Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. Unpaid domestic labor has long been the invisible backbone of economies worldwide. But what if it were compensated?

In this episode, historian Emily Kalachi takes us inside the Wages for Housework movement. In this episode, historian Emily Kalachi takes us inside the Wages for Housework movement, a bold and controversial campaign that emerged in the 1970s. Drawing on her new book, Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise, Kalachi tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators.

tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades. Joining Kalachi to discuss the history, impact and lasting relevance of this revolutionary idea is Hannah Dawson, the historian of ideas at King's College London and editor of the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. Let's join Hannah now with more.

Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Hannah Dawson. Our guest today is Emily Kalachi. Emily is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.

She is a historian of modern Africa, global feminism and decolonisation. Her first book, Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Post-Colonial Tanzania, is an extraordinary exploration about the young migrant community drawn to the amazing city of Dar es Salaam during the socialist era in that country. And her new book, which is the subject of our discussion today, is Wages for Housework,

the story of a movement, an idea, a promise. And as I hope you can see, those of you who are watching this rather than just listening to it, it's a completely stunning cover and matches the stunning quality of the words inside. I really love this book, Emily, and hugely look forward to talking to you about it and really recommend it as...

as a brilliantly clear exposition of a completely fundamental and transformative movement within the history of feminism and of capitalism and of socialism and of rethinking,

big ideas about class and labour and solidarity. And I wonder if we might begin, Emily, by talking about the kind of core idea of this movement, this movement which became encapsulated in the slogan in the 1970s, Wages for Housework, which of course made visible

in this undeniable way, the fact that what women did in the home, the caring, the cooking, the cleaning, was work. And as with all work, it ought to be remunerated.

So maybe just to briefly start, it might make sense to talk about the moment, right, 1970s, where you have feminists all over the world are coming together and talking about the situation of women. And one of the kind of core elements of the mainstream feminist movement was to talk about women's rights.

legal rights, the right for equal pay for equal work, the right to abortion and contraception, all these really critically important things. And yet some of the women in wages for housework, their insight was that while all these discussions about women's rights are really important and all, you know,

appropriate and well and good, they didn't go far enough in addressing one of the key factors of inequality, which is the fact that we live in a global economic system.

that relies on just hours and hours and hours of work that is not counted as part of the economy, that is not compensated in any way. Of course I'm talking about, as you mentioned, housework, the work of caring for children, of caring for the sick and the elderly, of maintaining households, of feeding people, right?

Without this work, the entire global economy would grind to a halt. And yet those who do this work are not recognized for it, they're not compensated for it. In fact, often the fact that they do that work actually impoverishes them. So by demanding wages for housework, by demanding recognition and compensation for this work,

they were after a lot more than just a paycheck. They were really trying to challenge that entire global system that relies on the extraction of that unpaid work. So they're really kind of trying to imagine a totally different way that we might live together as a society. - Wonderful, thank you. That's right. So it's this incredible synergy between Marxism on the one hand and the critique of capitalism that's at the core of that and feminism.

And it's kind of Marxism on steroids in the sense that it's taking the account that we're familiar with of the extraction of value from the worker in exchange for this paltry wage, turning workers into wage slaves, and saying that capitalism is

does this in the most amazing total way with women in the sense that it extracts their value, it extracts the labor and pays them nothing. And that sort of extraordinary theft

Yes. That's at the core of that insight. That's why it's such a kind of illuminating thing. And of course, it points to one of the themes that comes through wonderfully powerfully in your book, which is this...

Emphasis on rethinking and kind of expanding our understanding of the working class. Because a lot of what Wages for Health Work did was exactly to kind of challenge particular stereotypes. It was interested in challenging, on the one hand, the stereotype of the worker as male and working in a factory and to understand the worker as

not only working in the home but of course doing the work that's associated with women so care work um domestic work which as it were not in your home but um you're going into homes um so rethinking the notion of the working class which feels to me like such an urgent point at this moment where there's a lot of rhetoric appealing and political populist movements appealing to the working classes who've been left behind and

ongoingly erasing a huge segment of that group who are women, women of colour, poor women, migrant women, the most sort of marginalised people in our societies. And so it feels like now is such an important moment to re-emphasise or to re-see, to re-visibilise what the working class is.

