you recognise that and you demand compensation for it, you challenge the way that capitalist society exploits that labour and makes profit from it, then you can start to challenge the capital system as a whole. Then you can start to challenge a scenario where so [00:09:00] many people in the world, the majority of whom are women, are doing work for free to make the system function, empowering and making profits for other people, right? To challenge that system is what you're doing when you're demanding wages for housework.

So by proclaiming, or demanding that wage, you're not saying: "I'm going to be a housewife. That's my role in life. I'm gonna participate in that kind of patriarchal construct." What you're doing is demanding that the system actually recognise something materially that's already, part of how the economy functions.

[00:09:30] Isabelle Roughol: And we should say, I mean, that's kind of the subtext through everything we've talked about so far, obviously it is a Marxist analysis. It is a sort of radical left campaign.

One insight that they have, that I thought was interesting as well, is that if you recognise this housework, it also helps value it to its real value.

So,There's this insight in your introduction that, I thought was interesting is that the closest, that work is to the work that women do for free in the house, the less valued it is monetarily by the economy, right? So that's why we don't really pay nurses and teachers and cleaners and sanitation workers very well, it's because they're a lot like your mom and you're expecting your mom to work for free.

[00:10:13] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. Yeah. There was this great quotation,from the 1970s. One of the anecdotes in my book is about the sanitation workers strike, and there was this artistwho was interviewing sanitation workers, and one of the comments, that one of the sanitation workers made was: "they don't respect us 'cause they think we're their mother."

So it's just that implicit assumption that work is denigrated. Calling something the work that your mother does is an excuse to think of it as valueless. I think that says so much about the role of this work in society.

[00:10:43] Biographies of 5 campaign leaders
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[00:10:43] Emily Callaci: But I wonder if it might help for me to talk about, just to give a bit of context for the five women that are the centre of the

[00:10:49] Isabelle Roughol: Yes. That was my next question because we've thrown a few names. but let's talk about yes, let's talk about who they are.

[00:10:56] Emily Callaci: Sure. And so one of the things I found so fascinating about this movement was how widespread it was. It's a movement that was fairly small, but it was, they had branches in the UK, in New York, in Italy, in the Caribbean. And so I focused my book on five women in particular, who I thought, who first of all had really critical roles in defining this politics. But part of what I was interested is how they really understood housework in different ways.

[00:11:20] Selma James
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[00:11:20] Emily Callaci: So the first person I focus on is Selma James. So she was born in 1930 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a very kind of radical, immigrant community in Brooklyn. She grew up around, members of the American Communist Party and the troskyist Socialist Workers Party.

And so she grew up around radical politics and, as a young woman, one of her insights was that much of the left at that time really understood working class politics through the lens of the male worker who went to work in a factory, the kind of classic proletariat, the idea that to become a radical member of a social movement, you had to go and work in a factory, right?

But she grew up in a context where women were doing really [00:12:00] critical activism. Her mother was involved in organising tenants, organising mothers to collect their payments from the government for childcare. So she really understood housewives as being inherently political, even as the left kind of cashed them as people who were apolitical.

So she, in the 1950s, moved to Los Angeles, joined this kind of offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party called the Johnson Forest Tendency, and they're basically trying to organise workers in a kind of broader working class struggle, and her role within that was to go around to all the housewives in the neighbourhood and ask them about their daily labours and their daily lives.

And so she really became convinced that these women are not counted as workers, but they have all this political potential. If we could just bring that into how we think about the labour movement, we could really have a truly authentic labour movement that included everybody.

And so in the 1970s when second wave feminism really hit the scene, she'd already been thinking about this issue of unpaid work in the home for several decades already. So she really brought that struggle to second wave feminism. And for her second wave feminism was really an extension of class struggle.

She understood the women's movement as a movementof the working class more generally, and that women were an unacknowledged part of the working class.

[00:13:15] Isabelle Roughol: It's so much harder to organise, right, women, who are not together essentially in a factory, right? If everyone is just spread out and within the four walls of their house most of the day, you don't have that exchange, right?

