[gentle music]
- Judd Kinzley: Welcome.
My name is Judd Kinzley.
I'm associate chair in the Department of History.
I wanna welcome everybody to the History Club.
History Club, for those who don't know,
meets one to two times per semester.
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 Callaci, here this evening.
And if you're not on our mailing list,
I hope that you will come away from this
deciding that you want to be, and 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 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 Callaci.
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 Postcolonial Tanzania,
was published by Duke University Press in 2017.
Since that book,
she's gone in a slightly different direction,
and her second book, which she'll be talking about today,
is titled Wages for Housework:
The Story of a Movement, an Idea, and a Promise.
And this was published by Penguin Press in 2025.
This book and Professor Callaci
have been featured widely in The Atlantic, The Guardian,
The New Republic, and various kind of 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.
[audience applauds]
- Emily Callaci: Thanks so much, Judd.
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,
there's this image of the Statue of Liberty.
But, you know,
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:
"Wages 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.
You know, and yet, this new job that I was doing
was largely invisible to society,
totally uncompensated and unrecognized.
So, you know, I grew up in the 1990s.
I grew up with, you know, with feminism,
but the kind of feminism I grew up with in mainstream,
you know, 1990s America really didn't talk about housework.
You know, we talked about equality.
We talked about career success and expression.
But this question about housework, you know,
I think that we thought about it
as this kind of relic of older generations,
you know, not something that would have affected me.
But suddenly faced with this,
this, you know, mountain of unpaid work,
you know, what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild
calls the "second shift,"
I started to think about, you know,
why it is that we live this way.
And, you know, like many new parents,
I got lots of kinds of well-intentioned advice,
you know, life hacks about how to be more efficient,
how to be more productive, how to balance,
you know, work and life.
But I found myself really wanting
something more ambitious.
You know, I wanted to know
why we collectively decide to live this way,
you know, 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, you know, at that time,
one of the founders of Wages for Housework,
a feminist named Silvia 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 stretched across the U.S.,
you know, in New York and Philadelphia,
into Canada and 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, 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 set the scene 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,
this broader movement for women's liberation,
you know, what many call second-wave feminism.
This is a time when women 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 and 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 good 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 inequality
are in the material differences that, you know,
at their heart are about all this unpaid, invisible 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 wanna be housewives anymore.
"We wanna 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 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, 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 marry C.L.R. James.
She went with him to Trinidad.
She moved to London, where she lived in this,
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 focus on in my book
is Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who's pictured here.
She was born a bit later than Selma James.
She was born in the midst of World War II in Italy.
She was born in northeast Italy, in a place called Treviso,
and she grew up during a time
of rapid industrialization in Italy.
This is a time when, after World War II,
the country was really trying to recover its economy.
And you just saw 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 change is happening to her society,
including rapid environmental degradation to the areas
where she'd grown up,
you know, the growth of monocrop 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-Mussolini era
that really emphasized the patriarchal nuclear family
as a social norm.
She was a brilliant student, an ambitious young woman,
and yet, as 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 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 forms of exploitation
that were growing up in this postwar movement.
And she had a particular focus of her activism.
You know, she talked about the "social factory,"
which is the idea that there's this critique
that as industrialization really changes the lives of workers,
you know, the social factory suggests, as a concept,
that it's not just workers whose 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 at 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 Mariarosa Dalla Costa,
they met in 1970.
And, you know,
soon after, they began speaking across, you know,
from Selma in London and Mariarosa in Padua.
And, you know, by 1972, they had basically got together
and decided to launch a global movement
around this issue of unpaid work,
you know, what 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 can 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 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 of the state
and really change how society works.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Mariarosa Dalla 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 Italy,
in contrast with much of western Europe,
you know, into the 1970s, women were not actually
leaving the home for paid work in as 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 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 theater,
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 about their demand for wages for housework.
So, from this initial movement
that started 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 join
and expand this movement is Silvia Federici,
who's pictured here in 1977.
So, Silvia Federici, like Dalla Costa, was born in Italy.
She was born in central Italy, in Parma,
into a community that was a very progressive part of Italy.
