Wages for Housework

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In July of 1972, four women met up in Northern Italy, calling themselves the International Feminist Collective. In a statement, they declared, "We identify ourselves as Marxist feminists, and take this to mean a new definition of class based on the subordination of the wageless worker to the waged worker, behind which is hidden the productivity, ie the exploitation of the labor of women in the home and the cause of their more intense exploitation out of it." Thus they saw the need to create an international women's group that would produce and share publications and would, "aim ultimately at joint mass actions transcending national borders." The International Feminist Collective didn't last long as an organization itself, but it planted the seed of what would become the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Three of the four women who met in Italy that July, Selma James in the United Kingdom, Mariarosa Dalla Costa in Italy, and Silvia Federici in the United States, would be major drivers of the campaign. Before the July, 1972 meeting, James and Dalla Costa already had a shared publication that would, over different editions and translations, help define the vision of the wages for housework movement. In 1953, Selma James, under the pen name Marie Brant, had written a political pamphlet titled, "A Woman's Place" at the urging of her future husband, C.L.R. James, in which she discussed the toil and stress of housework and motherhood and how vulnerable women were being dependent on both their husbands and their husbands' bosses for material support. When Mariarosa Dalla Costa was working on her own manifesto in the early 1970s, she consulted with James, whom she'd met in London, and when she published "Women and the Subversion of the Community" in March, 1972, it was alongside an Italian translation of James's "A Woman's Place." The two followed up with an English language version of their book titled, "The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community," published by Falling Wall Press in Bristol. The book did not demand wages for housework, although in a footnote, James mentioned that the idea was getting traction. In fact, it was James in a pamphlet distributed at the Third Women's Liberation Conference in Manchester in March, 1972, who had argued,  "If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. The ruling class has glorified motherhood only when there is a pay packet to support it. We work for the capitalist class. Let them pay us, or else we can go to the factories and offices and put our children in their father's laps. Let's see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. We demand wages for housework. All housekeepers are entitled to wages. Men too." In their speaking tour that followed the release of their English language book, James and Dalla Costa zeroed in on wages for housework as the core demand. By the mid 1970s, there were Wages for Housework groups in the United Kingdom, in Italy and in the United States. Silvia Federici convened the New York Wages for Housework Committee, which opened a storefront meeting space, published pamphlets, convened conferences, and participated in protests. In 1975, Federici published her classic text of the movement, "Wages Against Housework," which opened, "They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work." Federici, who was a PhD student in philosophy at the time, argued that housework is,  "the most pervasive manipulation, the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class,"  because housework is not just unwaged, and not just imposed upon women, but  "It has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need and aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character." Following the New York Wages for Housework Committee Welfare Conference in April, 1976, organizers, Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod launched an autonomous group, Black Women for Wages, for Housework, declaring, "Our group is a rainbow of Black women. Some of us are married, some are single, some of us have children, some don't. Some of us are straight, some are lesbian, some of us have second jobs. Some are on welfare. Some of us are older, some younger. All of us want wages for housework." They weren't the first autonomous group. Wages Due Lesbians had launched in Toronto a few months earlier. The first action of Black Women for Wages for Housework was to fight for the right for college students on welfare to also receive tuition grants without losing their welfare benefits. After Prescod moved to the West Coast, she rallied Black Women for Wages for Housework, to demand that the police investigate a wave of serial murders of young Black women and that they keep the public informed. When the police and media referred to the murder victims as prostitutes, Prescod responded, "Every life is of value. We don't accept a hierarchy of human life." For Prescod, her work with Wages for Housework and her work organizing against serial murders were the same work, both the work of holding communities together. Today, Wages for Housework is called Care Income Now, launched in March, 2020, under Global Women's Strike. On their website, they note, 50 years after the campaign originally launched,  "Women and girls do more than three quarters of all unpaid care work, a total of 12.5 billion hours a day. The market values unwaged work at $10.8 trillion, but never suggests that those who do it should get any of it. Unpaid family carers, overwhelmingly women, but also children, save governments billions." Joining me in this episode is Dr. Emily Callaci, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of, "Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor."