[00:13:27] Emily Callaci: Yeah, exactly. That isolation in the home is really part of the struggle. How do you actually build a kind of collective movement, when you don't have the factory floor as the kind of location where everybody gathers? So that was her real challenge and that was her real ambition, was to make a working class movement that could bring in all those unpaid workers as part of how we think about the working class. And so that's Selma James.

[00:13:48] Mariarosa Dalla Costa
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[00:13:48] Emily Callaci: The second person I write about is Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who grew up in Northeastern Italy, in a place called Triviso. And she was part of student movements in the 1960s at the University of Padua. And she was part of a movement known as _operaismo_, which was a kind of coming together of the student movement and the workers' movement to really challenge some of the expansion of factory capitalism across northern Italy in the post-war era. And there were all these wildcat strikes, all these attempts to really question the profit and efficiency model that was basically taking over factory life, but also everyday life, in cities in the north of Italy.

So she joined this movement. She organised outside of factory gates, but again, like Selma James, she had this insight that this notion of working class struggle doesn't account for all the work that we as women are going to be expected to do as we get older, raising children,taking care of our parents, taking care of basically people, particularly in a very Catholic society, there's this real gendered expectation that women produce children for the state and for, for God.

And so, she had this idea that if you're thinking about workers working [00:15:00] on a factory line, an assembly line, you have to imagine the assembly line extends far beyond the factory into the home, where people are there, getting the worker ready to go to work every day, producing the worker by feeding him, doing his laundry, cleaning the house, producing children for the next generation of workers.

So for her, that's where the working class struggle began, in the home, where workers are being produced and raised. So those are the first two members, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. They met in the early 1970s and basically realised that they had a lot of politics in common. So they launched the Wages for housework movement together, Selma James in London, Mariarosa Dalla Costa in Italy.

[00:15:38] Silvia Federici
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[00:15:38] Emily Callaci: And then the third person I write about my book is Silvia Federici. So she's probably the most well known, at least in the US of the campaign. Her work is very widely read and she's still a very active feminist activist.

[00:15:49] Isabelle Roughol: If you're in women's history, you've come across her.

[00:15:51] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. Yes. So she was also born in Italy,in Parma, in the red Belts of Italy where the Italian Communist Party was kind of a stronghold there. And, she grew up very active in politics, but even though she grew up in, in a very kind of politically progressive community, she still faced these very kind of strict gendered expectations about the role that women would play, in society, again as homemakers, which is a role that she really resisted very strongly. And so she, as a young woman, she went to the US to get her PhD in philosophy. And she had this real interesting class politics and, the student movements in the sixties and also in feminism. But it's really when she encountered the work of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, really talking about women's unpaid work in the economy, that she really thought that feminism had a place for her.

So she, went home for the summer, met Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and then when she came back to New York where she was living, she started the New York Wages for Housework Committee in the mid 1970s.

And that was a really critical moment because just to give you a bit of historical context, New York at that time was on the brink of bankruptcy. There was a big financial crisis, and the way that the city responded to that was through austerity measures, cutting social programmes. And, at that time, the Wages for Housework campaign in New York really thought about that as a feminist issue, because so many of the things that were on the chopping block were things like childcare, were things like welfare payments, were things like subsidies for women togo to college for free.

They tried to really reframe the issue of austerity, and say, austerity is not just tightening your belt and making government more efficient. It's freeloading on women's unpaid work. It's taking things that are collectively recognised as valuable and paying for it, and then just stopping paying for it, expecting that women will continue to do it for free.

[00:17:40] Isabelle Roughol: Because you're not gonna stop feeding children or educating children, right? So you're just expecting women to pick up the slack because somebody's got to, right?

[00:17:48] Emily Callaci: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:17:49] Wilmette Brown
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[00:17:49] Emily Callaci: And so the fourth person I wrote about in my book, and this is the person who really, whose work I really was inspired by and made me wanna write the book is Wilmette Brown. So Wilmette Brown, she was born in Newark, New [00:18:00] Jersey, which is a, a very segregated city in the United States.

