Wages for Housework

The International Wages for Housework Campaign was started in 1972 by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier and Selma James, who first put forward the demand for wages for housework. Dalla Costa co-founded the International Feminist Collective, formed in Padua in 1972 to promote political debate and action on housework, from which the international campaign arose. The movement came out of the wider current of Italian autonomist Marxism, and Dalla Costa developed her analysis as an immanent critique of Italian workerism.

Its theoretical starting point was The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press, 1972) by Dalla Costa and James, which opened the “domestic labour debate” by redefining housework as reproductive labour necessary to the functioning of capital yet made invisible by its removal from the wage relation. Its first edition did not come out for wages for housework; the third edition of 1975 did. Wages for housework was one of the six demands of “Women, the Unions and Work, or What Is Not to Be Done”, which James presented to the third National Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester; James then formed the Power of Women Collective in London and Bristol to campaign for it, reconstituted as the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1975. In Italy groups calling themselves Salario al Lavoro Domestico formed in several cities in 1974, and in Padua Lotta Femminista, formed by Dalla Costa and Federici, adopted the idea.

In 1975 Federici started the New York Wages for Housework Committee and published Wages Against Housework with the Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press. The text opens: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.” Federici argued that capital made women accept unwaged work by convincing them that housework is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity, and that its unwaged condition reinforced the assumption that housework is not work, preventing women from struggling against it. Wages for housework, she held, should be seen not as “a lump of money” but as a political perspective.

Between 1974 and 1976 autonomous organisations formed within the campaign in the UK, US and Canada: Wages Due Lesbians, the English Collective of Prostitutes, and Black Women for Wages for Housework, co-founded by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown. In 1977 the New York group Federici had formed dissolved, and the Padua group led by Dalla Costa left the IWFHC and dissolved soon after; Dalla Costa blamed political repression in late-1970s Italy. In the 1980s and 1990s the campaign won UN resolutions recognising unwaged caring work, and since 8 March 2000 it has been better known as the Global Women’s Strike. In 2019 it contributed a recommendation for a “care income” compensating care for people, the urban environment and the natural world to the Green New Deal for Europe report.

The campaign drew debate from within the left and beyond. In 1979 Heidi Hartmann criticised Dalla Costa’s analysis of housework as an argument about the relation of housework to capital rather than about relations between men and women, while granting that her wage demand had vastly increased consciousness of the importance of housework in the women’s movement. Other critics argued that wages for housework could reinforce or institutionalise gendered roles, and that the goal should be liberation from housework, equal opportunity and pay in paid work, and a more equal sharing of unpaid work; some feared it would commodify intimate relations of love and care. Proponents replied that entering the workforce did not change women’s social role and left women in paid work facing a “double shift”. The movement’s conceptual legacy continues in reproductive labour and social reproduction theory.