The Theoretical Housewives of New York City

IT WAS THE FIRST OF MAY, 1974. Children sprinted across the patchy grass of Prospect Park, the magnolias were still in bloom, and it seemed, for a moment, like Mayor Abe Beame’s deal with the governor would avert the city’s impending fiscal crisis. A group of women—no more than ten—fanned out across the meadow and handed out flyers: “MAY DAY OR MOTHER’S DAY?” The question was spelled out in scratchy capitals, flanked by crude drawings of a heart and a Venus symbol breached by a fistful of cash. “After decades of workers’ struggles, in the home we are still working for free,” their tract declared. “This is what is glorified on Mother’s Day, our unwaged work.” The last line swelled, “WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT MILLIONS OF SINKS, MILLIONS OF MOPS, millions of diapers, millions …” There, it trailed off.

The New York Wages for Housework Committee announced itself that day, not only to oppose the festival of sentimentality that is Mother’s Day but to demand compensation, from the government, for all the work women do for nothing. When the international movement first convened in Padua, Italy, in 1972, the focus was on unwaged domestic work: washing, sweeping, dusting, shopping, cooking, feeding, fucking, childbearing, child-rearing, soothing. Without women’s reproductive labor, they argued, capitalism would grind to a halt. The worker in the factory would arrive at the assembly line without clean clothes on his back, without food in his stomach—in fact, he might not show up at all. Women are socialized into this unpaid labor through the cultural myth that they are uniquely well suited to it, that these are “labors of love.” As they put it in another broadside: “We can’t afford to work for love.”

The International Wages for Housework campaign was not particularly beloved in its time, even at its height in the mid-’70s, when its chutzpah drew headlines and landed a spread in Life magazine. It was more often a subject of ridicule than admiration, chided for its strident rhetoric, dubbed the Jehovah’s Witnesses of feminist groups by The Guardian. Some critics, even within the movement’s ranks, worried a wage would reify the historic link between women and domestic work; others bristled at its interrogation of ingrained assumptions about a mother’s instinctive care. But in recent years, Wages for Housework has enjoyed a renaissance, as far as Marxist feminisms go. The most immediate catalyst was Covid-19 and the subsequent collapse of work and home into one cramped apartment, professional-managerial parents wiping runny noses between Zoom meetings. But the pandemic was an acute expression of a deeper care crisis; that is, the systematic devaluation of the labor that keeps society alive. Health care, childcare, and eldercare workers are chronically underpaid even as demand for their work grows with an aging population. Shrinking public provision and profit-seeking providers shift the costs of social reproduction onto families and individuals—and onto workers who routinely provide unpaid care beyond what their jobs require, for fear of leaving their charges neglected.

The movement’s return to the limelight can also be attributed, in part, to the aura of intellectual celebrity. Forty-six years after the New York Committee’s debut, Silvia Federici, one of the group’s founders, met a writer from The New York Times Magazine for a springtime walk through the same Prospect Park rambles. “I had asked to meet,” author Jordan Kisner explains, “because the pandemic and its cascade of economic, social, and political breakdowns had led to a profusion of Federician thinking in places I had never encountered it before.” Federici, then seventy-eight, appears alone in the profile, without her comrades from the May Day excursion. In the decades since, she has been recognized, in Kisner’s words, as “one of the most influential socialist feminist thinkers of the last century”—and arguably of this one too, given the cult status of 2004’s Caliban and the Witch, her bravura account of the birth of capitalism and the concomitant disciplining of sexuality. Federici is also the most prominent spokesperson for Wages for Housework in the United States, with Selma James occupying a kind of rival position in the UK. But Wages for Housework—was it a material demand? a radical provocation? a political theory? a social movement? a Marxist cadre? a feminist cabal?—extends far beyond the contributions of these two public intellectuals.