She grew up immersed in the civil rights movement. She was a brilliant student and went to Berkeley where she was, involved in student activism there in the anti-war movement. And, during her studies there, she encountered the Black Panther Party, which was based in the San Francisco Bay area at that time. And so she left university and began becoming basically a full-time organiser with the Black Panther party. She participated in the first struggle for ethnic studies at San Francisco State University. But at times she found that her identity as a black lesbian woman was not an identity that was fully recognised within the Black Panther party that she was a part of, because there was a kind of masculinist politics and a kind of idea of the gender roles within that,within the groups that she was a part of there. So she left the Panther Party, she went to Southern Africa and taught English for a couple years, and then when she came back to New York, in the 1970s, this again, was right the moment when second wave feminism was hitting, and she encountered the writings of Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa about wages for housework. And for her, that was a real kind of aha moment because for her, this question about women's unpaid labour was an extension of the Black freedom struggle.

She was thinking about this in terms of longer histories of slavery and colonialism and the ways that the United States and the global North have extracted the labour of Black women through histories of enslavement and colonisation. And so for her wages for housework was really a version of the movement for reparations, really trying to recognise all the work that has been exploited historically along racial lines. And so she, together with the fifth person I write about in my book, Margaret Prescott, founded Black Women for Wages for Housework, which was a branch of Wages for Housework that understood the issue of unpaid labour of women, particularly through the lens of race and racialized dispossession.

[00:19:58] Margaret Prescott
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[00:19:58] Emily Callaci: So Margaret Prescott, the fifth person in my book, she was born in Barbados when it was still under Colonial Rule and one of the factors that she grew up with that really had a big impact on her was the extent to which women in her community travelled abroad to work as low paid domestic workers in the global North, in New York and London.

Despite having been the site where many of the profits of the British empire came from, many of the profits of the slave trade came from, she grew up in relative poverty. So many people had to go and work abroad to send home remittances as a way to lift the family above poverty wages. She sees so many of the women in her family going to work abroad and not making enough money to even bring their families with them. This is a really painful part of her childhood. And then she moved to Brooklyn, New York in the 1960s into a very kind of activist family and community that was involved in the Civil Rights movement.

And she encounters this very different discourse in America, which is this idea that, " oh, immigrants are freeloaders. They're here taking advantage of the [00:21:00] riches of Western society. They're collecting benefits from the government. Immigrants are the problem."

And from her perspective, it was exactly the opposite, right? Immigrants were coming to the US having their labour exploited. They were creating much of the wealth of society and not being compensated properly for it. So for her, she really brought to Wages for Housework, a real understanding that the exploitation of unpaid work and the work of women crosses national borders too.

That much of that exploitation, and profit making is not just about within a society or within a country, rather exploiting the unpaid work of women, but across on a global scale, women in the global South producing wealth for the global North through that unpaid work.

[00:21:40] Isabelle Roughol: There's, I think, a really powerful connection that's made in your book, that is still extremely current, which is this idea of this connection. You have women from what we'd call today the global south, having to leave their children behind in the care of women who are paid even less than they are, so they can make a little bit more money in the West, working potentially for Western women who are employing them to free their time to themselves be able to make just a little bit more money in paid work. So you have these like connections of women just making barely more than the woman who allows them to even be able to work outside the home.

[00:22:20] Emily Callaci: Yeah.

[00:22:21] Welfare
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[00:22:21] Isabelle Roughol: I'm interested in the work that these last two women that you mentioned, do to connect welfare as well to the idea of wages for housework, this idea that actually welfare payments are not, they're not charity, they're not welfare, they're due.

[00:22:38] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. Thank you. Yes. And perhaps for, a UK audience, the campaign that really was concurrent with the Wages for Housework was the family allowance campaign, the campaign to protect family allowance at a time when there was a political push to get rid of the payments that were going directly to women and instead pay it through their husband, through his employer.

And the argument that Wages for Housework made was, this money is the only source of income that many women have. It's a source of autonomy. And so to take that away and pay it through their husband really is a blow against women's power and women's autonomy.

So in the US,Wages for Housework and particularly Black Women for Wages for Housework, understood Wages for Housework as an extension of the Welfare Rights Movement, which was a really important political movement in the US, led mostly by poor, working class and Black women. And basically their argument was to understand welfare payments as compensation for the socially necessary and important work of raising children. And the language that cast it is a kind of a handout or as a charity payment really missed the point, that this was payment for really vitally important social work. And so one of the arguments or one of the efforts that Black Women for Wages for Housework made was to get together with women from the Welfare Rights Movement and to protest cuts to the [00:24:00] welfare system that were happening in the 1970s by reframing recipients of welfare as workers, as workers that were not again demanding a handout, but demanding fair pay for the work that they were doing.

