“Our Time is Coming:” An Intellectual History of the International Wages for Housework

Campaign

By

Amanda E. Strauss December 2012

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in History

Dual-Degree Program in History and Archives Management Simmons College

Boston, Massachusetts

The author grants Simmons College permission to include this thesis in its Library and to make it available to the academic community for scholarly purposes.

Submitted by

Amanda E. Strauss

Approved by:

______ Dr. Laura Prieto (thesis advisor) Dr. Sarah Leonard (second reader)

© 2012, Amanda E. Strauss

The title is taken from Selma James, “Our Time is Coming,” documentary interview, BBC, January 21, 1971, retrieved November 4, 2012 from

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/70sfeminism/10404.shtml

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..........................................................................................................................2

Foreword .........................................................................................................................................3

Chapter I: Setting the Stage: The International Wages for Housework Campaign ..............5

Part I: Introduction ......................................................................................................................5

Part II: Historiography ..............................................................................................................10

Chapter II: The Intellectual Foundation of Wages for Housework ........................................30

Chapter III: Identity-Based Activism in The Interna tional Wages for Housework Campaign .....................................................................................................................................58

Part I: Black Women for Wages for Housework ......................................................................59

Part II: Wages Due Lesbians .....................................................................................................68

Part I: International Prostitutes’ Rights Movement ...................................................................76

Chapter IV: Conclusion: Wages for Housework and the Present ..........................................87

Appendix A: Geographic Chart ................................................................................................94

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................98

Primary Sources ........................................................................................................................98

Secondary Sources ..................................................................................................................100

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No scholar works alone, and I have been particularly fortunate to be surrounded by a coterie of friends and mentors who have inspired me, encouraged me, and challenged me. My husband Pablo has been a source of constant strength and calm. He has also kindly endured the numerous stacks of feminist books that have lined our small apartment. My aunt Sue is only a telephone call away, and I know I can always call to share joys, triumphs, and challenges, both big and small. My longtime and dear friend Sarah Zerzan always reminds me of why I write: to make a difference. As for my graduate school cohort – Stephanie Bennett, Erin Faulder, Emily Gonzalez, and Jasmine Jones – what would I have done without you? I also thank the women of the Schlesinger Library, who are my friends and have welcomed me into this amazing institution as a researcher and colleague. I want to specially acknowledge three professors who have left indelible marks on my scholarship and my life. Laura Prieto, my thesis advisor, has illustrated what it takes to be a great teacher. She gently pushed me to pursue my research, even beyond graduate school. She encourages me to speak, when I would be more comfortable staying silent. She has shown me how I can be a “librarian, archivist, historian,” without sacrificing any one of those roles. She is an inspiration, and I will forever cherish the time I have spent working closely with her on this project. Sarah Leonard, my second reader, showed me that an intellectual historian can examine “great works” and quotidian texts alike. She opened my eyes to an entirely new realm of scholarship through her History of Obscenity course. I discovered COYOTE and the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement through my research for this class. When I wrote one sentence about the connection between the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement and Wages for Housework in my seminar paper, she wrote “Fascinating link!” in the margins and encouraged me to continue investigating this connection. Donna Webber, my archives professor and advisor, has been an unending source of wisdom, strength, and encouragement. In the midst of my most profound stress, she has reminded me of the bigger picture. I am not certain that I could have so successfully completed graduate school without her. I told her of my trepidation at coming to the end of this long project, and she said, “You are not letting it go, you are only sharing it.” With these words in mind, I open my arms to share this project with the hopes that it will continue to evolve even beyond the margins of these pages.

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FOREWORD I happened upon two phrases in the course of my research that have lingered in the

periphery of my mind’s eye. The first is the opening statement of Lynn Weiner’s essay

“Domestic Constraints: Motherhood as Life and Subject,” which says “Like many academics I

am not particularly given to introspection.”1 The second is from the preface to Susan Strasser’s

book Never Done: A History of American Housework, wherein she remarks “At times, I have

seen myself as an embodiment of my real subject.”2 I, like Strasser, see a deep connection

between my personal experience and my historical research. In an attempt to counter the

academic tendency that Weiner discusses, I want to take a moment to reflect about my

relationship to the subject to which I have chosen to dedicate innumerable hours and my history

Master’s thesis.

I am the daughter of a housewife; a brilliant, talented woman who worked at home,

choosing as her occupation “housewife.” But she was so much more than this single word can

convey: homeschooling me, she was a teacher; nurturing me, she was a mother; quilting and

sewing, she was an artist. I grew up believing that gendered labor roles were natural and that I

would one day be a housewife like my mother. I have chosen a different path. If I consider the

roles I play in my domestic space – as a graduate student, I am a scholar; as a wife, I am a

companion – I cannot count housewife among them. Indeed my life bears no resemblance to that

1 Lynn Weiner, “Domestic Constraints: Motherhood as Life and Subject,” in Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, The Political, the Professional, eds. Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 215. 2 Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).

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of my mother or to my childhood understanding of gender roles. Yet, I cannot so easily discount

the housewife, for I remember my mother and her labor, of which I was a grateful beneficiary.

The housewife is a figure in my personal history, but she has also been a part of recent

political debates. As I write, the presidential election cycle has recently drawn to a close, and I

have been steeped in a bewildering political climate in which women’s rights have been

alternately contested and ignored. The housewife has been a quiet figure in these elections, but

she had her moment in the spotlight when Secretary of State Hillary remarked that Ann Romney,

wife of presidential candidate Mitt Romney and “stay-at-home mom,” “has actually never

worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a

majority of the women in this country are facing.”3 Clinton’s statement has been oversimplified,

because it was also a commentary on class politics. Yet, for a brief moment, politicos and

pundits, voters and candidates addressed the question: “Should homemaking or motherhood be

considered ‘work’?” Most of the answers given did not reflect any substantial consideration of

the housewife and her labor; she instead became a political symbol that was momentarily reified

and contested and then sent back to the shadows. In watching current events and thinking about

my mother, I have become even more convinced of the value of studying groups such as Wages

for Housework, for through this study we can bring a critical eye to every component of our

social house, even the housewife.

These pages are dedicated to the memory of my mother whose gentle labor continues to

shape me and to my generous husband with whom I share domestic chores and intellectual

camaraderie.