The words wages for housework were and are subject to different interpretations, each defined by its political context or, indeed, the person wielding those words. The formulation proved to be quite slippery, even if it seemed to have a very particular and material thing at its heart: a wage. Some saw the wage as the goal. Others saw it as a tool—sometimes even a bludgeon—to break down received ideas about work and love. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, an early leader of the movement in Padua, soon came to hold the position that housework should be made a public amenity rather than compensated in the home. Whereas for Margaret Prescod, who alongside Wilmette Brown led a 1976 Wages for Housework campaign to fight for welfare rights, the slogan was persuasive precisely because “it has money in its name.” Questions of whether there should be a wage, how much it should be, how it might be won, and who should pay it were endlessly debated and never resolved.

EMILY CALLACI’S Wages for Housework is the most rigorous and comprehensive history of the movement to date. Rather than impose a monolithic account, its author composes a history in five portraits: James, Dalla Costa, Federici, Brown, and Prescod each receive a dedicated chapter, telling the story of their private and public lives. The book thus comes to resemble a consciousness-raising session, the second-wave practice of convening women to speak about their experiences—of handsy bosses, of lazy, controlling husbands, of life-threatening abortions—under the premise that the personal is political. Ironically, part of what drove Wages for Housework’s organizers, at least in New York, was a frustration with consciousness-raising (and, for that matter, psychoanalysis), which they found navel gazing and “bourgeois.” In their writings, the New York Committee renounces the “I” of consciousness-raising for an omnipresent “we,” subsuming the personal experiences of different women into a collective that includes welfare recipients, upper-middle-class housewives, co-eds, and the largest constituency in the group: single, white, college-educated Marxists.

Wages for Housework took the Fordist household as its theoretical starting point. Its paradigmatic men were husbands and factory workers; its paradigmatic women were housewives. But in the US, the industrial family wage was already breaking down. The New York Committee’s original members were preponderantly social workers, teachers, and graduate students. In fact, the campaign (which, in Callaci’s estimation, never had “more than a few dozen members” at any given time) seemed to particularly attract women for whom housewifery was either unavailable or unappealing. Through the 1970s, single mothers on welfare, sex workers, and lesbians began to form autonomous offshoots. Some critics viewed this expansiveness as a failure of representation: How could women who were not housewives claim to speak on their behalf? Wages for Housework maintained that “we are the same woman whether we’re holding a dish towel, a baby, or a chemistry textbook. And we know that wherever we are … we are expected as women to work for free.”

The first chapter of the book is devoted to Selma James (née Deitch), born in 1930 in working-class, Jewish Brownsville. (Her father, a truck driver and trade unionist, taught himself to read with the Daily Worker; her mother, a housewife, protested evictions in the neighborhood and organized for “home relief,” a Depression-era provision of public assistance to families.) James joined the Johnson–Forest Tendency, a Trotskyist splinter group, when she was just fifteen. By her early twenties, she had married, become a mother, divorced, and worked on assembly lines in Los Angeles. In 1955, she moved to London and a year later married the older C. L. R. James, cofounder of the tendency and author of The Black Jacobins (1938). In an essay for n+1, Callaci admits that she “fell in love with Selma James” over the course of her research. “My pulse quickened when I turned a page in the files and recognized the distinctive font of her typewriter,” she writes. “Most of her letters included at least one stapled addendum and several handwritten PSes in different colored inks. She is irrepressible, has too much to say.”

James was a seasoned organizer when she began corresponding with Dalla Costa about Wages for Housework, then an embryonic idea. A student in Padua, Dalla Costa had come of age politically in Potere Operaio, a workerist movement that advocated for rank-and-file organization over institutional unionism. As she pamphleted workers in “a cloud of industrial miasma and mosquitoes,” chanting slogans like “Less work! More money!” Dalla Costa began to ask how those demands could extend beyond the factory and into the home. In 1972, she published “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” later the subject of a bitter authorship dispute with James, alongside an Italian translation of James’s 1953 essay “A Woman’s Place.” The former was a manifesto against the “‘female role’ as it has been created by the capitalist division of labour,” the latter a prescient feminist account, grounded in the experiences of mothers, housewives, and factory workers in industrial Los Angeles, of “constantly trying to finish work that has no end.”