And so the place where this kind of becomes solidified in the historical record is there's this really important conference in 1977, convened at theinitiative of Jimmy Carter's administration, or during the Carter administration, the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977, and Wages for Housework got together with women from the National Welfare Rights Association, some of the figures here historically are Johnnie Tillmon and Beulah Sanders, and basically they got a kind of statement to be ratified by the convention that said that, not only should welfare be protected, should the amounts be increased, but it should have the dignity of being called a wage rather than a handout, to recognise that these women are doing skilled, important work.

So I find that really important. To recognise this as work is to recast this from a demand for charity or sympathy and basically recognise it as a, a demand for justice, for workers justice. And Margaret Prescott and Wilmette Brown were doing this organising, particularly in in Queens College where they were both on the teaching faculty at that time. And this is a time when, I mentioned the austerity crisis in New York in the 1970s, there are cuts being made to welfare programmes, cuts being made to subsidised childcare, and cuts being made to to college tuition. This is a time when university was free in New York. It's no longer free.

But part of the argument they were making was that many of the students, In the university system in New York were also care workers. A lot of them were single mothers. A lot of them were caring for their siblings or for their extended family. There was this real kind of discourse in New York at that time was that students are freeloaders, they're getting all these benefits from the government, it's wasting everybody's money. And they tried to really demonstrate that these students. Were workers in many senses of the word. So one of their strategies was to hold these kinds of speak outs where students would go and they would speak about the different kinds of work that they did on the course of a typical school day.

They would, perhaps for example, wake up,take a relative to a medical appointment, prepare the children for school, take the children to school, go to their classes at university, come home, get the children home, go to the shift for their paid work job, 'cause they have to have another kind of income, and then get home, stay late at night and have to do their homework and then get up the next day and do it all again. As a way of challenging this idea that recipients of welfare were freeloaders, and try to turn that around and show how they were actually some of the hardest workers in society. Without their work, everything would grind to a halt.

So that connection between welfare and Wages for Housework was the way they tried to bring together this very working class, poor, Black women's movement and try to project it into this bigger kind of analysis of capitalism.

[00:26:53] How far did the movement go?
---

[00:26:53] Isabelle Roughol: So how far did the movement go? I mean, did we ever get to a point there was a bill out there to [00:27:00] introduce wages for housework? Or did it stay this, intellectual and activist campaign, without a physical reality? I mean, did they even imagine how that would work in practise? 'Cause I know that's a criticism that, that they got.

[00:27:13] Emily Callaci: I think there's a lot of disagreement within the movement about this. So I think that, for example, for Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, there was this sense of political theatre about it, that by demanding wages for housework, you're demonstrating, capitalism's internal contradictions, right?

And you could therefore the next steps, were less a policy blueprint than trying to launch a movement that wouldchallenge the system.

I think that particularly for Prescott and Brown and Selma James, and again, through their kind of linkages with the welfare rights movement, there was a real kind of concrete sense of having demands for government compensation for welfare as a kind of first step that can then lead to further demands, So there was a sense that, fighting with the welfare rights movement, fighting for things like the family allowance were part of the bigger kind of aim of,of challenging this situation where women's work is unpaid and essential to the economy. But I have to say, like if you're asking me did they succeed in getting wages for housework, the answer is mostly no. This is started in the 1970s and next you have the 1980s, which is the era of Reagan and Thatcher and massive cuts to many things that we might think of as wages for housework, things like subsidised childcare, things like welfare. So in that concrete sense, this is really kind of an unfulfilled promise. I should mention that many members of this campaign are still doing this work.

They're still together, particularly Selma James, I think she's 95 now, and she runs the Crossroads Women's Centre in, in London. They're still very much again, campaigning around wages for housework, although the demand has been, updated to, to a more kind of modern sensibility. Now it's called Care Income Now. The idea of asking for compensation for that work, um, calling it a care income rather than housework And they've really extended the analysis in many different directions, and I think it got a lot of traction, for example, during the COVID, pandemic because the issue of unpaid work was just so apparent to us in a way that perhaps it had been hidden before.