And I wonder if you wanted to talk a bit about that, about the kind of amazing multiplicity, multiraciality of the movement. Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's part of why I was so drawn to this topic. I mean, you know, one of the first motivations for me was my own personal life and becoming a parent and, you know, but...

As I kind of started looking into this movement and looking at, it's kind of like you get x-ray glasses and you can suddenly see this work everywhere, not just in the kind of nuclear family home, which might be the first thing you think of when you hear wages for housework, right? You think of housework in the home, but just how much work is going on everywhere to make society successful.

safe, to cope with climate change, to cope with violence, to cope with racism that many children face when they go to school. So I think one of the moments when I kind of thought that this topic is a book length thing is when I came across the work of Wimette Brown.

So, Wynette Brown is one of the five women intellectual activists that I write about in this book. And she grew up in Newark, New Jersey, which is one of the most racially segregated cities in America. And it also is the place in America that has the highest cancer rates, in part because of, well, entirely because of environmental racism and the effects of pollution on these urban communities in Newark.

So she wrote this pamphlet in, I think, you know, in the early 80s after she herself was diagnosed with cancer. And she was, you know, she coined this phrase, the housework of cancer, which is, you know, so recognizable if you've ever actually encountered the illness, just the amount of care work that is involved in healing from cancer and caring for someone who has cancer, right?

And she took that moment to really rethink this politics of housework, right? Of course it includes the wife of the factory worker. Of course it includes all these other things that are the more common protagonist of that feminist movement. But she started to look to her neighborhood. She started to look to, for example, the kinds of work that are imposed on women who live, for example, in substandard homes

housing, you know, who have, you know, neglectful landlords or who live with environmental pollution and racism and how that makes extra work on the community. She looks at the work of welfare mothers, you know, who are living in these systems where their kids are neglected by the state and they then become the people who provide those services that the state doesn't provide.

So, Wilmette Brown, by talking about wages for housework in the context of living with environmental racism and poverty, she really kind of expanded this concept to really think about the broader questions about racial capitalism and about environmental racism and how that imposes a totally different or expanded version of how we think about housework.

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Maybe we should just backtrack exactly and just explain that the book is, I mean, it's an extraordinarily rich account teeming with life and there are an awful lot of, not an awful lot, there are a wonderful number of personalities and events in the book, but you organize the book around five women. And one of the women who I was extremely glad to see foregrounded in this book

exactly as you say, is Wilmette Brown. And you've just talked wonderfully about her insights. I mean, one of the things that connects to what you've just been saying, but which is why she's such an interesting figure in the context of the movement of Wages for Housework, is that she kind of pushes the analysis on in kind of two ways. One is that she identifies not only the way in which capitalism feeds off women's work,

but the way in which extractivist racial capitalism causes extraordinary harms

through polluting air, polluting water, appalling, impoverished, dilapidated housing, and then expects or demands, because there's no alternative, the women to kind of clean up that mess. Yes. And to repair the harms that they've been done. And so this sort of, she offers this incredible kind of depth

of analysis of the harm of capitalism as both not only as an extractive phenomenon, but also as a, you know, she deepens our understanding of the violence that capitalism does. Absolutely, yes. And of course, connected with that is her interest in the environment and centering, because what Wages of Housework did was to center the idea of care in political analysis and to make it a source of kind of value that ought to be remunerated. And care, of course, applies

to human beings and to the environment in which they live. And so the way in which she connects up Marxism feminism and the Black freedom struggle to environmentalism, I think so powerful. - And so, as you mentioned, Wilmette Brown is kind of the person who really kind of makes this connection with environmental racism. She grew up in a place along the kind of Passaic River where there are all these petrochemical factors

That's also a theme in the work of Maria Rosa Della Costa, who was working and organizing as Italy was undergoing its major industrial shift in the 1970s, 60s, and 70s. But just thinking about how living with the effects of environmental degradation is another form of unpaid work.