3 Mollie Reilly, “Hilary Rosen, Democratic Strategist, Criticizes Ann Romney For Having 'Never Worked A Day In Her Life',” The Huffington Post, April 11, 2012. Retrieved on November 11, 2012 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/hilary-rosen-ann-romney_n_1419506.html. Note: This article also contains a clip from the original interview in which Hilary Clinton made this remark.

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CHAPTER I SETTING THE STAGE : THE INTERNATIONAL WAGES FOR

HOUSEWORK CAMPAIGN

Part I: Introduction

The International Wages for Housework Campaign was a grassroots movement formed in

1972, at the height of second-wave feminism. Two of the founding activist-theorists of the

movement, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, hailed respectively from Great Britain and

Italy. As the movement evolved, chapters were established in the United States, Canada, New

Zealand, Switzerland, and Iceland.1 Indeed, one of the largest protests of Wages for Housework

occurred in Reykjavik, Iceland during International Woman’s Year on October 24, 1975 when

25,000 women “withdrew their labour” for twenty-four hours as part of a “day off” strike.2 In

regards to the strike, “Power of Women: The Magazine of the International Wages for

Housework Campaign” commented:

Never before had there been so general a general strike. It included women from the fish canneries and the full-time housewife whose husband was in business; the farmer’s wife and the telephone operator. So-called general strikes of the past have ignored the woman who goes on working in the kitchen. Not only have they not seen her work, but the success of the strike has depended on her working even harder. But in Iceland women left their kitchens and this action showed what a general strike really is. Only when women stop does everything stop.”3

The same diverse character of this general strike was writ large in demographic composition of

the Wages for Housework Campaign. While some of these chapters, such as the London Wages

for Housework Committee, were formed based upon geographical location, many identity-based

chapters such as Black Women for Wages for Housework emerged internationally. Additionally,

1 See Appendix A, pages 77-80, for a geographical list of Wages for Housework groups. 2 “When Women Stop, Everything Stops,” “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 3 Ibid. Emphasis in original text.

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Wages for Housework collaborated with the international Prostitutes’ Rights Movement that

burgeoned during the same years, and some prostitutes’ rights groups formed as chapters within

Wages for Housework Campaign.

Dalla Costa and James were not the first feminists to express concern about women’s

uncompensated domestic labor. In 1889, American suffragist Susan B. Anthony said “Woman

has been the great unpaid laborer of the world,” and approximately twenty years later, Dutch

feminist Mathilde Wibaut - Berdenis van Berlekom echoed, “It is by her unpaid labour that the

housewife makes it possible for her husband’s wages to be kept so low.”4 Yet, only a small

minority of feminists have paid substantial attention to the issue of housework. Labor was one of

the principal concerns of the women’s movement internationally during the height of second-

wave feminism in the 1960s and the 1970s. Wages for Housework’s preoccupation with

domestic labor relegated it to the margins of the women’s movement. The relationship between

Wages for Housework and the “mainstream” women’s movement is illustrated by feminist

journalist Jill Tweedie’s article “Slave Wages.” In 1976, Tweedie wrote that she felt “irritation”

and “at times hostility” towards Wages for Housework.5 “A non-starter, I said,” she continued,

“Who needs it I said. I mean, I thought that was exactly what we didn’t want, housework

confirmed as women’s work. Give us wages for it and we’re really trapped, we’ll never get out

of the home.”6 Indeed, Tweedie remarked, she was not alone in her sentiments, rather,

4 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I, 2nd ed. Rochester, N. Y.: Charles Mann (1889) quoted in Betsy Warrior and Lisa Leghorn, The Houseworker’s Handbook. Cambridge, Mass.: Warrior and Leghorn, (1975). Mathilde Wibaut - Berdenis van Berlekom, Working Women and the Suffrage. London: Twentieth Century Press, (between 1900 and 1920) quoted in Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, eds, All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework and the Wages Due. London: Power of Women Collective (1975). 5 Jill Tweedie, “Slave Wages,” The Guardian, May 3, 1976. Note: This article was based upon an interview with Selma James, one of the founding members of Wages for Housework. James was only interviewed by The Guardian twice: this article in 1976, and a recent article in 2012. See the conclusion for a discussion of the 2012 article. 6 Ibid.

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To many women in the Women’s Movement, the Wages for Housework campaigners come over like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Open any door marked Liberation and behind it is a woman with a Wages for Housework badge on her bosom, ten thousand leaflets in her hand, a fanatical gleam in her eye and her foot wedged firmly in the jamb. At any meeting concerned with women’s rights there will inevitably be a Wages for Housework stall piled higher than any other stall with literature, buttons, posters, and statistics. Selma James and her sister enthusiasts in Italy and France, America and Canada harangue conferences, shout from soapboxes, gesticulate on television, burn with a strange fever […] On the street corner they go down well. Within the movement and, often, among career women without, they set up a high level of irritation. Eyes roll heavenwards, figures slump in seats as yet another campaigner leaps for the platform.7

Second-wave feminists regarded domestic labor as not only peripheral to their focus on women’s

role in the professional labor force, but also as an issue that could undermine women’s progress

in the workforce. Some of the primary initiatives they raised were ending sex-discrimination in

the workplace through antidiscrimination laws and reducing the wage gap through equal pay

legislation.8 These initiatives were already met with a high degree of social and political

opposition. Activists in the women’s movement therefore found it ludicrous to invest energy in

what Tweedie called the “Utopian” idea “that any government of whatever shade of pink,” was

going to pay “wages when women are already doing housework for free.”9 To counter statements

such as this, Wages for Housework argued that the goals of feminism would never be realized if

women still labored in the home without compensation.

In 1971, just before Wages for Housework began, Selma James remarked that activism

for equal pay should be the beginning, but not the end goal of feminists:

Equal pay. At the moment these two words have to sum up the entire dilemma of the working woman. For example, bringing her child to a baby minder before work at 8:00. Worrying how the younger ones are looked after and what the older ones are doing when she isn’t there. Doing her shopping in her dinner hour and the housework on the

7 Ibid. 8 For more detailed information, see chapter 8, “Workers and Mothers: Feminist Social Policies” in Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballentine Books, 2002), 170-199. 9 Tweedie, “Slave Wages.”

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weekends. All in addition to doing hard, boring, industrial work. More money won’t liberate us from any of this, but we start with equal pay.10

Indeed, improving women’s status within existing structures was secondary for Wages for

Housework; its primary objective was transforming the fundamental role and composition of the

family and the labor force. Housework was the center from which these changes would emanate.