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:07  
Hi, Emily. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Emily Callaci  11:10  
 Thanks so much for inviting me on. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:11  
I want to start by asking, this is very different than your first book, so I want to hear a little bit about how you got interested in this topic, about writing about wages for housework. And this is a book that sort of spans not the whole globe, but more parts of the globe than your first book. So tell me a little bit about how you got interested in writing about this.

Dr. Emily Callaci  11:35  
Sure. Thanks. So as you mentioned, you know, my background is in decolonization in African history, so a very different topic. I guess the connecting point would be kind of global history in the 1970s you know. So there was that kind of time period connection, but you're right. This was really a very different kind of project than I had been trained to do or had expertise in, and it really arose from the personal circumstances of my own life. I started getting interested in this topic after I had my first child. And, you know, like so many new parents, you just suddenly, you know, nothing can really kind of prepare you for this, just have this massive, I mean, even calling it a second job kind of undercounts just how all encompassing that work is. And, you know, I'd grown up in the 90s, you know. And I've always been a feminist, you know. But I really kind of grew up with a feminism that really focused on career as the site of, you know, feminist struggle of liberation, you know, very kind of middle class idea about feminism. And I just, you know, it just became so clear to me that this work was unencompassing, that it was happening everywhere around me. You know, I started to notice it more once I was doing it myself, and it was totally not counted as part of the economy, not recognized as actual work, and where it was recognized as work totally, you know, underpaid and unvalued. And so, you know, one of the things that I think many new parents face is you get all this parenting advice about how to manage this new workload. You know, how do you have work life balance? How can you, you know, be more efficient. Or, how can you outsource some of that work onto lower paid people, you know? And I found all that advice so frustrating and so narrow. And what I really wanted to understand was, me as an historian, first of all, you know, why do we actually do things this way? Like, how did we actually get to a position where so much of the vital work that makes our society run is not counted? And then, more than that, I really wanted a more ambitious way of thinking about this. I didn't want a lifestyle hack. I wanted to actually think about how we might live differently. So that got me just looking into, you know, how feminists of earlier generations had thought about this question of this, you know, unpaid, you know, essential care work. And so one of the first movements I encountered, what this was this really, you know, brilliant, creative, quirky, little movement from the 70s called Wages for Housework. And I just was really fascinated by it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:52  
You published this book with a trade press, and you yourself are in the book, not a lot, but some, as a researcher. I wanted to ask you about that, about that experience of writing yourself into the story as researcher. I love that as a reader, but I imagine that's a little bit different than what you're trained to do as an academic historian. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Dr. Emily Callaci  14:16  
Sure, let's see. There are a few ways to think about that. I mean, part of it was honestly that I, you know, apart from the nature of the topic, I had been thinking to myself, you know, that I was really, I mean, I've always been really interested in writing and literature, right? And so I found myself getting frustrated having gone through the tenure process of just this directive to write in this one particular way, you know, and I found myself really frustrated by just writing for my fellow colleagues and not what I felt like I had things to say to a broader range of people, right? So I even before this project, wanted to start experimenting with, how can we actually write, you know, in a different kind of voice as historians, you know? And I since then, started teaching creative historical writing classes, and I've really tried to I edit a series at the AHR called History Unclassified, which is with my co-editor, Kate Brown, that's about other genres of historical writing. So that's just kind of an interest of mine, but then also, particularly the topic of this book, you know, I think I tried to figure out, how can I write this in a in the way that would be most kind of, I don't know if convincing is the right word, but I wanted to, you know, this wasn't, it didn't feel to me that the only mode of running with this topic was as an expert, you know, like, because it was something that I felt so much with my body, with my everyday life, right? And so I had to figure out how to write that in an authentic kind of voice, you know, in a way that would, you know, there's this line by the great non fiction writer, Vivian Gornick, that says, you know, for non fiction writing to be compelling, you have to know who is speaking, you know, like, not in the sense that you have to know every demographic detail about that person, but you have to know the spirit in which it's being written. So I felt that to write this book about something that was so personal, I had to put some of that on the table. I did feel like, you know, if I'm writing about like, housework or unpaid work, you know, and traveling to all these archives and, like, taking breaks every, you know, couple of hours to breastfeed while my partner kind of pushes the baby around. I mean, like that can't be invisible from the book. I'd be participating in the very thing that I'm writing critically about, you know. So, yeah.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:24  
Yeah, so I guess that leads me to a question I have that I think the listeners might have, which is, what is, for this movement, housework? And that is a complicated question to answer, of course. So what all are we talking about when we talk about housework? 

