In case you missed this recent in-person event, check out video recording below of ‘The Global Women’s Strike Experience’ featuring Charlotte Lee from the English Collective of Prostitutes, Liz Hilton, from Empower, the sex workers’ collective in Thailand, and other fantastic speakers.Panelists who have been with the Wages For Housework Campaign for years, while others […]
Starting this month and throughout 2022, the International Wages for Housework Campaign (WFHC) will celebrate its golden anniversary and launch its 1972-2022 archives! The ECP started as an autonomous organisation within the WFHC and at the time the WFHC was one of the few women’s organisations that was ready to work with sex workers and help […]
Selma James PHOTO COURTESY OF CROSSROADS AV COLLECTIVE From anti-communist witch-hunts to independence movements to wages for housework and rights for sex workers, 91-year-old Selma James has been in the struggle for a lifetime. BY LEILA HAWKINS When I arrive at Crossroads Women’s Centre in North London to interview Selma James, she is in a meeting […]
At 91, Selma James has been an activist for longer than I’ve been alive, times three. A Jewish woman born in New York, in 1952 she published her first book, A Woman’s Place, aged just 22 – a radical piece of work underlining the frustrations of women’s lives in the home and the significance of their unwaged labour […]
Article written by:Frankie Miren For 12 days in late 1982 the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a church in King’s Cross to protest police brutality. Frankie Miren interviews women who were at the centre of the dispute, and explores explores the legacy of their action today. It’s November 1982 and you wake up on the […]
Ray Filar ‘Sex workers are the original feminists’, say Juno Mac and Molly Smith in Revolting Prostitutes. It’s an incendiary claim–not least because tracking ‘firsts’ is a fraught pursuit–but it might well be true. Mac and Smith point toward the medieval brothel workers who formed guilds and went on strike; the 15th century Bavarian […]
Sarah Walker Sarah Walker first came across the English Collective of Prostitutes at the North London Polytechnic, where she was studying English, in the early 1980s. In May 2018, Sarah and I sat down to record her memories of the ECP occupation of the Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross in 1982. Sarah talked about […]
Who cares about women’s work? Discussing care, Wages for Housework and valuing feminised labour, Ray is joined by Selma James, coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike and author of Sex, Race and Class, and Cari Mitchell, spokeswoman for the English Collective of Prostitutes.
“Unless we are aware of what we have in common as women and as workers, we tend to be complicit in the myth that social status equals human value. Our prejudices can reinforce the hierarchy of whose struggle is valid and central and whose is unworthy and marginal: who are “real” women and “real” workers […]