In Wages for Housework, the American historian Emily Callaci admits that the titular movement is a curious relic of second-wave feminism. Its proponents were “seen by many as quirky, even cultish”; in 1975 the Guardian compared them to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Dale Wakefield, the lesbian activist who launched the LGBTQ phoneline Gay Switchboard, decried the Wages for Housework lot as bores who “utterly destroyed” places of fun and safety for lesbians with all their talk of overturning capitalism. Even at its peak, Callaci writes that the campaign “never [had] more than a few dozen members”. Evidently, it never succeeded: a study released in December last year showed that women take on an average 79 per cent of household chores – without a penny of remuneration.
And yet, what the movement asked for remains alluring: the notion of cold, hard cash for the domestic drudgery that, so often silently, falls on women in heteronormative relationships, especially in households with children.
Callaci was a new working mother when she felt drawn to research the movement: “I wanted to understand how motherhood had changed my relationship to capitalism,” she writes. Like Jean Alexander, she was working 18-hour days when she returned to work as an academic four months after the birth of her first son; she would finish the book as her second child turned three. “For most of my life, I did not think very much about housework,” Callaci explains, “but when I became a mother, housework became inescapable.” Her situation will be familiar to many women grappling with the modern feminist impossibility of trying to raise children while maintaining an often-equal financial contribution to the household. “To be able to work, we rely on paid childcare; to pay for childcare, we need to work; and this entire cycle relies on the fact that the extremely skilled women who care for our children are paid less money for their work than we are for ours.”
So, then, to the Wages for Housework campaign. Callaci has attempted to narrate the development of a decade-long, continents-spanning anti-capitalist movement through five of its creators: James and Dalla Costa; Silvia Federici, who in 1975 wrote the movement’s still-resonant catchphrase: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”; Wilmette Brown, a former Black Panther; and Margaret Prescod, who together founded the New York branch of Wages for Housework. Callaci’s book, then, is as much a group biography as it is a study of a political perspective.