Dr. Emily Callaci  16:36  
Yeah, I think that's like you say, a complicated question, one that changes over the course of this history. So, initially, you know, it's housework is, you know, when it was first kind of politicized in this way by Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, is the work that makes all other work possible. You know, they were talking about, you know, the kind of metaphor that Mariarosa Dalla Costa uses in her kind of, you know, classic text that she wrote starting this movement.  If we're thinking about the working class, and you just talk about the factory, right, and the assembly line and the workers who are creating value to be extracted by the capitalist class in the factory, you're missing a big part of that equation, you know? And she says, we have to imagine that the assembly line stretching outside the factory all the way into the workers home, where there are people caring for that worker, preparing the food, keeping the house livable, getting him dressed, you know, taking a more long term perspective, raising future generations of workers, right? So that's the initial sense in which housework was kind of conceived, is, how do you actually reproduce human society, you know, at that level. As more people took up this idea of wages for housework, you know, for example, Wilmette Brown, as you know, she had been a member of the Black Panther Party, who then became member of Wages for Houseworkand started Black Women for Wages for Housework in the mid 70s. She talked about, you know, particularly, how housework, you know, it's not the same for everybody, right? She talked about the work of, you know, raising families in places that are suffering from environmental racism. That's a very different kind of housework, right? You have to keep right? You have to keep an environment livable for your kids when you're facing toxicity because of, you know, pollution, you know, talking about protecting your kids from police violence, you know, if you know, you're a Black family in, you know, in a police surveilled place. So housework, you know, starts off with this very kind of classic, trying to understand how housework fits into capitalism. It extends into this kind of way of thinking about it, as a way of living with capitalism, being able to like make life livable in places that are in many ways unlivable. So and then, you know, Silvia Federici talks about emotional housework in a way, right, the work of having to perform heterosexuality if you're in a nuclear family situation where a roof over your head is dependent on your marriage to, you know, a worker like that kind of making yourself pleasing, you know, like having to, you know, do the emotional kind of housework of caring for people. So that's another way it's extended, is to think about, you know, all those components of it. And there have been, you know, criticism at some points in the movement where it's like, you know, some people have pushed back and said, well, is everything housework, you know, at some point, for example, if you decide to, you know, put on lipstick in the morning, because there is social pressure on you do. So should we put a price on that? There was this movement of stewardesses who wrote to Mariarosa Dalla Costa talking about the emotional work of having to keep the passengers calm, you know, and thinking about that as housework. So there's a point at which it kind of spins into, you know, a really kind of capacious category, you know. And I think some might say we have to know what it is before we politicize it. But I think some of that rethinking of housework and all these different spheres is actually really interesting and generative.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:33  
Speaking of capacious, it's often unclear in the story in the history, what the demands of the movement are. Can you talk about that, what, what the demands are or aren't, or if we know, if we if the movement know what the demands are and the the tension that that creates?

