Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
Wages against Housework
A pamphlet arguing that demanding wages for housework would make visible the unpaid work on which capitalism rests and open a struggle against it.
Introduction
“Wages against Housework” was published in 1975 by the Power of Women Collective and the Falling Wall Press in Bristol, during the international campaign that the International Feminist Collective had launched in 1972. It opens with the sentences “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.” Federici argues that housework has been turned into a natural attribute of women and thereby hidden as work, although it produces the labour power on which capital depends. The demand for wages is presented less as a goal than as a political perspective: by asking for money, women show that housework is work, refuse it as their destiny and gain power against both capital and the family. The pamphlet became one of the most reprinted texts of the campaign and is included in the collection “Revolution at Point Zero” (2012).
More works by Silvia Federici
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