It was amazing to me, you know, within a week or two of the pandemic hitting, they were having teach-ins. They were having these discussions together with people who worked in the health sector, people who worked in anti-poverty campaigning, really talking about the need for a care income as a way to recognise this work and the kind of massive crisis we are now collectively facing about,the lack of care work and the lack of resources for care work.

[00:29:32] The care work of the climate crisis
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[00:29:32] Emily Callaci: Another direction that they have gone in recent years, or not that recent, I guess for several decades now, and this is really spearheaded by Wilmette Brown, is to think about the work of, surviving climate change and some of the environmental catastrophes that we're facing.

And one of the issues that got this way of thinking started was the crisis over,nuclear power and the Chernobyl disaster, and thinking about the kinds of unpaid care work that go into caring for people who are [00:30:00] living with the consequences of environmental degradation and pollution.

And of course we know that those effects are experienced differently by people depending on their socioeconomic status, depending on factors like, like race. Wilmette Brown really talked about what she called the housework of cancer. So she grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where they have the highest cancer rates in the country at that time. And part of that had to do with the industrial, production of chemical weapons along the river, near New York, New Jersey, that then polluted the local environment and then led to higher cancer rates. And so the community was facing having to care for all these people who were getting sick from, these industrial processes.

An extension that has been to think again about environmental issues as housework issues, as women's labour issues. And one of the places where I thought about this most recently is, and I'm not sure how familiar UK listeners will be with this, but we had this crisis, in the US in a place called Flint, Michigan. Basically the story was that there were these elevated rates of lead poisoning within the water system there. And again, this is a community that's predominantly Black, predominantly working class. and I think that wages for housework really helps us understand that as an environmental issue, but also an issue of women's unpaid work because so much of what it requires to care for people who are ill in that kind of community, to try to prevent people from getting ill in that context, to try to raise children when you can't even trust the water supply, this is all work that women are having to do for free, to live in a society that has all these environmentally harmful practises.

So the Wages for Housework as a concrete demand for payment, from the government in the seventies, that was not, that demand was not met. That was not a successful movement in that respect.

In other respects, I think there's a really long afterlife of this movement that really helps us reframe some of the most pressing issues that we face today, from the care crisis to the environmental crisis.

[00:31:52] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, there's something that's extremely current. Before I studied history and journalism, I studied economics first, and a lot of things that, that I think we're still talking about today when we talk about the economy, things like, the way that the profits of enterprise are privatised, but the negative externalities, like pollution, like

[00:32:11] Emily Callaci: Yeah.

[00:32:12] Isabelle Roughol: consequences for society, harm on people that is collectivised. And when we say it's collectivised, it's really a lot of unpaid women's work to pick up the tab for a lot of those effects. So I think that's very current. As well as something I know I was certainly taught in economics classes, the idea that things like the numbers that we're staring at all day, like GDP, don't account for so much work that exists in the world that like, like housework, right?

[00:32:39] How housework got remarketed as care work
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[00:32:39] Emily Callaci: Something else that you touch on that, that we didn't talk about that I thought I was really interested, it's that switch from housework to care work, which almost I think makes it maybe a little bit more palatable. It's more noble, right? Care work. And this idea that this is a work of love, right? There's this beautiful quote, you call it love, we call it unwaged labour. yes. That's a quotation [00:33:00] from Silvia Federici.

[00:33:01] Isabelle Roughol: Yes. I wonder if you could talk about that, the way that all that work is wrapped up in this idea of love or familial obligation, and how these campaigners think about that and the idea that you would be introducing, almost introducing capitalism or capitalistic or moneyed relations within something that is being presented as, this sacred work of love and of family.

[00:33:26] Emily Callaci: Yeah, I love that quotation too. I think it's one of my favourite, it might be my favourite one, because it comes from Sylvia Federici's questioning, you know, why is it that women have done this for free historically? Why? How are we socially pressured to do it? And it's through that idea of love that this is fulfilling to you.