Dr. Emily Callaci  19:56  
Sure yeah, so maybe the wat to start answering that question is to talk about one of the first major, or the biggest critiques of the movement right was, you're talking about the 1970s you know, what we sometimes call second wave feminism, where there's just massive movement around the world of women getting together to talk about women's liberation and talking about women's rights. And one of the, you know, major components of that is being able to resist traditional, you know, gender roles, and to resist the role of the housewife, the freedom to pursue work and financial autonomy outside the home. And so one of the big kind of criticisms of wages for housework was that you are basically, essentially entrenching that category of housewife when you demand payment for it, right? You're basically saying, we want to be housewives and we want to be paid for it, you know, like that seemed really counterintuitive at that time, you know, and it still seems counterintuitive. The response that Wages for Housework had to that is, you know, you can't actually address this form of exploitation, this particular problem, without talking about money, without actually addressing that. And you know, secondly, for people of, you know, middle class people and people who are educated like who have access to, you know, careers that are rewarding, that bring some kind of personal, you know, satisfaction, work might mean liberation, but for the vast majority of women, you know, working class women, poor women, historically, women of color, getting, you know, the idea of going out into the workplace has not always been associated with liberation, right? It's, you know, it's not liberating to go and work at a fast food restaurant for minimum wage while also doing care work, right? So to center so much on work in that way, really, one is elitist, but then two distracts from this broader problem, which is that we're all doing all this work that's essential for society to function, that's unrecognized. So for this to be out in the open, you have to demand payment for it, or you have to, at least, you know, recognize its critical, you know, place in the economy. And there was a lot of debate within the movement about whether this was a literal demand for money or whether this was a provocation, right? But I think that people come down on different sides of this, you know, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who I mentioned, you know, she even said in her first kind of major manifesto that becomes, in some ways, the kind of core text of Wages for Housework, and in spreading it, she says, "We're not demanding wages for housework that would actually just put us back in the home." And then in a subsequent publication that she co-edited with the Selma James, it says, "Actually, no, we need to demand wages for housework, because you can't talk about this without talking about money. And actually putting money in women's pockets may not solve the problem, but it's a good first step to then organizing ourselves and demanding more." So that's probably, as you point out, the biggest tension in the movement is, is this actually a literal demand for money? Is it a provocation? Is it a way to demonstrate how capitalism actually is not as efficient as it says it is, if you actually put a price on the stuff that is usually taken for free, then do you show actually what the real cost of this is? 

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:46  
Yeah, I thought that was one of the most interesting moments. It happens more than once in in this history, and perhaps the moment we're living in right now brings it to the fore again, is this idea that when there is, when there are austerity measures put in place, that they can be put in place by a government because they know that the work will be done anyway, and it will be done unwaged by women. Yeah,

Dr. Emily Callaci  23:17  
 Yeah, I found that, I found that ingenious when I first read this. I hadn't thought about it that way when I first started the research. But and I can I remember the moment that I kind of linked this with the politics of austerity. It was as Wages for Housework, you know, they had all these global branches, and one of them was in Guyana, led by this, this activist Andaiye, and she talked about wages for housework in terms of structural adjustment policies, you know, policies that insist that governments in the global south cut their budgets, slash social services, you know, as a way of proving they're more, you know, efficient economically, and you know, as a condition for bank loans. And she said, just as you say, you know, like this is portrayed as, you know, belt tightening as kind of like fiscal responsibility, but what it actually is is freeloading, because what we know is that when you cut health services, when you cut education, it's not that, you know, there's no need to care for the sick anymore. It's not that we're not educating children anymore or caring for them. It's that women step in and do that work for free, you know. And that's in the 1980s when you have Thatcherism in Britain and then Reaganism in the US, and the whole idea of the welfare queen and slashing welfare rolls, you know, Wages for Housework, was really making an argument as an alternative to austerity, you know, talking about, you know, actually, like, this is, this is not fiscal responsibility. This is, you know, coercive labor. This is, you know, extracting labor for free.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:33  
We're talking about the ways that this movement is saying to the larger women's movement, you need to think a little bit more broadly about what it means to be liberated, what it means just getting, you know, going out into the workforce is not, not necessarily liberation. But there are, of course, even within this movement, various strands and women who are coming from, themselves, different backgrounds are thinking about Wages for Housework in different ways. Can you talk about these different strands? There's, especially, there's the sort of Italian part of the movement. And then there is a Black Women for Wages for Housework. And there there is then there become tensions between these different parts of the movement, even if they have sort of the same overall idea of what they're looking for, because they're coming from different backgrounds, experiencing different things, reacting against different cultures. That leads to then tensions in the way they want to proceed.