You know, so Willna Brown, for example, was doing this work at, you know, in the 80s, you know, after Chernobyl and thinking about the effects, for example, of the movement against nuclear weapons. Right. And they talked about nuclear housework. Right. What kinds of you know, when you calculate the cost or effects of this kind of form of energy and the kind of pollution of it, they were arguing you have to factor in, for example, the high rates of illness that come about in the places where you have radiation, where people are exposed to radiation.

either in the form of nuclear weapons, but also in the form of these factories and disposal of waste products. What kinds of care work are invisible and being expected of people in the wake of that? And you can also talk about, for example, asthma rates in cities that are polluted, and how that's disproportionately experienced by poor people and by people of color. And of course, that adds incredible burdens to people who are doing care work.

again work that's unpaid unrecognized not considered you know part of the the cost of this not considered part of the economy so that was just so eye-opening for me to think about

housework in that expansive way as not just the work that delivers profit for capitalism, but also the work of surviving capitalism and making up for its harms. And just as one final note on that, one of the things I really loved about studying this movement is the kind of global reach. So some of their people who joined this movement in the Global South, for example,

Andaye, the great feminist from Guyana, talked about living with the effects of climate change. When you have massive flooding, for example, who is it that's going to rebuild that infrastructure? Who's going to care for the sick when the hospitals kind of collapse? That work of coping with climate change and adjusting to it is disproportionately borne by people who are women and who are not paid to do that work.

So I found that really, really eye-opening. Yes, that's brilliant. And that, of course, points to the final figure in your book,

Margaret Prescott, who exactly then shifts the optic again and focuses us on the global in a very big way. You know, she has this incredibly articulate account of how the wealth of the global north has been created by

women in large part of the global south by women of color and that they

ought to be rewarded for that. And she has this kind of brilliant phrase which intersects with the whole benefit economy and the whole idea of welfare. She's like, I'm not asking for handouts, I'm not asking for charity, I'm asking, I'm claiming what's mine. She's an extraordinary figure again, exactly, in just showing the amazing reach of this movement and also pointing so interestingly to

you know what's been happening recently in terms of the global economy and this huge emphasis not just in kind of western governments but also globally in in terms of imf policies or whatever which have this emphasis on austerity you know and if you want our help if you want um things to improve then you're going to have to we're going to have to cut this and cut that and and the way in which actually what that means is that you're just punishing further

Yes. No, I found that so interesting. I found the ways that Wages for Housework movement talked about austerity for me was just, it totally framed it in a new light. I think that we often think about austerity or it's presented to us anyway as a kind of fiscal responsibility and tightening the belt.

Getting rid of things we can't afford, you know and the way that wages for housework reframed that was to say You know so much of this this work that you're also know this, you know these programs that you're cutting This is essential work. You're cutting health care. You're cutting child care. You're cutting, you know care for you know, the community right when you cut that that work doesn't go away It's just performed but for free by people So basically you're taking essential work that is compensated and recognizing recognized and you're making it uncompensated

You're extracting that from people. It's coerced labor.

It's so interesting. And the direction of travel, so the direction of travel has not been to value that work more. It's been in the opposite direction. Yes. It's to steal more labor. Absolutely. Yeah. I was just thinking again about Margaret Prescott because, you know, just to backtrack a little about her, you know, she was born in Barbados and she grew up in this community, you know, that had, you know, produced so much of the wealth of the slave trade, you know. And growing up in a relatively poor community, she watched so many women in her community

travel abroad to London, to Amsterdam, to New York to work as domestic workers.

to do low paid care work in homes. So for her as a child, that was truly an extraction of labor, an extraction of resources from her community. Those women were not there. Someone else had to step in and care for their own families, right? And then when she gets to London and New York when she migrates as a teenager, she encounters this anti-immigrant rhetoric that basically says, immigrants are freeloaders. They're coming here and using our social services and getting these handouts.