This is something you should do because it is generous, because you are a good mother. Because that's what it means to be feminine, right? And so part of what Wages for Housework was trying to do is to take off that veneer of. Holiness and virtue, and reveal it for its real hard-nosed economic function.

They saw that ideology of love as a way of basicallypressuring women to do it for free, right? so that's part of what they were trying to address. And I think, one of the things that I think is the real tension within both Wages for Housework, but also in how I think about it, is that, you could say on the one hand, is the point of thinking about housework, to recognise that it is virtuous, that it is highly skilled, that it is fulfilling, and that becomes a reason to value it? Or does that then further play into that idea that housework is virtuous and it is feminine and you should do it for free?

Is the other perspective that housework should be compensated because it sucks, you know? And because it's, it's hard and it's time consuming and it's boring. And it's not fair that women have to do it and men don't, So I think those two perspectives are kind of at war within me when I think about it.

And they're kind of, I think, contradictory or rather, a tension within the movement itself. And I think that's why I think, on the one hand, calling it care work, there's been a real turn I think towards thinking about the value of care and I think this also is something that has been really taken up in conversations about mutual aid that I think have become much more central from our experiences living through the pandemic.

And I think that my own ambivalence about that is that, again, on the one hand, I think it's really important to uplift that work and to not see it as less skilled. It's incredibly skilled, much of it. But one of, I think, the problems with that is that there still is always going to be a lot of housework that kind of sucks. So for example, there's this magnificent article by the sociologist Dorothy Roberts. I think sociology is her discipline. I'm not sure. But basically it's this article from the nineties, that talks about this sort of, way in which the housework done by white middle class women, can be cast as virtuous and rewarding,taking care of children, reading them bedtime stories, taking this great care with this kind of work. But that's never gonna be the way we talk about cleaning toilets, right? Or cleaning up vomit on a hospital floor.

And so by elevating it all as care work, are you then separating out [00:36:00] the kinds of work that are done by more middle class women and then, separating it out from the kinds of work that tend to be done by low paid women of colour or, poorer women. By separating those things from each other, are you,perpetuating this kind of inequality?

Part of what I think housework does and Wages for Housework does is by taking away that veneer of emotion and virtue, you see it as an economic issue rather than as an emotional issue. And you can do away with some of that ideology.

[00:36:25] Isabelle Roughol: I think we see it in the world of work in the more traditional sense in, in paid work, in the careers that you choose, right? if your career is a calling, somehow that becomes a reason to pay you a lot less, right? We see it in academia, we see it in journalism, we see it in the arts, right? You shouldn't make money if you're an artist, but, if you work in finance, that's okay. Those, I think, are similar dynamics at play that, that are really, interesting.

[00:36:48] How the campaign ended
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[00:36:48] Isabelle Roughol: You say this campaign continues in some ways, but really it ended with the end of the seventies and the change of the,political moment. I think what's really incredibly poignant and sad and beautiful all at once is that a lot of these women sort of drop out of the fight because of the very reasons that brought them to the fight, right?

It's, they have to care for ageing parents. They have less time for activism. They have less time for politics. They need to take full-time jobs to support themselves because all that activism, all that intellectual work isn't necessarily remunerated. Um. I think that's very poignant and very telling.

[00:37:24] Emily Callaci: Yeah, it is. and I should say that, the Italian Wages for Housework campaignreally ended in the late 1970s, in part for the reasons you mentioned. Also because in the late 1970s, there's a wave of political repression of the left in Italy that really forced activists underground, and the New York Wages for Housework Committee closed down basically in the 1970s.

But,a lot of them really did keep campaigning throughout the 1980s. I think that because those were such a terrible decade for feminism in many ways that we don't know their work as well. Many of the campaigners, particularly in London, and, Margaret Prescott moved to Los Angeles where she was campaigning there, particularly around defending welfare rights,

particularly against protesting austerity measures. that work was really, I think, very important. Again, it's not as well known as the work in the seventies, and I think because they kept doing that work throughout the 1980s and nineties,I think that's part of why this work has been able to endure, because then when, say the COVID-19 pandemic hits, there are people who have been thinking about this all along for a very long time, who could share their insights with us and organise. yeah, it's got me thinking a lot about the kinds of feminist activism that are happening at times that are very hostile to feminism and that, might not be as, um, well known. to just be clear, I do think a lot of the activism continued past the 1970s, even though the end of the seventies was a major moment of defeat for them.

