This study chronicles the international feminist movement called
Wages for Housework and the work of the International Feminist Collective in Canada.
Their '
Wages for Housework' campaign was very much an anti-work position.
Similarly, James's articles on a wide variety of other subjects--from the importance of breastfeeding, to Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti, to recent feminist Slut-walks--show how she and her International
Wages for Housework and Global Women's Strike campaigns have struggled to make grassroots women's issues visible and to demand that governments and other organizations "invest in caring, not killing."
Mink reintroduces a demand common among some European feminists in the late 1960s: "wages for housework." Believe it or not, a 1973 report issued by President Nixon's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare also justified AFDC grants as payment for non-market work: "The choice confronting the AFDC mother," it declared, "should no longer be between taking a job or receiving no assistance (which really is no choice at all), but rather the choice between working at home, in her own house with her own children, or working outside the home.
Many contemporary feminists fear that a "wages for housework" strategy would tie women too closely to the home and would reinforce a sexist division of labor.
Maybe women should start thinking of welfare as a combination of strike fund and
wages for housework.
Chief executive officer of The Women's Organisation, Maggie O'Carroll, will sit down with Selma James, founder of the International
Wages for Housework Campaign, Katrine Marcel, journalist and author of Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner, and Caroline Criado Perez, journalist and campaigner of Keep a Woman on English Banknotes.
The
Wages for Housework campaign is not endorsed by all who profess to be feminists and, in truth, makes little sense.
If the home was a quasi-industrial workplace staffed by women for the ultimate benefit of the capitalists, then it followed that "wages for housework" was the obvious demand.
The demand for "wages for housework" has sunk to the status of a curio, along with the consciousness-raising groups in which women once rallied support in their struggles with messy men.
Wages for Housework, an international group whose name neatly summarizes its agenda, estimates that full-time housewives who are mothers of young children work ninety-two hours a week.
Wages for housework. The radical demands of the early women's liberation movement are a reminder of the utopian vision that catapulted a generation of women into action.