A few months later, Federici, a thirty-one-year-old PhD candidate who’d recently moved to Brooklyn from Parma, Italy, by way of Buffalo, New York, read “Women and the Subversion of the Community.” She was galvanized. The idea that “the work that is part of having a child destroys much of the pleasure of having them” recalled her own complex, occasionally strained relationship with her mother, whose love had been warped by the obligations of back-breaking care. The manifesto offered “feminism with a class perspective,” something Federici sought and struggled to find in the second-wave movements swelling around her in New York. Soon Federici began corresponding with Dalla Costa and organizing the New York Wages for Housework Committee. In November 1975, the group opened a small storefront on Eighth Street in Park Slope; in Federici’s recollection, it was “then a proletarian neighborhood,” slowly being gentrified by hippie homesteaders who came to restore its brownstones, settle in, and watch as property values climbed.

“The quality of life here is shit,” Federici wrote to Dalla Costa when she first arrived in Brooklyn. “I am strongly tempted to return to Italy.” She slept in a winter jacket with the door to the fire escape propped open, worried her landlord might set her building ablaze to collect the insurance money. The night before the storefront opened, the state legislature passed the Emergency Moratorium Act, deferring the city’s payment of its billion dollars of debt by three years; in the meantime, municipal bureaucrats would have to scrounge up the cash, cutting corners at the expense of teachers, sanitation workers, and firemen. “We don’t believe New York City is poor,” Federici told a journalist. “We know we’re poor. We’ve been defaulting in our lives week after week.” To her and her comrades, the hysteria surrounding the shortfall was a pretext to dismantle the social safety net, compelling the poor and unwaged to shoulder the costs of keeping the city running while the wealthy got off scot-free. The maximalism of Wages for Housework’s politics, amid the municipal minimalism of the fiscal crisis, was bold but deliberate: Utopian aims, they wagered, could reap material gains on the road to revolution.

In 1974, Wilmette Brown came on the scene. She was twenty-nine, a Newark native and lesbian-bar regular. Already she’d joined and left the NAACP, joined and left CORE, joined and left the Black Panthers. She’d fought for and taught in the first Black studies department in the country at San Francisco State University, then uprooted to Zambia to teach high school English, searching, all the while, for a political home for herself as a Black person, a woman, a lesbian. Back in the tristate, she started working at Queens College and joined a consciousness-raising group with fellow educators Audre Lorde and Prescod. It was in that group that Brown came across “Women and the Subversion of the Community”; like Federici, she was instantly all in.

By the summer of 1976 Brown and Prescod had formed Black Women for Wages for Housework, an autonomous collective that identified welfare as the first such wage and argued for its expansion. Aid to Families with Dependent Children had been established in 1935, but its recipients were subject to invasive raids and to the infamous “man-in-the-house rule,” which denied welfare benefits to single women who lived with men. Johnnie Tillmon, a mother from California, helped lead the movement against this rule; it is her advocacy in part that Prescod and Brown were thinking of. “Welfare is the first money we women have won directly from the government for the work we do in our homes,” they wrote. “It is not much and it hardly pays for all our work. But it is a start and it is our money.”

Both Brown and Prescod were teaching in the SEEK program at Queens College when they founded their group. SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) was started in 1965 to prepare students from public high schools for higher education, providing them with a small stipend and a specialized curriculum. The enrollees were poor, and many were Black or Puerto Rican. Its teachers were often young writers; Adrienne Rich recalled that in her first year her job “was to ‘turn the students on’ to writing by whatever means I wanted,” which meant reading writers like Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks and writing from firsthand experience. For all its intellectual openness, SEEK was also marked by desperation. “These were students painfully aware of the gaps in their education,” observed Toni Cade Bambara, who taught in the program from 1965 to 1969, “frantically alert to their need to establish a viable position, a stance in what is for them a daily toe-to-toe battle with the uglier elements of this country.”