Dr. Emily Callaci  25:42  
Yeah, right. So I decided to tell the story of this movement through the story of five women who I think all contributed something really distinctive to the thinking behind Wages for Housework. So the first of them was with Selma James. And she was born in 1930 in, you know, radical Jewish working class Brooklyn. You know, her dad organized for the teamsters union. Her mother organized, you know, rent strikes. So she grew up around radical politics, and she really saw herself as kind of a working class warrior fighting the class struggle. And she joined a kind of offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party, you know, as a young teenage woman at the height of McCarthyism, you know, and she was organized. She married CLR James, the great Trinidadian, you know, Marxist thinker. And as she's going along, doing all this organizing, you know, on behalf of working class people, she really has an interest in working class women. And she defines working class women, not just as those with jobs, but people like her mother, who are doing the work in the neighborhood and in the home. So this is a long standing interest of hers. So she ends up in London, you know, in the 50s and 60s, and, you know, long story short, when the feminist movement kind of takes off in the early 1970s in the UK, she really sees it as an extension of this working class struggle she had been doing her whole life. She didn't see this as an aberration or a different kind of movement. She's like, yes, women are the working class. We do so much of the world's work. So that's one kind of branch of this. Second is Mariarosa Dalla Costa. She grew up, you know, in post World War II Italy, at a time of, like, massive industrialization. And, you know, in the 1960s she's like a student militant with some of the uprisings on campus. And there are all these wildcat strikes around the factories in northern Italy. And her real focus on the left, the male worker, you know, working for Fiat and all these other industrial companies, as the protagonist of social change. And she is a part of that movement. And she says that, "We're missing a big part of that picture if we just focus on the male worker." I talked before about this metaphor of the assembly line, you know, she really wants to extend that to incorporate women's work. So that's her kind of major shift is talking about that Italian context of industrialization and the worker struggle. So the third person I write about, Silvia Federici, probably the most well known of these figures to people you know. Her texts are still read by college students, and you see her quotes on graffiti and T shirts and stuff. But she also grew up in post World War II Italy. Oral histories interview that I've done with her and that I and that I've heard, you know, other interviews, she really grew up, you know, at a time when, you know, it's central Italy, there's a real kind of post Mussolini, patriarchal, Catholic kind of culture. And Silvia Federici is this really brilliant, rambunctious, tomboyish kind of young woman who really kind of chafes against those gendered expectations that she sees kind of coming down the pike for her as she's growing up. So she flees that. She comes to the US to get a PhD in philosophy, and she ends up becoming one of the really eloquent spokespeople for Wages, for Housework, in terms of talking about resisting that push into the nuclear family, getting kind of conscripted into this, you know, gender role and and and she also, as I should mention, was getting a PhD in philosophy. So she also had a very academic kind of contribution to it as well. Wilmette Brown, so she, I mentioned her before she, you know, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and, you know, later and in Berkeley, joined the Black Panther Party. She was a Black lesbian woman, so she ended up leaving the Panthers, largely out of frustration with the gender politics of the Panthers. And when she started Black Women for Wages for Housework, you know, in New York in the 1970s, she really expanded the conception of housework, as I talked about before, to consider racial capitalism, to think about how unpaid work was not just about, you know, the post World War II nuclear family factory worker and his wife, but had to incorporate histories of the slave trade and slavery and incorporate histories of imperialism, right? And then later, you know, thinking about environmental racism and how the environmental crisis differentially affected Black women. So she really extended to thinking about it, to consider those race politics as central to it. And then Margaret Prescod is the fifth person I read about in my book, and she was born and grew up in Barbados, you know, in a relatively poor community. And one of the things that she witnessed a lot in her childhood is so many of the women in her community, women and men traveled abroad to work in the global north as as domestic workers, as low paid, basically care workers. So she could see this kind of extraction of labor, you know, from her community. You know, many of the women abroad were, you know, you know, having other people raise their children because they had to go and get money, you know, in working in London, in New York and other places. So when she moved to New York and as a teenager, despite having, you know, witnessed this growing up, when she gets to the US, by contrast, she encounters this political rhetoric which says, "Oh, immigrants are freeloaders. Oh, welfare mothers are freeloaders," when it was totally clear to her that the opposite was true. She had watched this labor be exploited, you know. So she really brought this global perspective to Wages for Housework, thinking about it in terms of immigration and imperialism and those dynamics. So they had these really different experiences of housework, different political backgrounds that they brought to this. And I found that so exciting, because to me, you know, as you point out, it really took this initial kernel of an idea about, you know, thinking about housework as part of the capitalist system, you know, and taking it from the kind of nuclear family, you know, conventionally conceived workers family, and then thinking about in all these different settings. It really, you know, became a very capacious politics for thinking about the work that we value and the work that we invisibilize and, you know, extract for free in our society. She also talked about some of the differences that they had, you know, and I'm not sure I could chalk them up entirely to their different backgrounds, although, certainly that came up. The movement split apart in the late 70s, you know. And I think all five of the women I've just described would maybe have a different story about why that happened. One of them has to do with basically what was happening in the late 70s. And you have like Reaganism and Thatcherism and the real rise of kind of conservative backlash that's cutting all these programs. And so a lot of people at that point thought, well, we've kind of lost the battle, you know, like, let's, let's direct our energies elsewhere. That was, that was what a lot of people told me. In Italy, there was a huge repression against the left at that time. You know, Mariarosa Dalla Costa was one of only very few people in her department that were not arrested, you know, for their political activities, right? So that put a real kind of it really pushed a lot of stuff underground. But then another factor was involved was, again, a real kind of split within the people in this movement who disagreed about how to do this politics. And, you know, one of the things that's been challenging about my book is trying to figure out how to tell everyone's version of the story, but not being able to, through my archival research, basically, like take a side. That's not something I was able to do through the work, research I was doing. So Silvia Federici and Dalla Costa, they talk about real differences in terms of how they imagined a social movement should work, with Dalla Costa and Federici really having an idea about a really kind of decentralized kind of movement, where people could kind of form their own kind of Wages for Housework group. They would talk to each other, but there would be this real kind of decentralized way it would unfold. And they were frustrated with Selma James, who would be accused of having a very kind of hierarchical, top down model of how to organize, perhaps coming from some of her political background, you know, I don't know, but that was the kind of frustration they had, was feeling that there was this real kind of attempt to control the movement. But then another really kind of important part of the story has to do with race and racism. So Wilmette Brown and I think Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod have been careful over the years about how they talk about it, you know. So it's only more recently that go on the record talking about it. But Wilmette Brown talked about trying to organize around, for example, welfare rights, you know, and finding it really difficult to organize with white women in the campaign in New York, because their failure to recognize that race was not just a kind of side category, but central to this question. And she describes that as the reason why they had to form Black Women for Wages, for Housework with to have their own group where they could actually fully explore that politics, you know, and actually pursue it. And they worked together with Selma James, who had a lot of experience doing that kind of work. Again, I mentioned she was married to CLR James. She had been doing a lot of anti racist work in London at that time as well. And then Margaret Prescod, more recently has, you know, said, you know, publicly a few times that she personally experienced racism from some members of the campaign, although, you know, she's not pointing fingers at, she hasn't named named, as far as I know, but she shared that as part of her experience, you know. So of course, that that's an important part of the story as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:09  
Where does this stand now? What, what does the shape of this campaign look like in the the present day? Things have obviously changed tremendously politically since the late 1970s, and yet we do not have wages for housework in most any countries currently. So what, you know? What? What is the current push that people are making?