when for her it was totally clear that it was the other way around, right? That their labor was being extracted, you know? - Yes. - I think that puts a different and interesting and powerful interpretation of austerity politics. - I totally agree. And it's one of the really fantastic kind of revelations of your book is the way that you frame that. And actually,

it points to another really important theme of the movement, and you bring this out well in the book, which is that part of what the movement was interested in doing was exactly kind of

renaming, reframing, re-representing things that seem to be kind of natural pillars of the world. And so, you know, with the example you've just given is the idea of like fiscal responsibility, you know, good housekeeping and the idea that that depended on some kind of abstention.

and austerity, that's a good thing. And then exactly to sort of show, to take the lid off that and show that what it really was was just further punishment of women. And that of course goes for the sort of core idea of the movement, which is about seeing what women do, not as their duty or their natural role, but rather as exploitative labor. And of course, a woman, one of the figures in your book who was so powerful in terms of analyzing the language

was Silvia Federici, who writes so eloquently to unmask the extraction. So I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about her and her amazing words. Yeah, so Silvia Federici, she grew up in Italy in the aftermath of World War II and Mussolini, and she really is someone as a brilliant writer

you know, sort of tomboyish young woman really chafed against those gender roles and basically the expectation that she would grow up and become a housewife. And so she really fled that and she came to the US and became a philosophy student. And when she joined Wages for Housework, she just wrote some of the most beautiful insights about the emotional aspects of this. You know, her famous kind of manifesto Wages Against Housework starts with the really memorable phrase. They call it love. We call it unpaid work.

And that really gets at how we are conditioned as women to think this is our natural destiny, to think that we are naturally destined to do this work, that we find it rewarding, that it is somehow inherent to our sex.

And for her, that's a kind of emotional blackmail, right? That is why it is undervalued. That is how we are convinced to do this for free. That's how we are impoverished by this. Recognizing this kind of emotional manipulation that's happening with that, by calling it work, by recognizing it as a work, rather than seeing it as something we simply do out of love,

we are actually exposing that system. We are putting it out in the open, you know, like, and, you know, for her, it's, you know, like the others in the movement, it's about exposing how capitalism actually works as a way of, you know, of ending that system or of challenging that system of, you know, finding a new way to do things. And for her, I think one of the things that you really see in her work

is also a huge imagination about how we might live differently, how we might feel differently, how we might relate to each other differently. One of the questions she asks is, can we really talk about emotional satisfaction and sexual pleasure? How can we even really know ourselves if we are financially dependent on the person we're sleeping with? How can you actually have that kind of

self-knowledge and exploration and really figure out what it means to live an emotionally fulfilling life and to have relationships with each other if you're not financially autonomous, if you are pushed together by these directives of capitalism to live in a nuclear family with your heteronormative roles

to discipline children so that they can become good capitalists, you know, like. So really kind of, you know, wages for housework and exposing this is about changing the economic system. It's about, you know, totally upending the kind of hierarchies that structure our world. It's also about emotional liberation, you know, and discovering how we might relate to each other, you know, if we did recognize this.

I mean, of course, one thinks about kind of feminism more broadly and the notion that the personal is political and to bring the personal into conversation with the political, of course, that's, you know, what feminism does in a much kind of broader sense and this whole idea of raising consciousness. And you have that.

So as you've just described, you have that so vividly enacted in Wages for Housework because they're exactly concerned, as you say, with the kind of affective costs of this material exploitation. It's really important not to, as it were, and this was a kind of frustration that some Marxist feminists had with Marxism,

and of course a frustration that some critics have of Marxism is that it wants to overly focus on the material and not think sufficiently about the interaction with the psychological and the linguistic. And so the way in which the movement brought those things together was so... I mean, it's just an extraordinary lesson, it seems to me, in how to think

fully in a sort of socialist mode and fully intersectionally. And of course, another thing that you were talking about there was this, thinking about the stereotypes, and there's a stereotype of the worker as a sort of man, but there's also the stereotype of the housewife. And they are not, we're not, these are not kind of middle-class,

heterosexual housewives. I mean, they're part of it, but I mean, it's a fun, one of the things that's so interesting about the movement and Federici is so exactly as you were saying, so good on that is that, you know, it's asking us to think so diversely about womanhood. There were lots of lesbians in the movement. There were the notion of disability as well. The experience of disability was crucial to it. And again, that's why it's so,