The first battle of Wages for Housework was to make housework visible, for this labor was

expected, but its essential social role was unacknowledged. The marginal status of housework is

illustrated well by the concluding sentence of the famed political essay “The Politics of

Housework,” that Pat Mainardi, a member of the women’s liberation group Redstockings, wrote

in 1970. She said, “I was just finishing this when my husband came in and asked what I was

doing. Writing a paper on housework. Housework? he said, Housework? Oh my god how trivial

can you get. A paper on housework.”11 Detractors of Wages for Housework shared the sentiment

of housework’s triviality. In 1977 Margaret E.C.M. King wrote a letter to the editor of a

newspaper in Toronto deriding Wages for Housework:

So, the housewives of the land want the government to pay them salaries. That is even more laughable than the idea of their husbands paying them. Why on earth should the government pay some guy’s wife for the work she performs in his home for his interests? […] Furthermore, are wives not already being supported by their husbands anyway? Who pays the rent, puts clothes on their back, food in their mouths, cosmetics on their faces, trips to the beauty salon – in short who takes care of them? […] [G]et a job of your own […] no woman was ever placed in locks and chains and forced to be a 24-hour a day devotee of housework. 12

10 Selma James, “Our Time is Coming,” documentary interview, BBC, January 21, 1971, retrieved November 4, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/70sfeminism/10404.shtml, 29:53. 11 Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework,” in Sisterhood is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 447-454. 12“Wages for Wives ‘Laughable’ Woman Contends,” from Coyote Records, folder 543, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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Though caustic, the primary flaw of this statement is that it reduced Wages for Housework to the

idea that the government should compensate women for labor performed in private homes. This

narrow misunderstanding of the goals of Wages for Housework overlooks the complexity of its

ideas. The public recognition and remuneration of housework were the primary political means

that Wages for Housework used to articulate their agenda. Yet, their ideas extended far beyond

expressing discontent about the rote domestic actions of sweeping floors and standing elbow-

deep in dirty dishes. They expounded a sophisticated social, political, and economic critique

based in their own unique blend of Marxism and feminism.

My thesis seeks to understand their analysis by constructing an intellectual history of the

Wages for Housework Campaign. It explores the literature of Wages for Housework, which

includes books, pamphlets, speeches, and short press statements, to construct a philosophical

genealogy of this movement. This genealogy ranges from the texts of Karl Marx to labor

activism in the early and mid-twentieth century and the explosion of the women’s movement in

the 1960s and 1970s. The philosophy of Wages for Housework represents the convergence of

New Left and feminist ideologies, and studying this movement lends insight into the complex

legacy of Marxism and labor activism in second-wave feminism. It also contributes to a more

nuanced understanding of international cooperation among feminists of the era. I argue that even

though Wages for Housework did not obtain its material goals, it was one of the most successful

movements of second-wave feminism, for it crafted an inclusive and complex definition of

“sisterhood” that united women of different races, nations, classes, and sexual orientations.

I begin by exploring the historiography of women’s domestic labor and use this

scholarship to contextualize my project. Chapter two investigates the body of theories in which

Wages for Housework’s activism was anchored. The primary focus of this chapter is a close

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reading of the foundational text The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community

published by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James in 1972. My analysis of this text is

supplemented by other writings produced by members of Wages for Housework. Chapter three

explores three identity-based groups within the Wages for Housework: Black Women for Wages

for Housework, Wages Due Lesbians, and the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement. It considers both

these groups’ relationship to each other and the ways in which they built upon or diverged from

the theory that The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community charted for Wages for

Housework.

Part II: Historiography

As a transnational history that examines feminist activism, discourses about women’s

unpaid domestic labor, and the impact of gendered divisions of labor on women’s rights, this

project weaves together many threads of historical scholarship. Though my historical analysis

draws from histories of feminism and sexuality, the primary historiography that contextualizes

this project reflects the central concern of the Wages for Housework Movement: women’s

domestic labor. The Wages for Housework movement has been marginalized in scholarship on

women’s labor and feminism alike, which is a reflection of its marginalization by the women’s

movement itself. Historians have not addressed its history as a labor movement and as a feminist

movement, and this project, therefore, does not fit comfortably into the established

historiography.

This historiographical overview establishes what historians have written about women’s

domestic labor and underscores what is absent from this scholarship. It includes scholarship that

focuses on Europe, primarily Great Britain, Canada, the United States, but also touches on

Australia and New Zealand. The transnational nature of this historiography is intended to reflect

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the international scope of the Wages for Housework Campaign. It also highlights historical

scholarship on women’s domestic labor that concentrates on the geographical regions in which

Wages for Housework was most active. While the span of this body of historical scholarship is

ample, it is characterized by four distinct categories of inquiry: women’s transition into wage-

earning labor; the role of housewives; the characteristics of and means by which housework was

accomplished; and the history of the political activism of housewives and mothers. By placing

these categories into conversation with each other, the following section traces the evolution of

historical scholarship regarding women’s domestic labor.

The earliest American scholarship on women’s domestic labor was published in the late

1970s, and the 1980s saw a proliferation of work on the history of housework and the housewife

and women’s transition into wage-earning labor. This scholarship consistently examined

women’s labor in relation to the space in which it occurred along the public-private continuum.

Indeed, the framework of spheres was prevalent throughout the early years of the discipline of

women’s history. In 1988, Linda Kerber’s renowned article “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds,

Woman’s Place,” exhorted historians to take a more complex approach and not rely on the trope

of spheres, but rather to “deconstruct,” “analyze,” and “demystify,” the binary opposites of

public and private.13 She continued:

What are we to make of this polarity between the household and the world, an opposition as fundamental as the opposition between the raw and the cooked, the day and the night, the sun and the moon? We do not yet fully understand why feminist of every generation – the 1830s, the 1880s, the 1960s—have needed to define their enemy in this distinctly geographical way. Why speak of worlds, of spheres, or of realms at all? What is it in our culture that has made feminists think of themselves, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s words, “as immured in their households, groping in the dark?14

13 Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 9-39, 39. 14 Ibid.

