The introduction to Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework opens with an image. A campaign poster from 1974 shows an illustrated Statue of Liberty holding a fistful of cash and a broom as children grab at her robes and dishes lay stacked at her feet. Her face is defiant.
The poster (pictured below), created by the New York Wages for Housework Committee, sums up the central demand of the decades-long Wages for Housework campaign that Callaci’s book intricately traces from 1968 to the present day: that women’s care labour should be compensated in order for it to be valued by society.
The international campaign, which was first founded in 1960s New York by working-class feminist and housewife Selma James, argues that women’s care and domestic work is the backbone of the entire capitalist system. Capitalism, after all, relies on workers’ waged labour. But who produces, nurtures and feeds workers? Women. For free.
Wages for Housework poses a tantalising question: if this is work, what would happen if women refused to do it? Alternatively, how would women’s lives change if they were actually paid for it?
The immediacy of these questions compelled Callaci, a history professor and mother, to embark on the book. When she returned to work after having her first son, between her days teaching at university and her evenings caring for her child, she was herself working 18-hour days, and found herself contemplating how motherhood had completely changed her relationship to capitalism. Her earnest reflections on her experience invite readers to reflect on their relationship to care labour, and paid labour, too.
Callaci’s book profiles the lives and work of the five dynamic, visionary women who led the international Wages for Housework movement.
Selma James fought to protect family allowance payments to women in 1972 London and still campaigns to this day. Mariarosa Dalla Costa organised with students, female factory workers and artists to kickstart committees and campaigns across Italy. Silvia Federici, a feminist academic who argued in the New York 1976 fiscal crisis that austerity was an exploitation of women’s unpaid work.
Then there is Wilmette Brown, a lesbian and Black Panther in Berkeley who up-ended the campaign’s theory to argue that it was the destructive harm of capitalism that created more care work for women, and Margaret Prescod, who ensured the campaign included sex workers and, as a woman born in Barbados, saw wages for housework as a form of colonial reparations for Black women’s unwaged work.
Using interviews and archival research, Callaci presents charming vignettes from the campaign’s history. Detailing the organising of Italian factory workers in Italy in 1974, who went on to successfully secure healthcare rights at work, she describes the women’s realisation that paid work did not provide the autonomy and liberation that second wave feminism had promised:
Working eight-hour shifts at the factory had not made them the equals of men, for it did not replace or lessen the work they were expected to do in their homes. When their male co-workers clocked off the job, they could expect to go home and be cared for; fed, and rejuvenated, but when women workers got home, they resumed the job they did for free.
Perhaps most relevant to today is the chapter that explores New York City’s 1976 fiscal crisis, which saw the government implement staggering cuts to welfare benefits, subsidised daycare, college tuition and healthcare.
Silvia Federici identified these payments and subsidies as support for unpaid women’s work, a form of wages for housework, and argued that when the government removed them, it banked on the assumption that women would continue to do the care work of looking after children, sick and elderly relatives for free. By extension, government austerity projects exploited women’s care labour.
Yet alongside showcasing the campaign’s material victories and intellectual landmarks, Callaci does not shy away from the many tensions within the ground-breaking, but also heart-breaking, movement. She is candid about fallouts between the key women involved.
Callaci also highlights the unresolved tensions and contradictions around what the ‘promise’ of a care income had hoped to materially achieve: were women to be paid a wage from the state or male partners? Would this not just reinforce gender roles that would keep women trapped in the home? Would quantifying care mean that nothing under capitalism was safe from commodification?
Callaci’s book is as much a political provocation as it is a celebration. Its well-timed publication resurrects the campaign’s core critique of capitalism and women’s care labour in a present-day context. In 2025, austerity is still on the agenda. With a new government that refuses to uncap child benefits and proposes to slash disability payments, Wages for Housework is as urgently relevant to working women in the UK as it was in the 1970s.
Wages for Housework is available in hardback from Penguin for £25.000.