You know, this was 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's 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 U.S. 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
Mariarosa Dalla Costa's writing in Italy,
and on a family trip home for the summer,
she went and met with Dalla Costa
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 U.S. 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 Silvia Federici,
so, she wrote this essay
called "Wages Against Housework" in the mid 1970s
that's really become a kind of classic in feminist literature.
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,
which was, you know, okay,
women are doing all this work for free,
it's essential work.
Why do they agree to do it?
And 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 'cause we are told it's natural to us.
We're told that is 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 having this, you know, this way of organizing society.
So, she published that essay,
and then she started a committee in New York City,
in Brooklyn.
Like in London, they opened a storefront
where 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 they 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 childcare, you know,
to cut welfare payments and to cut the public 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 is a really big part
of protesting those cuts to government services.
And one of 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 that are not essential to the functioning of 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,
then the government went on to declare austerity
and cut all those programs.
But I think it's a really important moment
where we saw an alternative being kind of proposed about
how feminism could respond to that kind of challenge.
Okay, so the fourth person I wanna talk about
that joined the committee
and really contributed in unique ways to it
was Wilmette Brown.
She's pictured here.
So, Wilmette Brown's 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 of Racial Equality.
She was part of the youth NAACP.
And she went on to Berkeley.
She was a brilliant student, and 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 collective story
is Margaret Prescod, who's pictured here.
So, Margaret Prescod 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.
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 an early age.
And so, then when the 1960s,
her family eventually gathers the means to move to the U.S.,
and she moves to Brooklyn,
and she encounters this political discourse
that basically is very anti-immigrant,
that's claiming that 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
to sort of expand the politics of Wages for Housework
in really interesting ways.
And so, together with Wilmette Brown,
she formed Black Women for Wages for Housework,
which was part of the Wages for Housework campaign
specifically focused on the ways
that 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 Prescod attended the 1977 Women's Conference
in Houston, Texas.
This was a major conference that was convened
with the encouragement of the Carter administration.
And, you know,
the most kind of well-known images of this conference
are of Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan
and this really big fight that was happening in the U.S.
at this time to pass 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 Prescod,
along with some of the founding figures
of the National Welfare Rights Movement.
Pictured here, you have Beulah Sanders and Johnnie Tillmon,
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 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 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 the 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 for Housework Committee,
you know, dissolved.
In Italy, the campaign came to a close in 1979.
But Wilmette Brown,
Margaret Prescod, and Selma 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 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 was held in Nairobi,
Wages for Housework, led by Margaret Prescod,
organized a delegation that would go there
and argue in, at this kind of big forum that was, you know,
talking about feminism on a global stage.
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 that as economists?"
So, what they called for, in a way, kind of scaling up
this earlier demand of Prescod, was that,
you know, they had a kind of platform
that they pushed to get passed with this conference,
which would call on national governments 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 Wilmette Brown.
And this kind of started from the 1980s
when Wilmette 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?
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 '80s,
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 Passaic 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, Wilmette Brown had this really kind of big push.
She ended up leaving the campaign in the 1990s,
and, you know, Margaret Prescod and Selma James continued on,
and they continue working on this campaign
to the present day.
Many other groups have joined the organization.
They've 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.
You know, 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," you know,
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 wanna just talk about
some of the things that I've learned
in the process of researching this history
and writing this book.
And I wanna focus on three provocations
that they made that I found really useful
to understand in the contemporary world.
The first provocation is this: The home is a workplace.
We think about it,
you know, typically as a kind of respite from the world of work,
as a kind of, you know, a kind of safe haven
from the world of market relations.
But Wages for Housework really showed
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,
you know, in our own lives, but to whole groups of workers
who do this actually for their profession, you know,
whose workplace is somebody else's home.
And particularly, I wanna talk about
how Wages for Housework, you know,
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,
you know, kind of culminated in 2011.
The International Labor Organization
passed Convention 189,
otherwise known as Decent Work for Domestics,
recognizing the home as 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 labour 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 Andaiye.
She was from Guyana, and she founded
a Wages for Housework branch in Guyana in the 1980s.
And she has this to say about structural adjustment programs
that were imposed on Guyana in the 1980s,
you know, 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,
"we 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 Wilmette 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,
that result from having a water supply
that's tainted in that way.
A whole other level that I started to think about
when I was 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 work,
walk further to gather firewood
when 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 is 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, dealing with new forms of work,
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.
[audience applauds]