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The 1990s and 2000s reflected the growth of this discipline and its transition to more nuanced

analytical frameworks that began to interrogate the root causes of what Kerber termed “major

social questions,” like “the feminization of poverty.”15 As a result, the historical lens for studying

women’s domestic labor was refined. More attention was paid to particular historical eras such

as the Great Depression and to the activism of housewives and mothers, both on their own behalf

and for local causes such as price-fixing by butchers, national issues such as welfare, and

international matters such as peace activism. Additionally, as gender, and to a lesser extent, race,

became part of the scholarly analytical lexicon in the 1990s, this scholarship began to explore

how the gendered and racialized nature of domestic labor influenced gender roles outside of the

home. It is in this context that scholarship about women’s domestic labor began to intersect with

feminist scholarship. A notable example of this intersection is Lesley Johnson and Justine

Lloyd’s Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife, written in 2004, which

examines how generations of feminists have viewed the role of the housewife and questions how

the tensions surrounding women’s domestic role influences modern women.16

The demographics of the historians who have contributed to this historiography are also

of note, for they speak both to the evolution of women’s history as a discipline and to the way

that the discipline of history is gendered.17 The overwhelming majority of historians who have

written about women’s domestic labor are female, with male scholars joining their ranks only in

the past decade.18 Many of these female historians, especially those who published their research

15 Ibid. 16 Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife (New York: Berg, 2004). 17 Bonnie Smith explores the ways in which gender has influenced the evolution of the discipline of history in her book The Gender of History. Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Harvard University Press, 1998). 18 Note: These demographics are not true of women’s history as a whole, which includes noted scholars such as Tom Dublin who began working in the 1980s.

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in the 1980s, noted in their forewords, prefaces, afterwords, and/or introductions the personal

connection they had to the subject of women’s domestic labor. In writing these histories, they not

only wrote an overlooked history into the annals of academic scholarship, but also confronted

their personal experiences as wives, mothers, and scholars who engaged in paid and unpaid

labor, as a generation whose mothers or grandmothers were housewives, and as women who

sought to reconcile their personal experiences with their exposure to feminist theory and

activism. Annegret Ogden, author of The Great American Housewife remarked that in 1974, “at

the height of the women’s liberation movement,” she was “experiencing the shock of my

transition from full-time housewife to full-time wage earner [and] decided to trace my roots as a

housewife by studying the housewife’s role as it was played throughout this country’s history.”19

Ruth Schwartz Cowan reflected in her postscript to More Work for Mother (1983) that her own

experience of trying to navigate the gender roles associated with domestic labor taught her that

“Many of the rules that tyrannize housewives are unconscious and therefore potent.”20 The

double bind that these historians confronted in their personal lives and their scholarship recalls

Lynn Weiner’s essay “Domestic Constraints: Motherhood as Life and Subject,” which closed by

stating “Perhaps the key is not to think of personal and professional life as dichotomous, but

rather as equally compelling parts of a whole.”21 The discipline of history does not invite the

historian to become subject as well as author, but the personal connections that these historians

acknowledged between their experiences and the histories they wrote provides compelling

19 Annegret S. Ogden, The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner, 1776-1986 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), ix. 20 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 219. 21 Lynn Weiner, “Domestic Constraints: Motherhood as Life and Subject,” in Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, The Political, the Professional, eds. ”Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 215.

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insights into the discipline of history and its connection to the present day, which reaches beyond

the walls of academia.

A final note on the characteristics of the scholarly treatment of women’s domestic labor

is that though this subject has been a narrow field in the wide vision of historians, it has received

much more attention in other disciplines, including Sociology, Psychology, Law, and

Economics. This rich, cross-disciplinary scholarship could greatly enhance the current

historiography of women’s domestic labor. Future research in this field should look outside the

boundaries of the historical academy to draw in the wealth of work that colleagues in other

disciplines have produced.

Women’s Transition to Wage-Earning Labor

American historical study of women’s paid labor outside of the home began in 1979 with

Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s monograph Wage-Earning Women.22 The temporal focus of this text

was the period from 1900 to 1930, decades when women’s entrance into the labor force in large

numbers converged with the maturation of an industrial economy in the United States. Tentler’s

work sought to understand the effect of paid-employment on the life-cycle, demarcated by

schooling, marriage, and motherhood, of working-class women. Her work is nuanced in that it

argued against the teleological view that women’s entrance into the paid workforce spurred

women’s social and political emancipation. Instead, she proposed that women’s entrance into the

industrial labor-force was broadly a conservative, not an emancipatory experience, which

solidified rather than redefined traditional gender roles.23 The most comprehensive history of the

transformation of women’s work into wage labor in the United States, Out to Work by Alice

22Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 23 Tentler, Wage-Earning Women, 2.

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Kessler-Harris, was published three years later, in 1982.24 Kessler-Harris’ text began in the

colonial era and continued through the late 1970s. Her analysis encompassed not only the

mechanics of women’s labor, but also the tensions between women’s labor and family roles and

the overarching cultural, social, and economic expectations of what defined “women’s work.”

Like Tentler, Kessler-Harris saw that women’s entry into wage labor as conservative, often

reflecting the “mutually reinforcing aspects” between “wage earning and family roles.”25 Both

Tentler and Kessler-Harris wrote about the diversity of women’s experiences along lines of race

and class, but the focal point of their work was white women; they employed gender, but not

race as an analytical framework.

A notable contrast to Tentler’s and Kessler-Harris’ work is An Economic History of

Women in America, which was published in 1982 by Julie Matthaei, an economist who identified

herself as a Marxist.26 Though Tentler’s, Kessler-Harris’, and Matthaei’s work spanned the same

broad timeframe of the colonial era to the late 1970s, Matthaei analyzed the development of

capitalism as a transformational force both for the definition of “womanhood” and the sexual

division of labor. Nearly a decade later, Matthaei co-authored a text with Teresa Amott titled

Race Gender & Work.27 This book employed both race and gender as analytical frameworks,

discussing American Indian women, Chicana and Puerto Rican women, European women, Asian

American women, and African American Women. Amott and Matthaei defined themselves as

Marxist-feminists whose scholarly perspective was “radical [and] anti-racist.”28 Their

24 Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of America’s Wage-Earning Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 25 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, ix. 26 Julie A Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America: Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor and the Development of Capitalism (New York: Schocken Books, 1982). 27 Teresa L Amott, & Julie Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991). 28 Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work, 4.

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methodology was influenced by this perspective, and the resulting scholarship brought women of

color into view. Though it is an economic, not a strictly historical text, this work represents a

more nuanced exploration of women’s labor that has yet to be mirrored by historians. I suspect

that this trend in historical scholarship is driven by the discipline’s reluctance to more fully

intertwine their methodology political perspectives, like those stated by Amott and Mathaei.

