My name is Judd Kinsley. I'm Associate Chair of the Department of History.
I want to welcome everybody to the History Club.
The History Club, for those who don't know,
meets one to two times per semester.
And the idea of the History Club is essentially to showcase the work of our colleagues in the Department of History,
which is why we have my colleague, Professor Emily Kawachi here this evening.
And if you're not on our mailing list, I hope that you, you know,
will come away from this deciding that you want to be. So please sign up outside.
I'm happy we talked about this a little bit at the beginning,
but I'm happy that to report that today we'll be partnering with PBS Wisconsin University Place.
This broadcast was will be taped and ultimately broadcast on PBS University Place in the coming months.
So I want to take just a brief moment to introduce my colleague, Professor Emily Kawachi.
I'm really pleased that she is joining us here today.
She's a professor of African history, her first book, street archives and city life,
popular intellectuals in post colonial Tanzania was published by Duke University Press in 2017.
Since that book, she's gone in a slightly different direction.
And your second book, which you'll be talking about today is titled wages for housework,
the story of a movement and idea and a promise. And this was published by Penguin Press in 2025.
This book and Professor Kawachi have been featured widely in the Atlantic of the Guardian,
the New Republic and various kind of media media outlets and she'll be talking about this book in her presentation today.
So without any further ado, I'll turn things over to Emily. Thanks.
Thanks so much, Jen. Thank you all for being here. Welcome history club.
So I wanted to start my talk today by sharing this image.
So here we have this poster from mid 1970s.
And in it, you see right away this image of the Statue of Liberty.
But rather than standing at Ellis Island with a torch,
she's pictured there holding a broom in one hand and a fistful of dollars in the other hand.
And at her feet, you see three children grasping at her robes and she's standing with one foot on top of a pile of dirty dishes.
So I always thought this was kind of a cool image. I came across it in the Library of Congress catalog many years ago
and I ordered a print of it and I've had it up on my wall for many years.
Just kind of as a kind of nifty artifact of second wave feminism.
I always just thought it was a really cool piece of artwork and a really cheeky slogan at the bottom way just for housework.
What a cool idea. But I didn't really think much about that in any more deeper historical sense.
I kind of had it as this piece of art. And I didn't think about it much.
But that really changed when I became a mother for the first time some years back.
And suddenly the question about housework took on a whole new set of meanings.
Like many parents I found myself working suddenly around the clock.
At the job that I had long done for my profession and had enjoyed compensation for.
But now I had another set of tasks that took up the rest of my time caring for an infant.
And yet this new job that I was doing was largely invisible to society, totally uncompensated and unrecognized.
So I grew up in the 1990s. I grew up with feminism.
But the kind of feminism I grew up with in mainstream 1990s of America really didn't talk about housework.
We talked about equality, we talked about career success and expression.
But this question about housework, I think that we thought about it as this kind of relic of older generations.
Not something that would have affected me.
But suddenly faced with this mountain of unpaid work, what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls the second shift.
I started to think about why it is that we live this way.
Like many new parents I got lots of well-intentioned advice, life hacks about how to be more efficient,
how to be more productive, how to balance work and life.
But I found myself really wanting something more ambitious.
I wanted to know why we collectively decide to live this way.
With all of this work that's so essential for how society functions, being invisible and unpaid.
And more importantly, I wanted to think about how we might collectively live differently.
So being an historian, what I did next was to try to think about how older generations of feminists thought about this question of housework.
So I found myself looking to the archives of feminism.
And one of the first places I ended up looking to was the Wages for Housework movement of the very poster that I had hanging in my house.
And so at that time, one of the founders of Wages for Housework, a feminist named Sylvia Federici who had founded the New York Wages for Housework Committee,
was depositing her archives at Brown University.
So I took a trip to her archives just to kind of look into this.
And what I soon found was that this movement was a very serious movement and it was a global movement.
I saw the connections, the branches of this campaign that, you know, stretched across the US, you know, in New York, in Philadelphia, into Canada, in the UK, across Italy, and the Caribbean.
And that really got me thinking about this as a global movement that I wanted to look into in more detail.
