WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK

What would women do with their lives if they had more time The riveting untold story of a revolutionary campaign to change the way work is valued The women of the world are serving notice We want wages for every dirty toilet every indecent assault every painful childbirth every cup of coffee and every smile And if we don t get what we want we will simply refuse to work any longer Across the globe in the 1970s a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand Wages for Housework Today it remains a provocative idea and an unfulfilled promise Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades from the early 1970s when Selma James a working class political organizer and Mariarosa Dalla Costa a scholar activist started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City s fiscal crisis to Wilmette Brown lesbian poet and anti war activist and Margaret Prescod community organizer who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement Drawing on new archival research and extensive inter