In the 1970s, the campaigning group Wages for Housework – women, lay down your dusters! – was thought to be cranky and cultish even by some of the second-wave feminists who should then have been most sympathetic to its cause. The story went that if someone stood up at a meeting and announced themselves as one of its members, the audience would groan, knowing a lecture was inevitable; in 1975, the Guardian compared its acolytes (it never had more than a few dozen official members) to Jehovah’s Witnesses. By the time it finally fizzled out in the 1990s, its reputation was in the mud. Increasingly riven by factions, former members accused its leadership of bullying and intimidation.
But some ideas take a long time to come into their own. In Britain in 2025, the issue of social care and its funding is impossible to ignore. This morning, I read of Andrea Tucker, who successfully challenged in court a demand that she repay £4,600 in carer’s allowance overpayments (Tucker looked after her mother for 15 years; the Department for Work and Pensions claimed she breached weekly earnings limits, in spite of it having previously advised her otherwise). Post-Covid, just about everyone is aware of the fuzziness of the line between work and home, while the concept of a universal basic income, once thought radical to the point of loopy, is fast gaining credence. In England, a pilot scheme is running in central Jarrow, north-east England, and East Finchley, north London; Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, is a vocal adherent.
Emily Callaci’s new history of WFH – how strange and appropriate that its acronym is the same as for working from home – is, then, rather well timed, for all that it sometimes makes for unintentionally comic reading (when Callaci, an American historian, earnestly recounts the histories of myriad splinter groups, it’s impossible not to picture – freedom for Tooting! – the old BBC sitcom Citizen Smith). But even before we get to the matter of who does what in the home, her book steps on familiar present-day territory.
Hello again, liberal males. How interesting to read that the women whose stories she tells were attacked not only by the right, but by those men who were meant in theory to be on their side. In Italy, where Wages for Housework was led by a Marxist academic from Padua called Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the leftwing press characterised the movement’s members as bourgeois castrators. It was scandalised by the fact that she and her colleagues had the temerity to describe unwaged women as members of the proletariat, a categorisation that gave them equal status with male factory workers.
Dalla Costa is at the heart of Callaci’s book, whose structure takes the form of a group biography, and she’s perhaps its most appealing character. As a member in the late 60s of the anti-capitalist operaismo movement, one of whose rallying cries was “Less work, more money!”, Dalla Costa would rise at 4am to leaflet petrochemical plants before returning to Padua to teach her students Rousseau. For her, class and sex intersected, and this made her a natural ally for Selma James, the American founder of the international Wages for Housework campaign (the estranged wife of the historian CLR James, she was living in the UK). James’s consciousness had been raised by motherhood and the low-paid factory jobs she’d done. In 1972, she and Dalla Costa published The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which effectively launched the debate over domestic labour by spelling out the fact that capitalist economies rely on those who care for the workers: who cook and clean for them; who raise their children; who tend to them when they’re ill. As another activist, the Italian-American scholar Silvia Federici, later put it: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”
Such ideas made powerful sense in the moment, printed on a pamphlet or shouted through a loudhailer. But when people asked questions, their incoherence became obvious. Was the wage intended to compensate housework, and if so, who was to pay it? The state or the man’s employer? (The worker was then almost always a man.) Many second wavers resented the association of housework with feminism – they didn’t care to be paid for plumping pillows; they wanted careers outside the home – while others saw the campaign’s demands as nothing more than a productivity deal, pounds to be offered in exchange for spaghetti bolognese and clean sheets. Federici argued that money was not the point; she couldn’t say how much the wage should be. But if this was so, how would anyone know when the battle was won? It seemed that WFH required women to participate in a struggle that had no clear immediate objective.
For the casual reader, however, such nitty-gritty is perhaps less captivating than the book’s atmosphere more generally, a mood that is at once ridiculous and rather magnificent. Whether logical or not, WFH’s ideas seeped into the ether. When the school leaving age was raised to 15 in the UK, some girls believed they should be paid for their time, since they were no longer allowed to work. Should the cash go to their parents? A teenager called Gaye thought not: “Like, if we was naughty, they’d say, oh, you’re not getting your money today…” Amazingly, Selma James regarded such a standpoint not as cheek, but as a legitimate rebellion against the stranglehold of capital. In Italy, meanwhile, an artist called Milli Gandini turned WFH into an art project. Having allowed dust to accumulate on the surfaces of her house, she used her finger to draw feminist symbols in it, which she then photographed. The cooking pots she’d once used for pasta, she painted in bright colours, after which she bound their lids shut with barbed wire.
For its leaders, one senses that WFH had a personal, psychic cost: the black activist Wilmette Brown is a case in point. Callaci tries repeatedly to interview her, but she’s now a practising Hindu and yogi; the closest Callaci gets is to attend an event via Zoom during which Manisha, as she’s now known, discusses immigration (the talk is sponsored by a Pinner-based organisation called Tattva). Many activists drifted away; others, battle-scarred, can no longer bear even to think of those times. WFH’s last gasp in the UK was at Greenham Common in the 1980s, where Brown and others are said to have sowed discontent in the women’s peace camp (“Pay women, not the military,” read their banners).
It may be, Callaci suggests, that WFH’s global demands were simply too wide-ranging. What, after all, do women in Peru really have in common with those in Plymouth or Pensacola? Or perhaps – a happier alternative – it’s simply that its time is yet to come. For all the robot vacuum cleaners in the world still can’t answer the vital question: what counts as work, and when and how much is a person owed for doing it?
• Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