There were only 109 students enrolled in the program in its first year. Then, in January of 1969, the governor proposed decreasing the SEEK stipend and cutting CUNY admissions by 20 percent. In response, a committee of Black and Puerto Rican students issued a petition with five demands, among them that the university system create a school dedicated to Black and Puerto Rican studies, that it require Black and Puerto Rican history and Spanish language classes for all education majors, and that the racial composition of all entering classes reflect the Black and Puerto Rican population of the city’s public high schools. (CUNY was more than 75 percent white at the time.)

When these demands were not met, the students occupied the City College campus in Harlem. Rather than concede, the university implemented a policy of open admissions, guaranteeing a spot to every public high school graduate in the city. In what some saw as an act of deliberate sabotage, CUNY was immediately overwhelmed by new enrollees. In the fall of 1970, there were over 6,000 students in SEEK. “I am writing from under water—” program director and composition teacher Mina P. Shaughnessy wrote at the time, “way down deep in a churning, murky, frenzied world of sentence fragments, and sweet, betrayed students, and memos and suspicious colleagues.” These were the classrooms Prescod and Brown entered: crowded, chaotic, and intensely politicized.

In October 1976, amid budget cuts, the city began investigating and penalizing CUNY students who received welfare alongside tuition assistance, accusing them of double-dipping, with the alleged overpayments totaling around $1 million. Dozens of students were stripped of their financial aid and SEEK stipends. In response, Black Women for Wages for Housework launched the No Cuts, Just Bucks campaign, organizing students, many of whom were mothers, against the measures. They demanded not only that aid be reinstated but also that stipends be pegged to the cost of living in New York, that free childcare centers be established on campus, that funds be allocated for a campus welfare resource center, and more. They organized speak-outs, presented a petition to the New York Department of Education signed by welfare rights activist Beulah Sanders and the legendary sex workers’ group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), and testified at a CUNY board meeting. In 1979, the cohort went to Albany to speak before the State Assembly on the request of Brooklyn State Representative Al Vann. The next year, Vann successfully backed Bill 1564, which decreed that tuition assistance would not disqualify students from receiving welfare. In other words, No Cuts, Just Bucks won. Prescod wrote that, along with the passage of Vann’s bill, they “were also able to win the first childcare program at CUNY for students, faculty, and staff.”

In No Cuts, Just Bucks, Wages for Housework found its most concrete and ultimately victorious expression, folding the movement’s critique of unpaid reproductive labor into what we might call—to repurpose The New York Times’ mocking term from 1970—“welfare lib.” The campaign championed an antiausterity vision that, particularly as socialist politics gain ground in New York, feels urgent and profound: education not as private advancement but as the collective labor of teaching and learning; care not as a commodity but as a right; welfare not as charity but as a due wage.

THERE IS A SIXTH, unlisted subject in Wages for Housework—Callaci herself. The book begins with its author gazing up at a Wages for Housework poster on her living room wall as she prepares her son’s lunch. Callaci’s preoccupation with the campaign didn’t begin until she became a parent. A product of the “girl power” feminism of the 1990s, she had previously spent very little time thinking about housework, focusing instead on academic pursuits (Callaci is a historian of modern Africa at the University of Wisconsin–Madison) until the demands of motherhood piled onto her full-time job and left her working eighteen-hour days. “Motherhood seemed to conscript me into all the things I hated about American middle-class life,” she wrote in n+1. “If before I had been able to fool myself into thinking I was leaving a light footprint on the world, skimming along the surface of capitalism, I was now fully embedded.” Ultimately, she hired outside help. Callaci’s grievance is both with mandatory housework and with a system that compels her to ease its burden through consumption and the employment of other, poorer women.

