OpenDemocracy: How Wages for Housework sparked an international solidarity movement
The 1970s movement paved the way for queer, Black, trans and sex working feminist organising across the world today
The first thing to know about the international Wages for Housework campaign that began in the 1970s is that you shouldn’t take the name at face value. This wasn’t some single-issue movement committed to putting pennies in pockets of frazzled, overworked housewives. Wages were just one of six demands contained in the 1972 pamphlet Women, the Unions and Work, Or… What Is Not To Be Done; others ranged from full bodily autonomy to the right to work less. These were radical demands rooted in a revolutionary feminist reframing of work itself, an analysis of how capitalism needs the unpaid labour of women to survive.
These were the ideological seeds of Wages for Housework. They snowballed throughout the 1970s into a broad, intersectional and international network of organisations fighting for the rights of lesbians, sex workers and Black women. These feminists marched for equal pay, for free childcare, for birth control and on-demand abortion. They fought the criminalisation of sex work, discrimination against lesbians, and the stereotyping of Black mothers claiming welfare – the so-called “welfare queens” derided by US media.
There were bumps along the road, like interpersonal squabbles, documented instances of racism, and widespread confusion over what the movement should be fighting for. But especially as the movement spread beyond borders, Wages for Housework became a global phenomenon rooted, first and foremost, in an ethos of solidarity. We should learn from it.
Revolutionary beginnings
Wages for Housework can be traced back to the International Feminist Collective, rooted largely in Britain, Italy and the United States, and co-founded by Selma James, Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa back in 1972. This year marked the publication of another game-changing pamphlet ‘The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community’. Co-authored by James and Dalla Costa, the pamphlet argued that capitalism could only survive because male workers came home to a clean house and a freshly cooked meal. This unpaid labour, undertaken mostly by housewives, kept the cogs of production whirring.
The unpaid aspect of this never-ending work was crucial: no pay meant no union, no bargaining and no power. It also obscured the fact that housework was work in the first place. It was a vicious cycle, one which disempowered anyone whose life consisted of housework and not much else.
In 1975, Federici followed up this thesis with ‘Wages Against Housework’. In the book, she explained that critics reduced “wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective”. The point wasn’t just to secure cash. It was to engage in a broader struggle which subverted “the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society,” Federici said.
So many of us are crushed by the same systems – through solidarity, we can connect the dots of different issues and realise that most of us have more in common than we think
Most famously, Wages Against Housework skewered the claim that marriage is about love, and love alone. Federici conjured the image of a sighing bride confronted with dirty dishes at the end of her wedding day, ejected swiftly out of the honeymoon period and into a life of unpaid labour. “A lot of us recognise that we marry for money and security,” she wrote, “but it is time to make it clear that while the love or money involved is very little, the work which awaits us is enormous.”
Wages Against Housework marked a new chapter in the movement by highlighting its universality. Solidarity needs deep, intersectional analysis to truly thrive. It requires an understanding that so many of us are crushed by the same systems, that we can connect the dots of different issues and realise that most of us have more in common than we think.
James and Dalla Costa had already outlined the theory by identifying housewives as an invisible, unpaid labour force tasked with keeping men productive by satisfying their every need. Federici expanded this into a broad feminist manifesto, writing: “We might not serve one man, but we are all in a servant relation with aspect to the whole male world.”
The power of women: building global networks
By 1974, Wages for Housework was building solidarity with activists worldwide and spawning affiliated groups. Initially, these were largely based in the Global North. Now, the Global Women’s Strike – which lives on as part of the Wages for Housework legacy – has chapters across Peru, Thailand, Burma, and India.
These groups represented a broadening in focus, incorporating abortion campaigners, sex workers, lesbians and women of colour, all of whom were fighting for liberation from the shackles of this “servant relation”. The offshoot groups were autonomous, in charge of making their own rules. But the affiliation with Wages of Housework allowed them visibility – an inbuilt solidarity network.
