Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972–1977: History, Theory, Documents ed. by Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin (review)

In 2013, journalist Kristin Wartman reduced the plea for "wages for housework" to "pay people to cook at home." Her goal was to improve familial health and welfare, which, she argued, had suffered from the movement of wives and mothers into the paid labor force ("Pay People to Cook at Home." New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/opinion/pay-people-to-cook-at-home.html?_r=2&">www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/opinion/pay-people-to-cook-at-home.html?_r=2&). Yet wages for housework (WFH) was no simple appeal for monetizing cooking, cleaning, and caring, what activist feminist theorist Silvia Federici and her sisters-in-arms nearly a half century ago called women's "first shift."

As recorded in this invaluable collection of manifestos, pamphlets, photographs, flyers, speeches, and "media coverage," drawn from Federici's personal archive, WFH was a revolutionary claim. The New York Wages for Housework Committee, and its counterparts in Italy, Britain, Canada, and across the United States, called on women to reject the task of reproducing labor power by performing activities necessary to replenish the (male) wage worker and socialize the next generation into their proper place within the capitalist system. As Federici explains in Wages against Housework, first published in 1975 and reprinted in this volume, "To say we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity" (206). No labor of love, housework was work, and exploitative work at that. Under these circumstances, (hetero)sex became a form of forced labor when women had no choice but to please the breadwinner or risk the loss of economic support for their children and themselves.

Wages for Housework includes founding statements, origin stories (in Padova, Italy, during a 1972 gathering of what became the International Feminist Collective), conference reports from Toronto and Bristol, and activities of US chapters. One section celebrates the Icelandic Women's Strike of October 1975, which "confirmed the Wages for Housework slogan that 'when women stop everything stops'" (83). Other documents present techniques and strategies of organizing, such as the urban storefront meeting place and the dramatic street protest. Invaluable are transcriptions of meeting notes on topics like sexuality, forced sterilization, health, housing, aging, and welfare. These pieces show theory in the making. The flyers and drawings, some reproduced in color, express a vibrancy and bravado, an in-your-face daring, complete with catchy slogans that conveyed big ideas in memorable ways. These pronouncements include "Housework Is Our Common Problem, Let's Make It Our Common Struggle, We're Never Unemployed, We're Just Unpaid" (45), and "A Woman's Home is not her castle: It is Her Workplace, But a Workplace We Pay Rent For!" (63).

Federici's introduction historicizes the documents of a movement that has left a large intellectual footprint despite a short formal time span. While nineteenth-and early twentieth-century predecessors sought to affirm housework as work, they merely offered "a union demand" (19)—better working conditions and recognition of the dignity and worth of their labor. But WFH rejected "work by which we felt imprisoned and whose ends (the provision of cheap, docile, disciplined workers)" went against a grand vision of human liberation (15). It named wage labor "the second shift" and classified pink-collar jobs in retail, helping professions, offices, and the overall service sector as extensions of housework. Home and community, social reproduction as well as production, became spaces for mobilization.

WFH emerged during the economic downturn of the 1970s, which saw significant cutbacks to the welfare state amid what we have come to understand as neoliberal globalization. It paralleled the autonomous turn within the...