Perhaps this quandary presents an opportunity for introspection on behalf of the discipline about

the political and social ramifications of our work. The (inadvertent) scholarly marginalization,

even of women of color, for example, reflects and reinforces their social, political, and economic

marginalization.

Instead of more fully integrating race and gender as analytical lenses, historical

scholarship on women’s labor outside of the home developed by exploring the effect of women’s

entrance into the paid labor force on the home. The anthology Labour and Love, edited in 1986

by Jane Lewis, illustrates this historiographical trend.29 This anthology focused on Great Britain

from 1850 to 1940, and its essays parsed women’s experiences in the home and in family life,

giving weight to the connections between women’s work outside the home and women’s roles

within the home. Labor was one of the central concerns of this anthology, and the essays

contextualized it by discussing women’s experiences with sex, domestic violence, reproduction,

and relationships among mothers and daughters. This contextualization placed labor in

conversation with other aspects of women’s lives, a similar goal to Tentler’s work, achieved

through a different approach.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the focus of this historiography shifted from examining

paid labor outside of the home to studying piece work; paid labor in the home, which the current

29 Jane Lewis, ed., Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940 (New York: B. Blackwell, 1986).

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vernacular might describe as sweatshop labor.30 This shift is marked by Eileen Boris’ and

Cynthia Daniels’ anthology Homework, published in 1989 and Eileen Boris’ Home to Work,

published in 1994. Written in the political context of the 1980s, which saw renewed debates

about homework, Boris’ and Daniels’ anthology was a broad treatment of the subject of

homework. The essays in the anthology addressed race, class, and gender. When taken as a

whole, Boris and Daniels stated that the goal of these essays is to elucidate the “past and present”

of home-based labor.31 Boris’ monograph treated the topic of wage-labor in the home more

narrowly. She focused on how changing constructions of motherhood from the late nineteenth to

mid-twentieth century related to homework and the debates surrounding its abolition. Whereas

motherhood appeared briefly in the work of Tentler, Kessler-Harris, and Lewis, it was the

primary construction through which Boris viewed womanhood. Her work bridged the gap

between home and paid labor and invited consideration of specific female roles, such as

motherhood or the housewife.

The Role of the Housewife

The preceding texts looked into the private sphere from vantage point of the public

sphere, examining the ways that women’s paid labor influenced their domestic lives. In contrast,

other histories inverted the relationship between labor and the home; they discussed women’s

work and role within the home, looking outwards to ascertain the home’s influence on the public

sphere. The focus on domestic labor and its social and political implications was initiated in 1982

when two similar texts were published: Susan Strasser’s history of housework in the United

States titled Never Done and Caroline Davidson’s history of housework in the British Isles titled

30 Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds., Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 31 Boris and Daniels, Homework, 1.

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A Woman’s Work is Never Done.32 Both scholars prefaced their work by musing on the marginal

status of the history of housework among academic historians. They both also expressed similar

sentiments that marginalizing housework ignored the history of the labor of women, who

comprised nearly half of the population. They further stated that the history of housework is

inseparable from social and cultural values and the development of industry and the economy.33

Housework is ubiquitous, yet taken for granted, and therefore is easily overlooked by scholars.

Strasser succinctly described its historical value, saying “The history of housework provides a

description of fundamental changes in American daily life.” 34 Strasser’s and Davidson’s work

laid the foundation for future works by writing about the role of housewives, including the

mechanics and mechanisms of housework and by making the case that housework is a legitimate

and necessary field for historical inquiry.

Histories about women’s domestic labor became more sophisticated in the late 1980s,

when “housework” and “housewife” were not just the subjects of historical scholarship, but also

analytical categories used by historians to define, understand, and interpret the role of women

and women’s labor. Accordingly, Annegret S. Ogden published The Great American Housewife

in 1986.35 This text reconstructed a history of the daily tasks of housewives from 1776 to 1986. It

did so by examining the evolution of social and cultural expectations regarding the role of

housewives. Ogden discussed the housewife as manager, helpmate, lady, saint and sufferer,

pioneer, domestic scientist, consumer, supermother, and displaced homemaker. Her approach

was similar to that of Boris’ Home to Work in that she used the construction of housewife (where

32 Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles, 1650-1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982). 33 Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done, 1. Strasser, Never Done, xi & xii. 34 Strasser, Never Done, 7. 35 Annegret S Ogden, The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner, 1776-1986 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986).

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Boris used mothers) to explore women’s role in the home, the family, and the paid workforce. In

1987, Glenna Matthews published “Just a Housewife,” which traced the ebb and flow of

domesticity from being a central social value in the 1850s to a problematic “non-occupation” in

the 1950s.36 Whereas Ogden placed her work in conversation with the burden of women who

occupied the role of wage-earner and housewife in the 1980s, Matthews anchored her work to

contemporary feminist views of second-wave feminism that devalued domesticity and the

housewife. Matthews’ work illustrates the connection between feminist politics and the

reevaluation of the significance of housewives.

The influence of women’s unpaid domestic labor on the emergence of industry was the

subject of Jeanne Boydston’s Home and Work, published in 1990, which, like Kessler-Harris’

work, is regarded as a seminal text in the field of women’s labor history. Boydston’s work was a

history of housework in the United States before the Civil War. The history of housework was

the foundation of Boydston’s text, but she stated that the “real subject” of her study was

uncovering the relationship between gender and labor systems during the industrialization of the

United States.37 She employed frameworks of Marxism and gender in her text, and while Strasser

and Davidson proposed that housework was important for understanding social and economic

developments, Boydston began to prove this assertion. She suggested that “the growing social

invisibility of labor women performed for their own families made housework in many ways the

prototype for the restructuring of the social relations of labor under conditions of early

industrialization.”38 The trend of applying economic frameworks to historical scholarship was

continued by Joanna Bourke’s Husbandry to Housewifery (1993), which was a study of the

36 Glenna Matthews, “Just a Housewife:” The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 37 Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work : Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 38 Boydston, Home and Work, xx.

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relationship between housework and economic change in Ireland from 1890 to 1914.39 Bourke

presented a sophisticated analysis of the change in women’s experience of labor in Ireland. She

used an economic rather than a gendered analysis of housework to frame her work, producing a

history of housework’s role in the economic development of Ireland.

