‘It infuriates me’: why the ‘wages for housework’ movement is still controversial 40 years on | Women

EMile Callaci at home in Wisconsin, surrounded by the usual debris of family life. She admits that the bed behind it is not made of making, and there is a “handful of marble and masses on the ground” left by its children, now seven and three. But in magnification, it was not clear to her background, so none of this was visible on the screen, just as here, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I backed the laptop camera away from the chaos on the work surface in my kitchen. We have automatically hidden the locality for the professional appearance, and it is irony that this interview revolves around making invisible and unpaid workers in the home visible.

Callaci, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote a book, wages for housework, which dates the radicals Women’s campaign in the 1970s That argued to acknowledge the economic value of local work. In fact, she made it clear, it was a recipe for the revolution, designed to destroy capitalism and its legend that it supports that women love to keep the house so much that they would do this for nothing.

The wages of home business founders argued that when the employer rented a worker, they get the value not only for the employment of that person but for the person in the house, which allows them to work in the first place by taking care of children and business. There are no homework, no capital: However, somehow, the housewife (and at that time she was always a housewife) did not get any profit. Callaci says: “The idea was that if the amount of capitalism depends on this work and then it actually required to compensate it, you will see that the system does not work as it says it works.” “It is assumed that the most effective way to regulate the economy, but what is hidden is the amount of work that is extracted and exploited for free. The important point is to expose this and collapse by putting a price in this work.”

In the book, you hint five stars of the movement: New Yorker Silvia Vidity, a philosopher, who saw the nuclear family as a prison; Salma JamesAn American Marxist factory worker, runs the British movement arm after her husband, CLR JamesHe was expelled from the United States under the leadership of McCarthy. Italian activist Marrosa Dala Costa; Wilmit Brown, an old warrior in the Black Energy Organization, the Black Party of the Black Party, who ran Black women to get homework wages; And Margaret Breescod, born in Barbados, who argued that the American prosperity relied on unpaid workers for black women.

From the beginning, there were differences in opinion about the exact meaning of wages for household chores.

For Federici – whose statement in 1975 formulated the phrase “they say it is love, we call it the unpredictable work” – it was not literally about obtaining their salaries but about the revolutionary struggle. (Although she admitted that money may help women without any other way to earn, she said that many have other options – including not having children, as did not do that) was only loosely from homework, with an expansion of the definition to include Voluntary work or political organization, and rental strikes (because homes were places of work), poverty alive or racism, and what can now be called “emotional work”: anything that I felt is obligated to do so is not paid.

When she had children, while working full time, Callaci started professional attention in this dilemma. “I found myself working mainly for 18 hours, which seemed to be a strange way to think about liberation. As a feminist, I feel that we received a message that the answer is success in work, and of course I love my career. But this type of exhaustion seemed to me not .. . “We are only discussing exactly when it’s not so, appropriately, it should stop and take a phone call from the daycare center for its children. However, she says, the advice with good intentions that you received about time management for working mothers did not cut it. “I was hungry for more ambitious explanations about how we got here, and why do we live this way – more than ideas on how to do things differently.”

Informed, I found an Echo Federic statement as a specific text with young university students. She says: “Many students who study them respond to a society that really emphasizes production and consumption, and seeing what he did on this planet,” she says. But this generation, which is felt by ownership of homes and financial security out of reach even if they are working hard, as you think, give priority to time with family and friends. “They are wondering about this kind of milling culture that tells us that we need to see that it works all the time to justify our existence.”

She says wages for household chores were, likewise about the time of the background. Although James was more focused than Vherere to put money in female pockets, she also preferred a week for 20 hours, and ensuring income, whether you are working or not-today’s campaign pioneer in her favor Global basic income. Federiti has argued over the government’s daytime care mothers not to work, but rather to do everything they like: making art, terror, seeing friends or having sex. (None of the five seems very interested in how to pay the price of anything from this, which prompted some contemporary critics to see this as a way to be astonished, while others are concerned about linking wages to home wages in the local field – despite a paid job as a necessary introduction To quit.)

This idea was about what Vidity calls “joyful militancy”, or to seek to be happy instead of productivity, which attracted Callaci as a new stressful mother. “While I felt that I needed things like entertainment, such as exercise, like seeing my friends. I couldn’t have a lot of work. And part of me feels as if we expect mothers to be cut off from all those things that make life deserve to live? Why Women should apologize for that, why should we say: “I need help in order to be able to do my other work more efficiently?”