So the result of that journey is the book that I want to talk to you about today.
And before I get into the deeper history of this movement and some of the main kind of protagonists in this history,
I wanted to just step this in a little bit for Wages for Housework and what that movement was about in the broadest terms.
So the Wages for Housework campaign, you know, was a campaign that started in the 1970s, a time, you know, that we associate with this broader movement for women's liberation,
you know, what many call second wave feminism.
This is a time when women, you know, from all over the world were, you know, getting together, assembling, and making demands, you know,
demanding an end to patriarchy, an end to oppression, inequality, and really trying to imagine new possibilities for women.
Now Wages for Housework really came up as part of this really hopeful moment, this ambitious moment for thinking about a different world.
And at the same time, they also really disrupted the wider women's liberation of that movement by saying, you know, yes, we want equal rights,
but that really only scratches the surface of what women's oppression is really about.
They said, you know, when you live in a world where the vast majority of essential work that makes society function is work that is unpaid and is done by women,
you know, what could do equal rights do you if you're still, you know, doing this double shift and being exploited?
You know, so they really tried to reframe this feminist movement by saying that rights are important, but they're not enough.
The real roots of oppression and equality are in the material differences that, you know, at their heart are about all this unpaid and visible work.
You know, the work of caring for children, caring for the sick and the elderly, maintaining homes, cooking, cleaning, all this work without which none of the other parts of the economy could function.
So that's what Wages for Housework tried to do.
And they were very controversial at the time, as you can imagine, right?
This is a moment in the 1970s when so many women are trying to say, we don't want to be housewives anymore.
We want to totally get rid of this idea that women should be associated with housework.
And now here come this movement that's trying to get us to associate even more with housework by demanding payment for it.
So it really made a big stir in the movement at that time.
But I think it's really important to remember that this is a group that, you know, was not aiming to make women into paid housewives.
You know, by seeking wages for housework, they were after a lot more than a paycheck.
They were trying to fundamentally change how the economy works.
They were trying to reveal that what we think of as a system of free labor, where people go and they sell their labor in a marketplace,
is actually only a part of the economy.
The real economy happens with all this work that is coerced and basically done for free by women.
So by demanding payment for that, they were not seeking just to be paid and to get a paycheck,
but they were seeking to undermine the entire system and to imagine a new kind of way we might organize our society and our economy.
They were calling for a kind of revolution.
So in the course of researching this book, I came to focus my energies on five women in particular,
who I think are really extraordinary in their ambition, their creativity,
and the unique ideas that each one brought to this insight they had about the value of housework in a capitalist economy
and the potential of organizing a movement around it.
So the first woman I focus on in my book is pictured here. This is Selma James.
So Selma James was born in 1930 in Brooklyn to a radical Jewish politically active family.
Her father was an organizer with the Teamsters Union.
Her mother was really active in organizing tenants to protest unfair evictions and rent rises
and organizing women, you know, mothers to demand their welfare payments for their children.
As a teenager, she joined the youth branch of the Socialist Workers Party,
where she eventually met a man called C.L.R. James, the great Trinidadian Marxist revolutionary,
who was set on building a working class movement from the grassroots,
that tried to really recognize, you know, the inherent kind of creativity and abilities of working class people around the world.
And so Selma James, you know, really found this to be a powerful form of politics.
So, you know, she was a brilliant student, she was accepted with, you know, free tuition to Brooklyn College,
but she decided she didn't want to be a student, she wanted to be a revolutionary.
So she moved to Los Angeles, started working in a factory, you know, and as a young single mother,
really devoted her time to talking to women, you know, about their lives.
And one of the main insights she had was that, you know, at a time when most kind of, you know,
left-wing labor activists really understood the working class and the proletariat as somebody who goes to work at a job every day for wages,
her insight was, you know, if you focus on that as the working class,
you're really missing a big part of the puzzle, which is that many people who work,
you know, are actually doing that work in the homes, that is women.
So this was her main insight, and so she went on to Mary C. L.R. James, she went with him to Trinidad,
she moved to London, you know, where she lived in this mixed race marriage where they were very involved in anti-racist political activities in London.
