Wages for Housework: the fight for paid domestic labor
Amidst the many discussions of waged and salaried labor, the movement for paid domestic labor makes multiple appearances in the archive. The Scholar and the Feminist Conference III held in April 1976 and devoted to the theme, “The Search for Origins” featured a workshop by New York Wages for Housework Committee activist Silvia Federici, “The Politics of Wagelessness: Women, Housework, and the Wages Due.” (April 1976) The Wages for Housework movement was a transnational feminist movement (in the US and several European countries) had a brief life, beginning in 1972 and lasting a few years. The BCRW archives of second-wave feminist ephemera includes flyers and pamphlets from the movement, including a demanding and unapologetic manifesto:
The Wages for Housework movement had a short life and has not been widely featured in histories of feminist activism in the twentieth century. Louise Toupin’s recent book, Le salaire au travail ménager: Chronique d’une lutte féministe internationale (1972-1977) (Montréal: Les Éditions du remue-ménage, 2014), documents the movement (and the opposition to it from both the traditional left and many second-wave feminist activists and groups). But as Toupin observes, the question of reproductive labor has never been adequately answered.
This failure to address the work of care came into harsh relief during the global pandemic that began in 2020. Indeed, even the New York Times Magazine saw fit as part of its ongoing coverage of pandemic living to spotlight the work of Wages for Housework founder Silvia Federici in a long feature article: Jordan Kisner, “The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew,” New York Times Magazine, February 17, 2021, updated February 22, 2021. And in the most recent “big idea” infrastructure plan announced in April 2021 by the Biden administration, childcare and eldercare appear alongside bridges and broadband as essential elements of economic infrastructure. Taking seriously the notion that reproductive labor, caring labor, and domestic labor are forms of work—albeit often invisible and undervalued—has long been a goal of feminist movements, and the social transformations required to embed that recognition in social policy remain very much a work in progress.