And yet when Selma James looks squarely at Callaci on a Zoom call and asks her if she wants wages for housework for herself, she demurs. “Until that moment, I had embraced Wages for Housework mostly as a thought experiment,” she writes in the book’s introduction. Like an academic—and James tells her, “I don’t have a very high opinion of academics”—she had enjoyed engaging with Wages for Housework as a research topic, an archive, a thought experiment in keeping with her “abstract and idealistic” sensibilities. James’s invitation to pursue Wages for Housework as a material possibility takes her by surprise.

Throughout the book, Callaci seems ambivalent about the grandeur of Wages for Housework’s vision, sometimes tempering the campaign’s sweeping proclamations in more cautious language. In the epilogue, the author, reflecting on what the movement has given her, renders its inheritance in deflatingly modest terms: “new habits of imagination: a daily, quotidian practice of desiring and imagining a world beyond capitalism.” The specter of failure—they didn’t get what they wanted—seems to hang over her prose. The women of Wages for Housework didn’t subordinate their demands to those of political expediency, nor did they force a consensus over what those demands meant. They frequently disagreed. Most of the members don’t speak to each other anymore. But they asked for more, more, more, even as they were told to accept less and less, and that seems to me to be the essence of tenacious political life.

Foremost among the movement’s many differences from the liberal feminism of, say, Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine, was its rejection of the promise of liberation through work. “Big deal,” Jane Hirschman, an early member, told the SoHo Weekly News. “We now also have freedom to become coal miners and ditch diggers just like men. So we can all break our backs and die of lung cancer.” Still, the latest labor numbers are hard to ignore. Women, to this day, make eighty cents to a man’s dollar, a fact that She-E-Os are more likely to recite than many self-described socialists. Nearly a million women have left the workforce this year; in July’s jobs report, women accounted for 100 percent of the labor force decline. A national survey from the year prior found that “caregiving pressures [were] the top factor pushing women out.” The story behind these figures isn’t one of women choosing kids over career, as the trads in the Trump administration would have us believe; it is a story of the crisis of care. Financial circumstances for women, especially mothers, especially single mothers, remain massively burdensome, constraining, and unequal. More women are confronting something that Wages for Housework understood a half century ago: that the liberal feminist bargain—the exchange of a women’s labor power for a wage supposedly sufficient to secure social equality—is a poor substitute for women’s liberation.

The International Wages for Housework campaign was, as its full name attests, conceived as a global network. Despite its size, the movement brought its fight against unwaged labor to cities such as Padua, London, Toronto, and Georgetown, Guyana, adapting its central demand to local struggles over public services, family allowances, and migrant domestic work. But Wages for Housework is, at heart, a New York book. Grounded in the suffocating austerity of the city’s fiscal crisis, when the campaign both flowered and faltered, Callaci’s history also time travels to other New Yorks: to the communist Brownsville of the 1930s; to the student-radical Flushing of the mid-’60s; to the leafy, gentrified streets of present-day Park Slope, where, amid Blank Street Coffees and UPPAbaby Vistas, you can still find institutions and habits left behind by an earlier, more restless era. The storefront on Eighth Street is long gone, but the Park Slope Food Coop, locally sourced and quarrelsome since 1973, maintains its address on Union. And Federici still lives in the neighborhood. (Callaci finds her at home, a bowl of freshly washed plums from the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market gracing her table.) In last year’s mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani, with an assist from Park Slope progressive Brad Lander (a reassuring presence for the enclave’s affluent liberals), carried three-quarters of the vote here. The administration’s affordability agenda—universal childcare, municipal grocery stores, and rent stabilization—puts the politics of social reproduction front and center. Recently, in Prospect Park on a cool summer afternoon, I walked through the meadow, as I had countless times while growing up nearby. As I crossed the drive, I passed by the Garfield Place playground, recalling that it was there I took my first steps, and imagined my mother—alone, tired, attentive—looking on from a bench crowded with caregivers.