And so when the second wave feminist movement came in 1970s, she was really ready for it.
She'd been thinking about women's unpaid work for decades already.
And for her, the women's movement was really just an extension of the working class politics that she had grown up with.
The second character I figure, I focus on in my book is Mara Rosa Dalakosta, who's pictured here.
She was born a bit later than Salma James, she was born in the midst of World War II in Italy,
she was born in Northeast Italy in a place called Trevizo.
And she grew up during a time of rapid industrialization in Italy.
You know, this is a time when after World War II, the country was really trying to recover its economy,
and you just saw, you know, a mass kind of wave of factories being built, particularly in the north of Italy.
And what she could see from this was, you know, this rapid changes happening to her society,
including rapid environmental degradation to the areas where she'd grown up, you know,
the growth of monochrog agriculture and, you know, pollution in the kind of Venice lagoon near where she was from.
And at the same time, she also was growing up in this post-Musselini era that really emphasized the patriarchal nuclear family as a social norm.
She was a brilliant student and ambitious young woman, and yet she got older,
she found herself kind of coming up against the societal expectations that what she would do when she came of age would be to become a housewife.
And she really rebelled against that expectation.
So as a young woman, as a student at college in the 1960s, she participated, you know, in, you know, in the student movement.
She joined in with workers who were launching wildcat strikes in the factories across northern Italy.
And she was joining with all of these activists that were talking about the working classes and rising up against the kinds of, you know,
forms of exploitation that were growing up in this post-war movement.
And she had a particular focus of her activism.
You know, she talked about the social factory, which is the idea that, you know, there's this critique that as industrialization really changes the lives of workers.
You know, the social factories, you know, suggests as a concept that it's not just workers who lives are changed by the growth of new industries,
but the lives of everybody who lives in that society, you know, that, you know, her insight was that if you're interested in workers and working class people,
you can't just focus on what happens inside the factory.
You have to imagine that the assembly line stretches all the way into a worker's home, where someone is there cooking for him, you know,
cleaning his clothes, caring for the environment, raising his children.
So for her, thinking about that social factory, the assembly line that goes all the way into the home, that was where the real kind of struggle began.
So Selma James and Mari Rosa Delacosta, they met in 1970.
And, you know, soon after they began, you know, speaking across, you know, from Selma and London and Mari Rosa in Padua.
And, you know, by 1972, they had, you know, basically got together and decided to launch a global movement around this issue of unpaid work, you know,
it will become known as the Wages for Housework Campaign.
So they started with groups, you know, in the UK and Italy.
So here we have an image of the London Wages for Housework Campaign, and they had a women's center that they basically, you know,
took over as a squat in Camden Town in London in the mid 1970s.
And they set up this center where women from the community could, you know,
you could see what they would see as they walked by, right, this kind of words in their window,
Wages for Housework for all women from the state, making very clear what their demand was.
And they welcomed in women of all different kinds, you know, into the center to talk about the way that unpaid work featured
into their lives.
The people who started coming first were people who were, you know, immigrant women who were fighting for their benefits from the state
at a time when there was, you know, there was such a great kind of anti-immigrant sentiment all around.
Sex workers came in to think about how their work fit into an economy that didn't recognize it as work.
You know, they had welfare mothers fighting for their benefits.
You know, you know, lesbian women fighting for custody of their children against a state that was quite homophobic.
So really trying to get different women from different kinds of constituencies together into this women's center
to talk about what housework meant in their lives and what it would mean to mobilize across these different kinds of categories
to really make a demand, you know, of the state and really change how society works.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Maria Rosa de la Costa, she's pictured there in the middle with the megaphone.
She was launching a campaign in Padua, and soon Wages for Housework branches were springing up all over the country, you know,
and it really took off in Italy in part, I think, because, you know, Italy, in contrast with much of western Europe,
you know, into the 1970s, you know, women were not actually leaving the home for paid work.
It has great numbers as they were in parts of northern Europe.
So there's a real kind of, I think, understanding that made a lot of sense to people.
That actually the work that's done in the home is vital work, and it's part of the economy, not separate from it.
