Selma James

Independent activity Feminism United States United States (Jewish) 1930–

American-born feminist, co-author of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and founder of the Wages for Housework campaign

In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), written with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, she showed how women's unwaged housework and care work produce the whole working class, opening the "domestic labour debate"; that year she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign.

A feminist activist born in 1930 into a Jewish working-class family in Brooklyn. At fifteen she joined the Johnson–Forest Tendency led by C. L. R. James, and in 1952 wrote A Woman's Place. In 1955 she went to England to marry C. L. R. James, and in 1958–1962 she was active in Trinidad and Tobago in the movement for West Indian independence and federation. In 1965 she became the first organising secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. In 1972 she published The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community with Dalla Costa and founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign; she was also the first spokesperson of the English Collective of Prostitutes. From 1985 she campaigned to have unwaged work counted in national statistics, and since 2000 she has coordinated the Global Women's Strike.

Also known as: Selma Deitch · Selma Weinstein

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

Why demand wages for housework?

Selma James started from her own experience as a housewife and low-paid worker. In January 1971, in the BBC Radio series People for Tomorrow, she used her experience of low-paid jobs and of being a mother and housewife, along with interviews with full-time housewives and with women who worked outside the home but still did most of the household chores, to explore the exploitation of women in society. Her paper Women, the Unions and Work, or What Is Not To Be Done, presented at the third National Women's Liberation Conference in Manchester in March 1972, made wages for housework one of its six demands.

The same year The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which she wrote with Mariarosa Dalla Costa of Padua, opened what came to be called the "domestic labour debate". What a worker sells for a wage is the capacity to work, labour power. That capacity has to be renewed every day through food, washing, rest and care, and the next generation of workers has to be born and raised by someone; this work of making labour power again is called reproductive labour. The book set out how the housework and care work women do outside the market produces the whole working class, so that the market economy is built on women's unwaged work. The first edition did not yet demand wages for housework; that demand came in the third edition of 1975.

At an international meeting in Padua in July 1972, the International Feminist Collective was formed, coordinated by James, Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici and Brigitte Galtier, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign formally began. It demanded money from the state for unwaged work in the home and in the community. The Italian activists who raised the demand saw it not as a welfare measure or a way of honouring the housewife's role but as a weapon of struggle: it would make invisible work visible and give women economic autonomy from a husband's wage. A public debate followed on whether full-time caring was work and whether it should be paid a wage.

After the Manchester conference James and a few other women formed the Power of Women Collective in London and Bristol to campaign for wages for housework; in 1975 it was reconstituted as the Wages for Housework Campaign, based in London, Bristol, Cambridge and later Manchester. That year the campaign opened the Crossroads Women's Centre in a red-light district near London's Euston station, and James became the first spokesperson of the English Collective of Prostitutes, which campaigns for decriminalisation and for viable economic alternatives to prostitution.

How did she make unwaged work count, in statistics and in strikes?

James tried to make unwaged work visible in theory and in statistics alike. Her Marx and Feminism (1983) read Marx's Capital from the point of view of women and of unwaged work and, in the English Wikipedia's assessment, broke with established Marxist theory. From 1985 she helped found the International Women Count Network. A country's gross domestic product counts only what is bought and sold on the market, so however much cooking, washing and childcare is done at home, none of it shows up. The network won the UN decision directing governments to measure and value unwaged work in national statistics.

On 8 March 2000 the Wages for Housework Campaign called a Global Women's Strike, in which women from more than sixty countries took part, and since then James has been international coordinator of this grassroots network. The strike demands that society "Invest in Caring Not Killing" and that military budgets be returned to the community, starting with women; its founding demand was payment for all caring work, in wages, pensions, land and other resources. She has worked with the Venezuelan Revolution since 2002.

In 2019 the Global Women's Strike network and the Wages for Housework Campaign joined the coalition calling for a Green New Deal for Europe, and James, with other members, contributed to its platform report. The report recommended funding a "care income" to compensate unpaid activities such as care for people, the urban environment and the natural world. The care income widens the original demand of wages for housework to all indispensable but unpaid or underpaid work of caring for people and the planet.