[00:38:45] The long tail legacy of Wages for Housework
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[00:38:45] Isabelle Roughol: You talked about care work and the pandemic. What are other areas where you see a continuation or legacy of Wages for Housework?

One thing that came to mind when I was reading you was the idea of universal basic income, which [00:39:00] sounds not the same, but a child of that idea maybe.

[00:39:04] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. I think in many ways the care income campaign has some similaritieswith basic income. And, I know there are different kinds of schools of thought within basic income and there are many trials going on right now actually that are specifically targeted towards, for example, women in their first year of motherhood, trying to give an income to those women, With The understanding that it's better for women, it's better for children,it's, the kind of programme that targets them. So that's a real kind of connection between basic income and wages for housework.

Another way in which I think it's connected is as you've talked about earlier, is thinking about delinking,income and the right to live and thrive in the world from paid employment. thinking about income as something that is a right and something that is beneficial, that's not just dependent on you working for an employer, you know?

Another place where I see a longer term legacy of Wage for Housework is in conversations about a Green New Deal, particularly in the US and also in the European Union. And part of the thinking there is how to prioritise an economy emphasising work that is not disastrous for the environment. Moving away from a model of economic productivity that's based on extracting things from the environment, putting carbon into the ozone, right? And, doing these things that are terrible for the environment, rather shifting towards forms of work that are either neutral or positive for the environment.

And care work is one of those functions. Care work will always be necessary to our economy. It's not something that can be outsourced to, AI or something. But it is something that can work to renew and protect and conserve the environment rather than extract from it and pollute it.

So many people who are thinking about a Green New Deal are thinking about how can we make care work the centre of a green economy. And then a third place where I really see many of these insights being taken up is for, the efforts of domestic workers around the world, domestic workers organising.

So there's thismovement of domestic workers in the us. I'm not sure about labour laws in the UK actually, but in the US, domestic workers, housekeepers and house cleaners, many home health aides are not protected by labour laws, because the home is not considered a workplace.

And there are lots of historical, you know, reasons for this. But basically if you go to work in a factory, your employer has to provide certain protections under labour law in terms of, for example, if you're breathing in chemicals, they have to supply,the proper kind of masking or the proper ventilation. You have to be given things to keep the work environment safe. Those protections don't apply for most people who work in the home. So much of the organising for domestic workers has been around. Recognising the home as a workplace and trying to seek labour protections for domestic workers.

and one of the victories of this movement was in passing the I-L-L-I-L-O, international Labour Organisation Convention 189, which is popularly [00:42:00] known as Decent work For Domestics, but really tried to recognise, again, the home as a workplace. And what I found, that really interested me was that one of the big organisers to pass this convention was Ida LeBlanc, whose mother founded the first Wages for Housework branch in Trinidad and Tobago, her mother's Clotil Walcott.

So a direct connection between, the efforts of wages for housework in the seventies and eighties and this current organising that's happening for decent work for domestics.

[00:42:25] Isabelle Roughol: Emily Callaci, thank you so much. This is really interesting. I think it's a campaign that,in some ways is really confronting and it's, challenging intellectually and some ideas that, I may not necessarily agree with, but I think are just very interesting to, to think about, to sort of reimagine the world and the economy differently.

Which,if the future that we're promised in terms of AI, eating half our jobs... it's work that we're gonna have to do, Figure out, how we divorce income from jobs that no longer exist apparently. So thank you so much for that enlightening conversation.

[00:42:59] Emily Callaci: Yeah, thank you so much for your really thoughtful questions. I really enjoyed it.

[00:43:02] Speaker: That was Emily Callaci. Her book is Wages for Housework. You can find it in the Broad History bookstore, both in the UK and the US. Every sale on the Broad History bookstore helps support this show. You can also join as a member with a recurring donation or make a one-time donation.

I would really appreciate your support to make that happen. Thank you so much. This was Broad History. I'm Isabelle Roughol and I'll talk to you very soon.