So you had branches of the Wages for Housework campaign in, you know, in Padua, in Venice, in Naples, Milan,
Rome, Florence, there even was a branch that, you know, formed in a small town in Sicily.
And, you know, they really came out in big numbers at protests, and were really kind of a big presence in the Italian feminist movement.
You know, they had a lot of fun with their protests, they had puppet shows and theatre, you know, they made artwork, they published zines,
and here we have in this image a picture of a concert where you have members of the campaign getting together,
composing and performing songs that they wrote, you know, about their demand for Wages for Housework.
So from this initial movement that started, you know, with a base in the UK, and then also a base in Italy,
the movement expanded from there.
And one of the next members to really, you know, join and expand this movement is Sylvia Federici, who's pictured here in 1977.
So Sylvia Federici, like Delacosta, was born in Italy.
She was born in Central Italy, in Parma, into a community that was, you know, a very progressive part of Italy.
You know, this is a place where the Italian Communist Party was held a great deal of influence,
yet despite the fact that she grew up in this very kind of politically progressive with respect to these kinds of class issues,
you know, she still really found the gendered expectations placed on her as a young woman to be really quite restrictive.
You know, she was a brilliant student, she was an artist, she was a painter and a writer,
and she really felt the kind of push of this expectation that Housework was her destiny, and she hated that.
So she went to the US to get a PhD in philosophy, and while she was a student in the 1960s,
she got involved with a lot of student activism, including by the early 70s, the growing feminist movement in New York.
So, you know, it was in that context that she learned about Mario Rosa Delacosta's writing in Italy,
and on a family trip home for the summer, she went and met with Delacosta and with Selma James,
and when she came back, she founded the New York Wages for Housework Committee in New York
to kind of make a US branch of this movement that was already getting started in Europe.
Here's an image from the New York Wages for Housework campaign, a poster from one of their protests on Women's Day in March 1977.
So one of the things that, you know, is most well-known about Sylvia Federici, so she, you know, wrote this essay called Wages Against Housework,
you know, in the mid-1970s, that's really become a kind of classic in feminist literature.
You know, it's a really kind of well-known essay by, you know, people who look at the history of feminism,
and it starts with this really famous sentence, they say it is love, we say it is unwaged work.
And I think this phrase really resonated with people because it got at this really kind of difficult question,
and it was, you know, okay, women are doing all this work for free, it's essential work, why do they agree to do it?
And, you know, that idea, again, that it is love, that they say it is love, you know, for her she was getting at this idea that women do it
because we are told it's natural to us, we're told that it's done out of love, we're told that we should want to do this.
She saw that as a kind of emotional blackmail that keeps women oppressed doing work for free and, you know, having this, you know, this part,
this way of organizing society.
So she published that essay, and then she started a committee in New York City and Brooklyn.
Like in London, they opened a storefront, women could come in from the neighborhood and talk about the various forms of housework they did,
their struggles, you know, with getting their welfare payments.
They would go out on Mother's Day and hand out flyers to mothers walking their children in Prospect Park and, you know, say, you know,
maybe instead of putting women on a pedestal for Mother's Day, we should give them a paycheck instead, you know,
and have these kinds of forms of activism that tried to get people thinking about the work that it did and how it functioned in the context of New York City.
Now, another really important part of the story, I think, when talking about the New York Wages for Housework Committee is that this is all getting started in the mid-1970s in New York,
which is the time when the city is facing a fiscal crisis, would eventually declare bankruptcy.
And at that time, you know, the big kind of, you know, political push was about how to deal with this fiscal crisis, you know,
and, you know, what was being proposed in the halls of power was to cut social programs, to cut benefits for mothers,
to cut subsidized child care, you know, to cut welfare payments and to cut the public, you know, university system that allowed mothers to actually go and get an education for free.
So these were all on the chopping block and Wages for Housework was a really big part of protesting those cuts to government services.
And what are the arguments they made was to try to reframe this question of austerity.
They said, you know, the whole discourse about austerity measures and cutting all these programs is that we are cutting loose the freeloaders.
We're getting rid of luxuries. Things are not essential to the functioning government.
They tried to turn that argument on its head and say, actually, you know, we're not here asking for handouts or for charity.