It's a movement that makes so much sense in itself, but also speaks so powerfully to feminism and to sort of, you know, the feminist debates today, it feels to me. Absolutely. Do you want to talk a little bit more about Selma James? Yeah, I mean, we've talked a little bit about the way that she brought Marxism and feminism together. But of course, she's so emblematic in the sense that, you know, she has a very rich, revolutionary, socialist, anti-colonial spirit.

history that she brings to feminism. She's such a fascinating person. She was about a decade older than the others in the movement. She had been around until like the 1930s. So she was born in 1930 in Brooklyn at a time when people are mobilizing for the Spanish Civil War.

Her parents were fellow travelers of the American Communist Party. She herself, when she was 13, joined the Socialist Workers Party. So she grew up in that real kind of class politics. And particularly, she's always very attentive to women in that struggle. Of course, there's the male worker, but there's the women in her neighborhood who are organizing tenant strikes and who were demanding their benefits.

So when she you know, she she went on to marry a stealer James the great Trinidadian Marxist anti-colonial thinker And you know she organized together with with him and in his movement And she was always very attentive to women like herself. You know she herself was a factory worker She was a mother and she would go around and interview the housewives and and working-class women in her neighborhood about their lives and really, you know, she really

For her, the thing that the labor movement was missing was the potential of all these women who were working class, even if they weren't working in the factory. They were certainly part of capitalism, she could see. They were certainly doing work for the capitalist system. So she, from very early on, was saying, we have to organize these people. You are missing out as a movement if you are not understanding that all this potential and all this political consciousness is here.

So then when feminism kind of explodes in 1970, she's like ready to go. She's been thinking about this for decades already, right? And for her, this moment was, you know, not something that was a totally radical departure from what she'd been doing. But for her, that was an extension of the class struggle, you know, recognizing women and their work and their unpaid work as part of class struggle.

That's right. And of course, implicit in that was a kind of critique of the left, which is always or which arguably has had a problem recognizing women. I mean, the way you were just talking about her, it reminded me of one of the anxieties and kind of part of the heat in the book, which is to do with the internal struggles within the movement. And you you write about this very

delicately and sensitively. I mean, there are a number of kind of rifts and internal struggles, but a kind of key one was the claim that was made by Prescott and James that there was a split in the movement that was based on race. And Maria Rosa de la Costa responded and said that that wasn't the source of the problem. The source of the problem was especially James's sort of...

quite autocratic approach to leadership. And you talk about how all you can do as a commentator is sort of sit with the messiness. I mean, I wondered, is that enough? I mean, it feels to me like race is hugely important. - Yes. - And we know the problems with racism in white feminism. - Of course, yeah. - And so I don't know whether you have, well, whether you want to sort of talk about

what it was like to kind of navigate that question in the writing of it and what thoughts you, you know, you come away with having written the book. - Yeah. So as you mentioned, you know, this is something that, you know,

I hadn't realized the tensions and the pain when I first started researching this. And then I started interviewing people and seeing just how painful people found that split on all sides of it. As you mentioned, one of the big issues had to do with race. And it's only in recent years that Selma James and Margaret Prescott have said on the record, that was the reason for the split in the movement.

And Margaret Prescott talks about personally experiencing racism from members of the Italian and New York committee. And then, you know, the way Millette Brown described it, you know, earlier, you know, in the 1980s was she didn't talk about it in personal terms. She talked about it in terms of, she described it as a kind of a social worker kind of relationship, right? She said all these well-meaning people who have anti-racist politics, you know, in theory, in practice, you know,

could not actually organize with black women, did not know how to take leadership from black women. And that was her experience, you know, and so that's what led her and Margaret Prescott. They initially joined the New York Wages for Housework Committee, and I think it would have been 1975 or 76, and they very quickly formed their own organization separate called Black Women for Wages for Housework.