Because of their analytical sophistication, Boydston’s and Bourke’s texts represent the

apex of the history of housework and housewives. In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, this

scholarship took a sharp and unexpected turn away from analytical work and towards nostalgic

histories that glorified rather than interrogated the historical figure of “housewife.” I cannot state

for certain why nostalgic histories burgeoned in this era. It seems that historical scholarship on

housework has born some relation to feminist and social narratives about women’s “traditional”

roles as wives and mothers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, third-wave feminism was punctuated

by a shift in the feminist lexicon, which began to identify feminism as a “choice.” This shift was

spurred by a backlash against the “supermom” ideal of the 1980s and pleas from some women

that feminists recognize full-time motherhood as a legitimate career choice.40 To this end, one of

these nostalgic histories is Una A. Robertson’s The Illustrated History of the Housewife (1997),

which spanned the same time period, 1650 to 1950, and the same geographical area, Great

Britain, as Davidson’s earlier work. Robertson’s preface referenced the 1970s “when ‘women’s

39 Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890-1914 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1993). 40 For more information on this trend, see Sara Hayden and D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Contemplating Maternity in an Era of Choice: Explorations Into Discourse of Reproduction (Lexington Books, 2010). There is a vast proliferation of scholarship on third-wave feminism. One source that can be consulted for an analysis of the differences between second-wave and third-wave feminism is Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Indiana University Press, 2004). I would point out that some scholars, including myself, are hesitant to establish clear demarcations, “waves,” of feminism. Indeed, Wages for Housework had many characteristics that could be described as “third-wave.” A more detailed exploration of this point will be reserved for a future work. I also think it is noteworthy that the 1990s saw the rise of vociferous religious organizations such as Pat Robertson’s “Christian Coalition,” who hailed a nuclear family structure in which women performed domestic labor and men were breadwinners. For more information about Christian social conservative movements in the 1980s and 1990s, see: Justin Watson, The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition (New York: Palgrave MacMillon, 1999).

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liberation’ was much in the news” as the moment when housewives became apologetic about

their labor and status.41 Slightly less than a decade later, in 2005, Rosmary Neering published

The Canadian Housewife, An Affectionate History.42 Neering framed her work as a model

through which contemporary women could understand and value the domestic labor of their

foremothers. Another nostalgic history that mirrors those of Robertson and Neering is Frances

Walsh’s Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife 1890-1975 (2011).43 There are

no recent works regarding the history of housework and the housewife in the United States.

The Mechanics and Mechanisms of Housework

As the preceding sections illustrate, historical exploration of women’s domestic labor is a

component of the broader field of labor history. It is also part of the history of science and

technology, and these histories study the implements used to perform domestic labor. In this

vein, Caroline Davidson’s A Woman’s Work is Never Done (1982) relied heavily on the history

of domestic technology in painting a picture of the history of the housewife. Through exploring

women’s reliance on domestic technology, these historians paved the way for exploring the role

of the housewife as consumer. Also closely related are histories of domestic servants, for they

allowed housewives to maintain clean homes without engaging in the heaviest of manual labor.

The seminal text on the history of domestic technology is Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More

Work for Mother (1983).44 Cowan stated that her work had a dual focus, for she analyzed the

history of housework and the history of domestic technology, one of which cannot be understood

without the other.45 Her work was also a history of the industrialization of the home. She placed

41 Una A. Robertson,.The Illustrated History of the Housewife, 1650-1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, xi. 42 Rosemary Neering, The Canadian Housewife: An Affectionate History (Vancouver, BC: Whitecap Books, 2005). 43 Frances Walsh, Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife, 1890-1975 (Auckland: Godwit, 2011). 44 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 45 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother, 11.

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her work in the context of a broader argument that reappeared throughout the historiography of

women’s domestic labor: the difficulty in measuring the economic value of women’s domestic

labor, and the double bind of women who work in the paid labor force and also maintain homes

and families. According to Phyllis Palmer’s book Domesticity and Dirt (1989), the use of

domestic servants allowed (and continues to allow) women to accomplish the labor necessary to

sustain their professional careers and their homes. 46 Palmer’s work was a history of housework

and an analysis of how lines of race and class demarcate what type of domestic labor women

perform and when and how they perform it. Indeed, her work examined race and class divisions

in the specific context of housewives and domestic servants. Whereas Ogden’s and Boydson’s

work focused on the housewife as an analytical category to define, understand, and interpret the

role of women and women’s labor, Palmer’s work confronted how the role of women as defined

by race and class was manifested in the parallel, but hierarchical, lives of housewives and

domestic servants. Her perspective brought women of color into view. She also examined sex

and sexuality and divisions between “good” and “bad” women as they related to the roles of

housewife and domestic servant. Sex and sexuality did not receive much, if any, consideration in

other works that have been discussed thus far, which is an omission that speaks to the need for

continued scholarship on the topic of women’s domestic labor.

The historiography of domestic technology and domestic servants as they relate to

housework and the housewife fell silent in the 1990s, to emerge again in the 2000s with the

renewed focus on the housewife as consumer, both of material goods and of food. The

relationship between the housewife, food, and consumer power has received the most attention in

this scholarship. In 2010, Tracey Deutsch published her monograph Building a Housewife’s

46 Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Temple University Press, 1989).

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Paradise, which examined gender and politics in relation to grocery stores in the United States

during the twentieth century.47 In many ways, Deutsch’s work marks the outermost boundary of

the history of women’s domestic labor, but it is included in this historiography because it

recognized a space, the grocery store, in which the power of housewives was recognized and

reinforced, rather than discounted and marginalized as it was in the context of labor. Some of the

most recent scholarship in this regard is sociologist Sabino Kornrich’s article in Journal of

Family History, “Hiring Help for the Home,” which was published in 2012.48 Like the work of

Matthaei and Amott, this article was written from a historical perspective even though it is not

the work of a historian. It set forth the question of how women’s entrance into the paid labor

market contributed to the commodification of the home. In this sense, it is neither women’s

domestic labor itself nor the foodstuffs and implements that women procured for their labor, but

rather the home itself that becomes a commodity. Boris introduced motherhood as an analytical

figure, Boydston and Ogden introduced housewife as an analytical figure, and now Kornich has

introduced the home. These are distinct yet intersecting frameworks that contribute to a nuanced

scholarship about the housewife and housework.

The Political Activism of Housewives and Mothers

The thread of the housewife’s power is addressed in various ways throughout the

historiography, and the preceding section has begun to bring to light the housewife’s power as a

consumer. Another arena in which housewives exhibited influence was in political activism.