We're here as essential workers demanding our just payment for essential work.
And in that way, they really tried to change the conversation about austerity.
Of course, as we know, you know, then the government went on to declare austerity and cut all those programs.
But I think it's a really important moment when we saw an alternative being, you know, kind of proposed about how feminism could respond to that kind of challenge.
Okay, so the fourth person I want to talk about that you joined the committee and really contributed, you know, in unique ways to it was Wilmette Brown.
She's pictured here.
So Wilmette Brown is a black lesbian woman. She was born in Newark, New Jersey, a city that was very segregated.
And she grew up in a really politically active neighborhood and household.
She was involved in the Congress for Racial Equality.
She was part of the youth NAACP.
And she went on to Berkeley. She was a brilliant student.
And, you know, she was very active in the peace movement at Berkeley in the 1960s.
She soon became disillusioned with campus politics and eventually left campus and joined the Black Panther Party.
And then went on to become involved in the fight for ethnic studies at San Francisco State University.
And, you know, she really traveled the world, you know, being involved in these really different kinds of freedom struggles, you know, as part of her sort of, you know, quest for justice.
And in the mid-1970s, when she kind of encountered the wages for housework movement in New York City after recently moving there,
she really sought to be an extension of what she understood to be the Black freedom struggle.
And she really connected the analysis of the exploitation of women's unpaid work to the struggle historically of black women,
particularly thinking back to histories of slavery, histories of imperialism, and more recently immigration,
and how black women's work has been essential and exploited by modern economic systems.
So she saw wages for housework as an extension of the Black freedom struggle.
And then finally, the fifth person I bring into this kind of, you know, collective story is Margaret Prescott, who's pictured here.
So Margaret Prescott was born in Barbados, and she grew up, you know, at a time when Barbados was still under colonial rule.
And one of the things she saw a lot in the neighborhood where she grew up, you know, it was a modest neighborhood.
It was, you know, she lived in relative poverty.
And she saw time and again women in her community having to travel abroad to work for wages in places like New York and London
and to send remittances home to care for their families.
So she saw the pain this caused to families, basically having to have, you know, women in their lives go abroad to work for money
and to not be able to afford to actually bring their families with them when they traveled.
So for her, she saw this work from a early age.
And so then when the 1960s, her family eventually, you know, gathers the means to move to the U.S.
and she moves to Brooklyn, and she encounters this political discourse that basically, you know, is very anti-immigrant.
That's claiming that, you know, immigrants are the ones who are freeloading on our economy.
They're collecting benefits.
And for her, it was entirely the opposite of that, right?
She saw the ways in which the people from her community, you know, were forced into migration, forced into these low paying jobs,
and their labor was exploited.
So she really, you know, when she came across wages for housework, she really took that in a way that extended it to an analysis
across national borders, how immigration systems participate in this system of exploiting women's unpaid work,
and that being an essential part of modern capitalism.
So she really brought this analysis, you know, to sort of expand the politics of wages for housework in really interesting ways.
And so together with Millet Brown, she formed Black Women for Wages for Housework, which was part of the Wages for Housework campaign,
specifically focused on the ways that, you know, women's unpaid work affected Black women in particular in America.
One of the key kind of moments in this campaign, both Black Women for Wages for Housework,
but also more generally for the campaign, happened in 1977 when Margaret Prescott attended the 1977 Women's Conference in Houston, Texas.
This was a major conference that was convened, you know, with the encouragement of the Carter administration,
and, you know, the most kind of well-known images of this conference, you know, are of Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan,
and this really big fight that was happening in the U.S. this time passed the Equal Rights Amendment.
And that was the main kind of focus of this conference and the ways that it was kind of depicted, you know, in the media.
But a really important struggle that I think is often forgotten was also going on at the same time at this conference,
spearheaded by Margaret Prescott along with some of the founding figures of the National Welfare Rights Movement.
You know, pictured here, you have Ula Sanders and Johnny Tillman, these really important feminists, you know,
who, again, fought for welfare rights as a critical component of their feminism.
And at this conference, the thing that they got together and lobbied for was, first of all, to protect welfare as a right within American society,
that feminists, you know, of all different kinds should support.