Particularly, drawing on this idea of autonomy rather than separatism. The idea that we want to be part of this bigger movement because we want to recognize what we share in common as unwaged workers of the world. But we also need a space where our particular experiences as black women facing racism and racial capitalism and the particular ways that racism shapes this experience of unpaid work.

We need our own kind of space to articulate that, you know. So that was where Black Women for Wages for Housework was formed and it really drew on the struggles of welfare mothers, you know, in the U.S. who had, you know, for decades before the Wages for Housework movement had been claiming their rights to support not as a handout or as charity, but because of the essential work they did as mothers and as care workers.

So that question about race was really critical to the organizing of Black Women for Wages for Housework. You know, it contributed to the split that happened in the late 1970s. And yeah, you know, I think I wanted to lay out that part of the history, right, and put forward that testimony as part of the book. Your question about whether that goes far enough, you know, is it's a good one. And I think it's something that I struggled with is figuring out how to adjudicate that as an historian.

how to go into archives and actually, you know, do more than, you know, believe the testimony and put it into my book. You know, I think that's, yeah. But what I tried to do is give voice to it and put it there in the book and to take, you know, take these women at their word about what they experienced and to elevate that as part of the history. I mean, I think it's really critical.

Yes, yes. And you do that so well, Emily. I mean, thinking about the urgency of this book,

It definitely was one of the thoughts that struck me. And I think, I mean, this, what you just said about, you know, the sort of difficulty that white women have sometimes taking leadership from black women. I mean, for example, you know, that these are lessons we must learn and quickly and now. And so there's a, and so, I mean, I just felt like the testimony of James

of Brown and of Prescott was so powerful in terms of that debate and uncontrovertible. And I feel like it's one of the great contributions of the book and one of the reasons why the book's not just a work of history, but a work of politics now. But I was wondering if we, I mean, we might sort of, we're coming to the end, but I was wondering if we might end by thinking about some of the

kind of worries or criticisms that people have made of the movement. There's been this kind of funny squeamishness in relation to the idea of wages, you know, actually wages. And, and of course that squeamishness is itself a kind of function of the myth making the capitalist myth making that means we can't talk about money because somehow that's it. And I mean, they're brilliant. I think, I think it was, it's Prescott, isn't it? Well, I mean, all of them have various kind of wonderful ideas.

responses to this but it's like no that is exactly what we want

You know, there's all sorts of forces that are telling us not to talk about money. Yes, yes. Because we deserve it, we want it. And so, and that's exactly at that point of kind of squeamishness that one's got to kind of come through that and absolutely keep talking about money. And that's what's so brilliant, actually, in the beginning, you begin with this poster of,

which is what they want, you know, as opposed to sort of what we want is compensation. It's not just actually compensation for work, it's compensation for everything. It's compensation for, they say, we want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every smile. If it's not the way that we think about sexual harassment, the idea that you can kind of get a wage for that. But nonetheless, this is part of systematic oppression of women and women want compensation.

material compensation, and that might go some way to repairing some of the damage. And I thought that sort of is such an ambitious and clear account of what's demanded. Yeah. Yeah. And it was so...

Provocative, I mean, it's still provocative, you know, but I think, you know, what made it so provocative is this is a moment, you know, when so many women are, you know, basically like what they're trying to fight against is the expectation that they identify with housework, right? They're trying to step that link and say, we're not going to be housewives, you know? Exactly. And so to say, actually, no, we have to do the opposite. We need to double down and

and recognize that work, regardless of whether we have been able to escape some forms of it through professional success or through class mobility. We need to identify with this labor that is still expected of us, and that is expected disproportionately among working class and poor women and women of color as a way to undermine that system, undermine those expectations.

The demand, you know, like that we actually are recognized, you know, that we can actually, you know, have a world where we have more power and more authority and more of the world's resources. Wonderful. Well, thank you, Emily. I mean, the title of your book, The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise, obviously suggests that this is an ongoing project.

And I feel like your book has taken us closer to the realization of this promise. So I thank you. We all thank you. That was Emily Kalachi, author of Wages for Housework, the story of a movement, an idea, a promise, which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. I've been Hannah Dawson. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Bea Duncan. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

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