That year marked the debut issue of The Power of Women, a short magazine which demonstrated the broad scope of the movement. The first edition featured a mini-memoir, The Invisible Woman, an anonymous account of a woman who gradually starts to accept herself as a lesbian, and is judged harshly as a result. “Because being gay is the most positive statement a woman can make about her own autonomy,” the author writes, “society’s attitude towards us is that we don’t exist.”
Another essay – What is a Sex Object? – complicated the anti-porn arguments of second-wave feminism. It argues that a broad variety of women are “sex objects”, in the sense that they sleep with their husbands when they don’t want to, and have babies because society expects them to – or because they can’t access safe, legal abortion. Arguments like these played a key role in the eventual 1992 passage of the Marital Rape Law in the UK, as well as the securing of child benefits.
By grappling with stereotypes like the “sex object” and offering a broad analysis of how we’re all objectified by capitalism, which sees our bodies and labour as mere commodities, Wages for Housework laid the ideological foundations for organisations like the English Collective of Prostitutes, an affiliated but autonomous group.
Founded in 1975, the trailblazing collective fought for – and still fights for – the safety and protection of sex workers. They defend women in court, often women accused of “brothel-keeping” for seeing clients in a shared house for safety. They campaign for housing and against austerity cuts, highlighting that plenty of sex workers are mothers barred from other jobs by a lack of free childcare and inflexible working conditions. In 1975, they explain on their ‘About Us’ page, Wages for Housework was “one of the few women’s organisations that was ready to work with sex workers and help us defend our rights. Selma James was our first spokeswoman.”
Wages Due Lesbians fought fundamentally for the right to choose, a right still frequently denied to marginalised communities
That same year, Wilmette Brown, a former Black Panther and lesbian activist, co-founded the second autonomous group, Black Women for Wages for Housework movement, alongside Barbadian journalist and author Margaret Prescod. Across the UK and US, they campaigned against everything from immigration controls to environmental racism, mounting holistic critiques of racism as a rot which seeped into every facet of Black women’s lives.
In the 1986 zine Roots: Black Ghetto Anthology, Brown summarised Black Women for Wages for Housework. She described it as a way for Black women to “take back what is ours: as a right; as damages; as backpay for all the unpaid and unwaged work of plantation and domestic slavery; as reparations – a way of reclaiming the earth.” In this sense, Black Women for Wages for Housework is part of a global, anti-colonial resistance project, which lives on today as Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike.
Wages Due Lesbians – now Queer Strike – was another influential autonomous group, based in Toronto. Their campaigning has been archived, and it can perhaps be best summarised by a promo flyer for a talk in London: “Every woman should have enough time and money to be able to decide for herself what kind of love life she wants.” They organised fundraising events for sex workers in need, fought for the rights of lesbian mothers to retain child custody, and supported two lesbians, Shirley Wilson and Sue Davis, who sued the San Francisco Police Department for beating and harassing them.
Like the Invisible Woman in The Power of Women, they fought for the lesbians left with little choice but to marry a man, as well as the lesbian mothers who left their marriages and lost custody of their children as a result. The group fought fundamentally for the right to choose, a right still frequently denied to marginalised communities: from abortion campaigners to the trans communities fighting for access to gender-affirming surgeries, this right to bodily autonomy remains at the heart of so many movements.
Although Wages for Housework wasn’t perfect, it managed to draw links between marginalised groups of all descriptions, creating an international solidarity network. What started as a simple question – as James puts it in Sex, Race and Class: “what is the relation of women to capital, and what kind of struggle can we effectively wage to destroy it?” – gave birth to a global movement where sex workers took over churches, “welfare queens” rose up, and lesbian activists took abusive cops to court.
In many ways, we have Wages for Housework to thank for marital rape laws, for child benefits, for the sex work activist groups still fighting tooth and nail for global decriminalisation, and for the ongoing battles to secure a universal basic income. It’s a landmark name in histories of solidarity, one whose impact is still being felt today.
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Jake Hall is a Sheffield-based journalist and the author of two books, The Art of Drag (2020), and Shoulder to Shoulder (2024). They’re passionate about lesser-known queer histories, and the power of storytelling to humanise marginalised people.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/how-wages-for-housework-sparked-an-international-solidarity-movement/