Indeed, the political activism of housewives can be considered in four categories: housewives

acting on their own behalf or for their nuclear families; housewives as activists for women’s

47 Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 48 Sabino Kornrich, “Hiring Help for the Home: Household Services in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Family History 37, no. 2 (April 2012): 197–212.

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issues; housewives as activists for local, national, and international causes, and finally, the

relationship between housewives and social movements such as feminism.

One of the earliest works that focuses the political activism of housewives is Paula E.

Hyman article “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest” (1980), which addressed the New

York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902.49 Hyman stated that this protest was unique because its

leaders did not demographically resemble other female political leaders of the era; they were

neither young nor single, but were instead middle-aged housewives. She suggested that the

history of this boycott gives insight into the political role of women, which histories of the labor

movement and the Socialist party overlook. While Hyman viewed housewives’ activism through

the lens of labor movements, Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution, published in

1981, examined feminist activism of American housewives. She explored the arguments and

protests of the first wave of what she termed “material feminist” housewives in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.50 Hayden argued that these material feminists, including

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, articulated the basic cause of women’s inequality to be the

exploitation of women’s domestic labor by men. Hayden’s work is important here because it

solidified the connection between feminism and labor activism and examined a movement that

was the intellectual precursor for the Wages for Housework movement. Though topically very

different, these two works represent two manners in which housewives became politically active.

Scholarship on this topic declined during the remainder of the 1980s, only to emerge with

renewed vigor in the 1990s. In 1993, Amy Swerdlow published her book Women Strike for

Peace, which examines the history of the Women Strike for Peace movement that was

49 Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 (September 1980): 91–105. 50Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981).

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galvanized by American mothers in the 1960s.51 Though not directly related to housewives, this

book laid the foundation for examining the political activities of women who inhabited the

domestic sphere. Swerdlow asserted that even though the Women Strike for Peace movement

had not developed the vocabulary of second-wave feminism, their protests demonstrated that

“the familial and the personal are political and that the public and private spheres are one.”52

This is a point that manifests itself continually in the statements of the Wages for Housework

movement. If Hayden’s work analyzed the intellectual precursors of Wages for Housework, then

Swerdlow brings to light the ideological cousins of Wages for Housework. Annelise Orleck built

on Hyman’s work in her article “`We are that Mythical thing Called the Public’" (1993), which

addressed the protest and activism of housewives in regards to food prices. This article also

represented a growing body of scholarship that focuses on the activism of housewives during the

Great Depression. A similar work is Denyse Baillargeon’s Making Do (1999), which analyzed

the role of women’s domestic labor in allowing families to survive the Great Depression in

Montreal.53 Bailargeon’s work relied heavily upon oral histories, which is a notable departure

from written source material that has characterized all the works mentioned thus far. This

methodological difference allowed Bailargeon to understand daily life during the years of the

Depression, which is largely undocumented by written sources.

In the 2000s, scholarship on housewives’ activism increased to outpace the scholarship

produced in the previous twenty years. In 2003, Sylvie Murray published her book The

Progressive Housewife, which is a study of women’s community activism in Suburban Queens

51 Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 52 Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, 13. 53 Denyse Baillargeon, Making Do: Women, Family, and Home in Montreal During the Great Depression, (Waterloo: Laurier University Press, 1999).

26

from 1945 to 1965.54 Murray placed her work in the context of historians’ re-examination of the

post-World War II era in the United States. Murray’s driving question is how women’s political

activism in this era co-existed with postwar domestic ideology. The ways in which the

emergence of second-wave feminism influenced the social construction of the figure

“housewife” was the subject of Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd Sentenced to Everyday Life:

Feminism and the Housewife (2004). This book covered a similar timeframe to that of Murray’s

work, though Johnson and Lloyd characterize their work as an interrogation of “what it means to

be a woman in the modern world.” 55 They studied the relationship between feminism and the

housewife in Great Britain and Australia during the postwar era and examined the how this

relationship changed during the height and decline of second-wave feminism.

The activism of housewives in relation to their economic circumstances has received

meaningful attention from historians. One of the most notable books on the subject of welfare

mothers’ protests is Annelise Orleck’s Storming Ceasars Palace (2005), which addressed the

activism of welfare mothers on behalf of their impoverished communities.56 This book echoed

Murray’s work in focusing on the relationship between the domestic sphere and community

activism, though, like Swerdlow’s work, it focused on mothers instead of housewives. Consumer

activism continued as a theme in the historiography through Thomas Stapleford’s article

“Housewife vs. Economist,” which was published in 2004. In 2010, Julie Guard also contributed

to the scholarship on the consumer activism of Canadian housewives during the Great

54 Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945-1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 55 Johnson and Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life, 2. 56 Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).

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Depression with her article “A Mighty Power against the Cost of Living.”57 Guard argued that

housewife-activists challenged ideals of feminine behavior and carved out social spaces in which

women could use their domestic roles to engage in direct political action.

The Wages for Housework Movement

My thesis on the international Wages for Housework movement is most closely related to

scholarship that discusses the political activism of housewives. Yet, because it is not a social or

cultural history, its primary sites of analysis are not motherhood, welfare, food boycotts, or labor

activism such as strikes. Instead, my thesis is an intellectual history of a social movement, which

focuses on the intersection of labor activism and feminist activism. I work from a two-part

definition of domestic labor: the material actions, the manual and sexual labor, of housework,

and the abstract interpretations of this labor, which binds housework to a specific understanding

of women as caregivers and nurturers. Instead of addressing women’s exodus from the home and

into the paid workforce, I emphasize on the ways that women used their demands for

compensated domestic labor to question the social construction of the home and family, to

discuss the economic inequities between men and women, and to connect these inequities to

issues such as violence against women. Indeed, Wages for Housework was a feminist movement

that viewed women’s domestic labor as the central concern in the struggle for women’s social,

political, and economic liberation.

Wages for Housework has received cursory attention from historians, while the cultural

feminists who were its contemporaries, such as Robin Morgan, Florence Kennedy, Mary Daly,

and Kate Millet have been claimed by historians and widely integrated into historical

57 Julie Guard, “A Mighty Power Against the Cost of Living: Canadian Housewives Organize in the 1930s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 77, no. 1 (March 29, 2010): 27.