I also liked the totalitarian wages for household chores, which I realized that for many working class women, the liberated professions were far -fetched; They were doing low work, grinding the work only to survive. The movement adopted the sex workers, and the “mothers of social welfare” in protest against forcing them to occupy the minimum wage functions, who argued that raising children was working enough. Initially, I tried to include men, on the pretext that this was not a battle between the sexes, but between workers and capitalism. James argued that men must also get wages for household chosen if they choose to do so; Knowing that they no longer no longer give them the confidence of their family in the face of their presidents without concern about the dismissal.

This reduces the small ice with the British trade union movement in the 1970s, while Dala Costa in Italy faced a fierce hostility to males within a left -wing movement where women were expected to be happy to print copies of publications written by men.

Meanwhile, the New York wages for domestic wages seemed to take a more facing approach. In her book, Calaci quotes its announcement in 1974, which she bought as a poster for comment at home: “The world’s women serve a notice! We want wages for every dirty toilet, every inappropriate assault, every painful child, every cup of coffee and every smile. We want, we will simply refuse to work! The second line of the Federici statement – “it calls it cold; we call it absenteeism” – certainly indicates that it saw the marital sex as work, and it agreed that it is uncomfortable with financial dependence.

“One of the arguments that Federicai shows is that we believe that we know what emancipation means, but how can we really know what this means if we are not financially independent, if we rely on the men we sleep with?” Callaci says. “

Perhaps the most extremist thinker was Brown, who knew household chores as anything that includes repairing damage – environmental or emotional – caused by capitalism. Nuclear weapons were opposed on the basis that they caused “nuclear homework” – such as having to care for people with radiation. When she was diagnosed with cancer, endless medical dates were described as “homework of cancer”.

To Callaci, this is a “truly severe policy”. However, if everything is practical is homework, does the word still mean anything? What about the things that take work, but what we enjoy or find deeply rewarding? Seeing everything that humans do as a product of economic exploitation does not leave a great room for love, mother, or otherwise.

This is where it was fears. “For a while, my younger son will not fall asleep unless my hand was resting on his stomach, and I was like,” is this work, or …? “I understood it was of value. I think I was happy because I could do it even if it was very annoying at times. But did you want to call this work? I felt that I did not want to call everything in my life a commodity.” She notes that later in life, even Vidity described her sick mother’s care as a way to resist capitalism, and not the exploitation that her previous writing may refer to.

If it could be contradictory at times, the movement had other tensions. Prescod and Brown have since said that they have suffered from racism within it, while Callaci research discovered some of the recommended reports on the alleged bullying and supposed assumed behavior. The tendency to do domestic action can be to see everything through a single unpleasant lens towards other feminists (Fedrichi criticized the US legislation that prohibits sexual discrimination at work, on the pretext that the paid work was “liberalization no one”). Ultimately, after a series of personal differences and tactical differences that may not be surprised by those familiar with the revolutionary movements, the campaign split.

After half a century, care has become a paid work, but only when external sources of others are used by mothers to go out into traditional jobs. Callaci and her partner work full time and pay for childcare, but she writes that they are uncomfortable that this “exploitative social arrangement” adds only because skilled children’s care workers earn less than professors. It disturbs her deeply that care is less than its value, while “if I find a way to make me look at my phone to get an additional second and stop temporarily and click on an advertisement, you can make a wealth.”

Meanwhile, the idea of ​​getting money to stay at home is a right -wing issue, instead of the left, which was embraced by conservative and influential politicians who are “vibrant” who gain a live column on Instagram.

“JD Vance has made this issue to” restore it to “restore traditional roles between the sexes, so that women can stay at home and raise children”, and only anger me. “I am frustrated because the Democrats were unable to find a way to seize this message in a way that was More and supportive for women. Why does the right to seize this area? “Although it believes that the wages for household chores affected feminist thinking, it recognizes the feeling of sadness because it has not reached anywhere in the practice.

But searching for it, in some respects, others. “I feel more confident in spending the time I need, such as caring for my child when he is sick and does not feel guilty about doing so.” It is also, as you think, is more alert to the invisible work everywhere, paid or unpaid: unrecognized cleaning, caring and gathering garbage that makes the world rotate. “It seems to be suddenly getting X -ray glasses, or When you can see the city’s electricity network, it is like: “Oh, that’s everything.” “She says, we are all a product of these household chores in one way or another. It is a choice of some to see it, while others feel more comfortable if it is unclear.

Homework wages written by Emily Kulasi (Penguin, 25 pounds sterling) are published on February 13. To support the guardian and the observer, ask for your copy on Guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.