Speaker 1  34:36  
Yeah, thanks so much for that question. And then I should mention that much of my writing and researching this book happened during the pandemic, and there was this, back when I was on what used to be known as Twitter, I remember seeing this little tweet once that was like, you know, everyone was tweeting about, WFH, you know, working from home, and kind of joking about what it's like to work from home. And I saw someone, I don't know who, who said something like, you know, "Oh, WFH, I wish this really meant wages for housework," because it was this moment when suddenly there was just, it was unavoidable to actually look at this work, you know, because it was literally on your screen. I mean, like, you know, when your kids are home from school and you're trying to zoom into a meeting, like you can just see it, you know. So I think that was a moment of, I mean, I don't want to mistake the fact that I became really interested in that moment with the idea that everyone became interested in that moment, but it does became interested in that moment. But it does seem to me like there was this turning point in terms of this interest in this topic and revisiting these politics. So, you know, in the kind of wake of that the core members who are still doing this work now you know that are in the original group that was formed in London, they have started a campaign, or rather, renamed the campaign Care Income Now. I think trying to update the idea of Wages for Housework, to have a more kind of expansive way of describing that work. And they are talking about care income both in terms of the conventional ways we thought about it, like in terms of caring for children, maintaining households, you know, connecting to the welfare rights movement, you know, our right to kind of care for people, and they've also extended it to include a call for caring for the planet as well, talking about all the kinds of care work that we're faced with, particularly when faced with climate crisis. So for example, you know, some of the people that are that they're involved with are working in India and in Thailand, in places where there is this pressure to privatize land and turn it into an extractive industry, you know, mining, deforestation, and you know, they're talking about the rights that people have to actually care for that land, both in terms of protecting the planet and protecting their livelihoods, right? So extending, I think, for them, calling that a care income, you know, is maybe a little more evident than calling that housework right and equally important and trying to relate those two kinds of work together, because they both are works that are necessary for sustaining life and for caring for our, you know, our community and our planet, and they're both things that are under threat, you know, in a capitalist economy that seeks to kind of monetize them, sort of extract profit from everything.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:03  
I think there are perhaps people who are newly interested in political activism. Are there lessons from this campaign that maybe places they found success, types of political activism they did that may be instructive for people who are thinking about political activism?