But more than that, they argued, you know, that payment should, you know, be offered, be, you know, called a wage rather than charity,
to recognize the dignity and worth of that work.
So they lobbied for that, and that became a part of the platform that then was sort of published as the official position of this conference,
you know, that welfare was not a handout, but, you know, just payment for essential work.
So that was a really key moment in this campaign, you know, and this is the late 1970s, as we know, you know, like,
this then led to an era where a lot of the welfare programs were actually cut.
So in some ways, those kind of concrete demands were not met, you know.
They didn't have success with meeting these demands, but then movement really continued on to the 1980s to really expand their vision.
Some people left the campaign in the late 1970s, the New York wages house for committee, you know, dissolved,
and Italy, the campaign came to a close in 1979.
But when that brown, Margaret Prescott and Salman James continued to organize throughout the 1980s,
in particular to kind of project their image and their vision onto a global stage.
Part of this, you know, played out in the halls of the UN, particularly in the UN conferences on women.
So in 1985, for example, the UN conference on women that's held in Nairobi, wages for housework led by Margaret Prescott,
organized a delegation that would go there, and, you know, argue at this kind of big forum that was, you know,
talking about feminism on a global stage, you know, they argued that, you know,
we know that women do the vast majority of the world's work and yet hold a fraction of the world's wealth.
How do we account for that as feminists?
How do we account as that as economists?
So what they called for, in a way of kind of scaling up this earlier demand of Prescott, was that, you know,
they had a kind of platform that they pushed to get passed to this conference,
which would call a national government around the world to develop accounting mechanisms to count the value of women's unpaid work,
and to make that part of how they evaluate economies.
So that was one of the places where they really kind of tried to make this demand into a global rethinking of the economy.
Another direction the wages for housework campaign took in the 1980s is in environmentalism.
So in the 1980s you have, you know, a lot of activism around, you know, nuclear proliferation.
And one of the people who really became a spokesperson for linking, you know,
the nuclear threat with this issue of unpaid women's work is with Matt Brown.
And this kind of started from, you know, the 1980s when Matt Brown was diagnosed with cancer.
And in the process of healing from cancer, you know, she had two really important kind of insights.
One was how much work it is to have cancer, right?
You know, all the kinds of care work it requires to heal from cancer, the way the community steps in to care for somebody who is ill.
And the second thing she realized is that cancer is not a burden that's distributed equally across society.
One of the things that kind of came out in the 1980s while she was in the process of recovering from cancer was a study
that showed that the place where she grew up in Newark, New Jersey had the highest cancer rates in the entire country.
And that had to do with a lot of the kind of petrochemical plants that were along the Pacific River near where she lived.
And it affected predominantly black neighborhoods like hers.
So she started thinking about the connections between environmental toxicity, racism, and women's unpaid work.
And so she went on to be elected to the Board of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
and the big kind of push that she made was to recognize the ways that environmental racism
and the disproportionate burdens of black communities are connected to the broader fight for peace and for environmental justice.
So, Luma Brown had this really kind of big push.
She ended up leaving the campaign in the 1990s and, you know, Margaret Prescott and Selma James continued on
and they continue working on this campaign to the present day.
Many other groups have joined the organization.
They renamed the Wages for Housework campaign Global Women's Strike,
and their work really gained particular momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic
when care work became so visible to all of us in our lives.
The focus on essential work really kind of came to the fore.
And so in the context of that, they renamed their demand from Wages for Housework
to a more capacious kind of phrase they call for care income now.
Basically calling for compensation and support for anyone who does work of caring for people or the planet.
So that kind of takes the campaign up to the present day.
In conclusion, I want to just talk about some of the things that I've learned in the process
of researching this history, writing this book.
And I want to focus on three provocations that they made that I find really useful
to understand in the contemporary world.
The first provocation is this.
The home is a workplace.
We think about it typically as a kind of respite from the world of work,
as a kind of safe haven from the world of market relations.
But Wages for Housework really show that it's an essential part of it.
