In the Wages for Housework Archives, by Emily Callaci – January 2026

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The basic provocation of Wages for Housework is that capitalism relies on the invisible and uncompensated labor of women, and that putting a price on that work both reveals and threatens the capitalist system and the gendered social order on which it depends. For me, it’s the provocation that fascinates. Then, as now, whenever someone talks about giving people money, there is always someone ready to contest the practicality of it. But can we afford it? Who will pay? I think they miss the point. It’s more than a policy prescription; it’s an invitation to rethink how we share the resources and burdens of our society and to forge new kinds of solidarity. The demand is literal and material, yet it is also a kind of political theater, revealing the hidden forms of coercion, extraction, and freeloading that prop up the system of “free labor.” It is about refusing that arrangement and imagining something better.

As a new mother, I found Wages for Housework useful, a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding everything around me, from the university where I work — where it seems to be a general rule that the further removed you are from students and their bodily needs, the more money you make — to urban plans that make transportation to the university easy from virtually any point in the city but day care within range nearly impossible to find. As a historian, I found the story of the origins of Wages for Housework irresistible. One of the movement’s founding intellects is Selma James, a brash, working-class, Brooklyn-born Jew and autodidact who left school as a teenager, met her future husband — the great Trinidadian Marxist public intellectual C. L. R. James — and moved to Los Angeles to join his political movement. Together with Grace Lee Boggs and the Trotsky defector Raya Dunayevskaya, C. L. R. James had formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a splinter from the Socialist Workers Party that set about documenting the lives and political consciousness of the working classes of America. A young mother and factory worker in the early 1950s, Selma contributed to the Johnson-Forest Tendency by recording the lives of housewives. The view of the left was that housewives were apolitical, and that to become political, women had to become waged workers and join the proletariat. Where her comrades saw backwardness, Selma saw housewives’ creativity, their endless acts of everyday resistance, and immense potential for working-class organizing.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the Italian cofounder of Wages for Housework, came of age politically during the wildcat strikes of Italy’s Hot Autumn of 1969–70, when workers rose up not just against poor working conditions, but against the social contract that tied their wages to productivity. Operaismo, or workerism, was the political philosophy that rejected the ever increasing subordination of workers’ lives to the demands of capitalism. The operaisti rejected traditional trade unionism, in which representatives negotiated with bosses but accepted that productivity and profit were paramount. Workers staged walkouts and slowdowns. They demanded 150 hours of paid company time for educational purposes — not for job training but for anything they wanted: philosophy, poetry, botany, whatever would enrich their lives. Dalla Costa, a young militant from the group Potere Operaio, extended the principles of operaismo to le operaie della casa: the workers in the home producing and maintaining the workforce that made the factories run.

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Emily Callaci is an historian of modern Africa, global feminism and decolonization.

In the Wages for Housework Archives, by Emily Callaci – January 2026

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