Making domestic labour visible by demanding wages for housework was seen by some women’s liberation activists as the first step toward women refusing housework and ultimately rejecting social roles. This tour of the LSE Library archives shares some of the photographs, press cuttings, pamphlets and more that help tell the story of the Wages for Housework movement.
The anti-capitalist, grassroots feminist movement Wages For Housework (WfH) began in the early 1970s when the International Feminist Collective, co-founded by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici and Selma James, began to organise and advocate for all of women’s unpaid labour and caring work to be recognised.
The demand for wages was partly symbolic and was used to express a political perspective and to make domestic labour visible. The movement considered “housework” as shorthand for all feminised labour and the demand for wages as an opportunity to bring attention to other issues in the struggle against oppression, such as bodily autonomy, childcare, domestic abuse, and sexuality.
In the UK, at the Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester in 1972, Selma James put forward wages for housework as one of six demands that the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) should formally adopt. This proposal was not carried and continued to be rejected when raised at any subsequent WLM conferences. James’ speech, which was written as an open letter to conference attendees and published as the pamphlet “Women, the Unions and work, or what is not to be done”, asserted that “[w]hen capital pays husbands they get two workers, not one”, and yet homeworkers remain invisible to unions and their unpaid labour not accounted for in a country’s GDP. WfH activists argued that unwaged workers in the home have the least power in a capitalist society. They believed that demanding wages was the first step toward women refusing housework and ultimately rejecting social roles.
Although many of the women active in the WfH campaign were white and middle-class – James countered early criticism of this by saying “to have sisterhood we have to get over the myths that only working class women are oppressed or that only middle class women can know that they’re oppressed” – their approach from the outset was one which would now be recognised as intersectional, with autonomous organisations Black Women for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians forming within it.
In 1975 the UK WfH group opened a women’s in a squat, later known as the King’s Cross Women’s Centre. Women using the Centre formed several other campaign groups, including the English Collective of Prostitutes, Women Against Rape, and WinVisible.
By some accounts the WfH campaign was highly divisive and unpopular amongst others within the WLM. There were accusations of WfH hijacking or wrecking other campaigns, and even some claims that WfH were connected to the police or funded by other organisations who wanted to infiltrate and split the WLM. Several of the women interviewed for the Greenham Women Everywhere oral history project express this suspicion.
Wilmette Brown, one of the founders of Black Women for Wages for Housework, and other WfH activists were members of the Yellow Gate camp that eventually broke away from the rest of Greenham following months of rising tensions. Some women at Greenham described those at Yellow Gate camp as disruptive and aggressive and questioned their motives, whilst women at Yellow Gate camp made accusations of racist verbal attacks and a refusal to address the issue of racism within the white peace movement.
Whilst there may have been some confusion or disagreement outside of the group as to what the actual aims of the WfH campaign were, they have campaigned on family allowance and pay equity, lobbied the UN to measure and value unwaged work, contributed to the Green New Deal for Europe and regularly organised conferences which centred the experience of black and immigrant women. The movement continues today as the Global Women’s Strike, Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike, and Queer Strike.
The material highlighted in this blog is drawn from different collections across the LSE archives. The Wages for Housework Campaign Archive is held at Bishopsgate Institute.
Watch All Work and No Pay (1976), a short documentary on the WfH campaign made for the BBC’s Open Door series.