And I think this really matters not just for those of us who care for children
and do housework in our own lives,
but to hold groups of workers who do this actually for their profession,
whose workplace is somebody else's home.
And particularly I want to talk about how Wages for Housework,
many of the activists from that campaign went on to work alongside domestic workers
who are fighting for recognition of the work they do in the home.
Historically domestic workers, house cleaners, home health aides
have not been recognized under labor law.
Again, because of this idea that the home is not a workplace.
And so a lot of their efforts kind of culminated in 2011,
the International Labor Organization passed Convention 189,
otherwise known as decent work for domestics.
Recognizing the home is a workplace and extending worker protections to all who work in the home.
Now a lot of places have yet to actually adopt this convention,
but it's a really important step I think in actually dissolving that boundary
that we set between the home and the workplace.
A second provocation that I find really useful in kind of linking this historic campaign
to the contemporary world is thinking about women's unpaid work
as an alternative way of looking at austerity.
In times of economic crisis, as I've talked about with the New York crisis of the 70s,
some of the first things to be cut from the budget are things that support unpaid women's care work,
or that support rather that cut women's care work.
And wages for housework argued that cutting off social support
was not just a matter of kind of tightening the belt and trimming budgets,
but a way of exploiting coercing labor from women,
a kind of form of freeloading on the work of women.
And I want to just read to you a quotation from a wages for housework activist named Andaie.
She was from Guyana, and she founded a wages for housework branching Guyana in the 1980s.
And she has this to say about structural adjustment programs that were imposed on Guyana in the 1980s,
basically pushing governments to cut all these social programs.
She wrote,
When prices rise and incomes plunge, whose job is it to walk from shop to shop
and stall to stall in order to find the cheapest items of food?
And then to go home and do the extra cooking that is required to make cheap items of food edible.
When as in Guyana, all the systems for the provision of safe water fail,
who goes to fetch water daily from downstairs or the next street or two miles down the road except women?
When as in Guyana would become prey to waterborne diseases,
who has to try to hold the line against the total collapse of the immediate environment of the family except women?
When women fail in this and the disease does strike,
who has to run up and down to take family to hospitals which have become ill-equipped because of government cuts?
Structural adjustment assumes correctly that what women do in the face of the deterioration it brings
is to increase the unpaid work we do without even thinking about it in an attempt to ensure that our families survive.
And then the third provocation, largely inspired by what Matt Brown,
that I think is really useful for thinking about our contemporary world,
is the idea that housework is environmental survival and repair.
And I think about the kind of insight she had facing her own cancer crisis
and thinking about environmental racism, you know, thinking about, you know, connected to what she grew up with in her hometown.
And I was thinking about this a lot as I observed what was happening in the world.
As I wrote this book, for example, the crisis of poisoned water supply in Flint, Michigan, right?
Of course, the obvious, you know, victims of this are people who are poisoned by that water,
the health effects that result from having a water supply that's painted in that way.
A whole other level that I sort of think about when I was, you know, thinking about wages for housework
is the kinds of work burdens that imposes on women, particularly in poor communities, when you can't trust the water supply.
You know, water is the central tool of doing any kind of housework.
If you can't use that and trust that, how much more work do you have to do to try to keep your children safe,
to keep your household running?
Similarly, you know, we're facing deforestation and rising sea levels.
And one of the kind of insights, you know, for example, you have Ellen Sirleaf Johnson,
the former president of Liberia talking about how so much of climate change is women's work.
Women are the ones that have to walk further to gather firewood
when, you know, the forested areas around you are, you know, are cut down, you know,
who have to deal with water supply issues when rising sea levels and the safety of water is threatened.
So to what extent does climate change connected to women's unpaid work?
And how might that change how we think about environmental justice in that context?
These are just some of the lessons I learned from the Wages for Housework movement and its history.
And so just in conclusion, you know, Wages for Housework was a really powerful way for me to think about what I was facing in my own life
as an individual, you know, dealing with new forms of work and new forms of community as I became a mother for the first time.
But really, as I learned about this history, it also made me think about some of the pressing challenges that are facing our world as a whole.
And that was really what was so powerful to me about studying this history.
So thank you so much for listening, and I really appreciate your time.