Dr. Emily Callaci  37:25  
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, as you pointed out, you know, a few minutes ago, one of the things that I, a question I get a lot is, you know, did they succeed? And, of course, we don't have wages for housework, and in many ways, the situation might be worse than it was then, right? So, you know, there's a long arc to the influence of these kind of movements. But I think the fact that these ideas are getting this, you know, so much interest right now you see similar ideas talked about, for example, in calls for universal basic income, right? You have all these pilot programs now that are prioritizing letting new parents care for their children, you know, as part of this kind of broader attempts to de link income with a paid wage job, you know, in the marketplace. You can see, for example, in calls for a Green New Deal, talking about, how do we actually invest in the kinds of activities that promote human thriving, right? And, you know, rather than, you know, extraction and mass consumption, right? You know, why don't we prioritize someone who cares for a human body or soul, rather than somebody who finds a new widget to make us think we want right? So I think the ideas are really powerful. And that, I think was my main interest, was thinking about this as a really powerful set of political ideas. In terms of organizing, there's a principle that they talk about a lot that I think is quite useful, not just in that movement, but other movements. Which is this idea they talk about autonomy, which is the idea that we all have a different relationship to the systems that exploit us. You know, like in the case of Wages for Housework, it is different to be a middle class woman in the suburbs with a CEO husband. You're exploited, of course, you know, like, but that's a very different kind of exploitation than being, say, a single mother who's having your welfare benefits cut, right? So how do you find a way, you know, bring these people together, sharing, showing what they have in common, but not silencing one over the other? Because one of the things we see often in the history of feminism is how, even despite efforts to be inclusive, it so happens that the the interests and demands of those at the top are the ones that always end up being centered, right? So how do you actually create a politics that doesn't do that, you know? And I think the intention of autonomy was to find a way beyond that, that different groups would have a way to think about how they relate to this issue, but have a sense of being accountable to other groups within the movement, you know. So there was one group that was fighting as lesbian mothers to, you know, defend their custody of their children, right against a state that was homophobic and, you know, calling them unfit mothers, you know, like, they didn't want to be drowned out by joining the mainstream movement, you know, like, but they wanted to contribute to it because they saw they had something in common with other women in that movement. But I think that as an organizing principle, it seems to me, really vital right now, particularly given how divided the left has been in this country. I mean, you know, in other countries as well, you know, and if there's a way that we can support each other by recognizing, you know, our common enemies and also what we share and you know, as people who want to be liberated, I think that's a really powerful lesson. So, you know, it's exciting to see people taking that up in some ways.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:22  
So I want to encourage listeners to read this book. How can they get a copy? 

Dr. Emily Callaci  40:27  
Sure. You know it should be available in in bookstores in the US as of March 18. And I encourage everyone to support your local indie bookstore, because we need to support them right now. And yeah, that's where you can get a copy. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:39  
Well, Emily, thank you so much for speaking with me. I loved reading this book, and it's been really fun to talk to you about this movement.

Dr. Emily Callaci  40:46  
Thank you so much.

Teddy  41:31  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistoryPodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistoryPodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode of suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistoryPodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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