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scholarship.58 Wages for Housework is briefly mentioned in the conclusion of Hayden’s Grand

Domestic Revolution and the introduction to Boydson’s Home and Work. Two other brief

mentions of Wages for Housework are included in Estelle Freedman’s history of feminism, No

Turning Back and Barbara Hobson’s research on prostitution reform Uneasy Virtue.59 The Italian

chapter of Wages for Housework is the subject of a forthcoming article by Maude Bracke titled

“Between the Transnational and the Local,” which apart from my thesis is the only other history

that focuses entirely on Wages for Housework.60

My thesis intends to rectify the absence of Wages from Housework from historical

scholarship. A reductive view of its activism on behalf of domestic labor during an era in which

women were trying to “get out of the home […] to do something more fulfilling than

housework” makes it easy for historians and feminists to dismiss Wages for Housework as “the

reductio ad absurdum of the feminist movement.”61 This movement merits attention from

historians because the women who participated in it were dedicated activists and insightful and

rigorous theorists of Marxism and feminism alike. My methodological choice to craft an

intellectual, rather than a cultural or social history of this movement was driven by a desire to

uncover and understand the complex ideological underpinnings of Wages for Housework. This

movement was distinct in its dual-purpose of labor activism and feminist activism, and the

ideology upon which it was founded resonated with a wide spectrum of women. Without

seriously addressing Wages for Housework, historians will have an incomplete understanding of

58 I have taken this list of names from Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful, (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). 59 Estelle B Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, 1st ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 188. Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition ( New York: Basic Books, 1987), 220. 60 Maude Bracke. “Between the Transnational and the Local: Mapping the Trajectories and Contexts of the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1970s Italian Feminism.” Women's History Review (2013; In Press). 61 Tweedie, “Slave Wages.” Dr. Sarah Leonard, one of my thesis advisors, wrote this phrase in her comments on the first draft of my thesis on November 25, 2012. I use it here with her permission.

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second-wave feminism. Indeed, dismissing Wages from Housework and its dedicated activists

from the historical record, whether accidentally or purposefully, stands in deep conflict with the

driving force of the field of women and gender history, for it leaves, as historian Laura Lee

Downs eloquently stated, “the lives and condition of women in history […] shrouded in

profound obscurity.”62

62 Laura Lee Downs, Writing gender history (London; New York: Hodder Arnold ; Distributed in the United States of America by Oxford University Press, 2004), 1.

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CHAPTER II THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION OF WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK

In 1971, the year before Wages for Housework was inaugurated as a movement, Selma

James was the subject of a short BBC documentary titled “Our Time is Coming.”1 In this piece,

James charted the course she thought the women’s movement should take, stating:

Dependence on a man’s pay packet. So much seems to hinge on this, but so much else has to be challenged. How to get rid of the idea of man’s work and woman’s work. How to educate our children so that they do not reject us and we grow and develop with them. How to establish new social morality in every sphere. But before any of this can be done, we’ve got to clear away the debris of the past.2

She showed how women were extricating themselves from “the debris of the past” by

interspersing her remarks with clips from discussions and consciousness raising sessions of

various feminist groups including the Birmingham Claimant’s Union, the Belsize Women’s

Liberation Workshop, the Peckham Women’s Liberation Workshop, and Bristol Women’s

Liberation Group. When introducing the Women’s Liberation Workshop in London, James said

“To redefine ourselves is going to be a long haul. First women in groups have to expose and

articulate how others have defined us. For example through advertising.”3 This zeitgeist of the

women’s liberation movement that provoked women to collectively question their role in society

through consciousness raising groups provided fertile ground for the emergence of Wages for

Housework.

The focal point for Wages for Housework’s analysis of women’s social role was

domestic labor. The intellectual framework of Wages for Housework represented the intersection

1 Selma James, “Our Time is Coming,” documentary interview, BBC, January 21, 1971, retrieved November 4, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/70sfeminism/10404.shtml. 2 James, “Our Time is Coming,” 20:26. 3 James, “Our Time is Coming,” 9:13.

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of two activist traditions: Marxist labor activism and material feminism, which began during the

first-wave of feminism, when women such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ethel Puffer Howes,

Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Victoria Woodhull advocated for what historian Dolores Hayden

refered to as “the feminist transformation of the home.”4

The theory of Wages for Housework was initially articulated in 1972 by Mariarosa Dalla

Costa and Selma James in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.5 This

book built upon and combined Marxism and feminism to create a philosophical platform that

showed women how to overcome the historical roots of their inequality. It was first published in

October of 1972 by Falling Wall Press “and a group of individuals form the Women’s

Movement in England and Italy.”6 It was the kindling that incited the Wages for Housework

Campaign, and as the foreword to the third edition (1975) that was co-authored by the Power of

Women Collective of Britain and Comitato per il Salario al Lavoro Domestico di Padova of Italy

stated:

4 Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, 4. 5 Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (London: Falling Wall Press, 1975). Note: I find it necessary to say a few words on the authorship of The Power of Women. I have seen attributions of the essay “Women and the Subversion of the Community” to Dalla Costa alone and to Dalla Costa and James jointly. In her recent book Sex, Race, and Class James described the authorship of this essay and the process of writing the book The Power of Women. According to James, the first draft of the essay was written by Dalla Costa in Italian after a conversation that she and James had regarding unwaged housework. Dalla Costa and James revised the essay together in London and they finalized the book together in Italy. James also noted: “Dalla Costa and I worked well together across national boundaries until 1977. That year there was a political split (on race) in our international network, and we quietly parted ways.” Selma James, Sex, Race and Class, the Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (London: Merlin Press, 2012), 44. I do not know if James was referencing a “political split” in the Wages for Housework network (the documents I found did not reference this split, though that does not by any means rule it out) or a “political split” in their New Left network. In terms of biographical information, I know hardly anything about Dalla Costa except that she was a labor activist. James was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. At the age of fifteen, she joined the leftist movement Johnson-Forest tendency, which was co-founded by Marxist theorists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. James married C.L.R. in England in 1955 and they divorced in the late 1970s – I do not have an exact date. In his book Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, Frank Rosengarten observed “The Jameses’ marriage took a bad turn in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Selma James began to apply the slogan “Wages for housework to her own personal situation” Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (University Press of Mississippi: Mississippi, 2008), 93. 6 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 2.

32

But even when the authors understood that Wages for Housework was the perspective which flowed logically from their analysis, they could not know all its implication […] The book has been the starting point not for ‘a school of thought’ but for an international network of organisations which are campaigning for Wages for Housework.7

The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community was subsequently translated into

Italian, German, French, and Spanish, which provides an indication of the international scope of

Wages for Housework. Indeed, I consider The Power of Women and the Subversion of the

Community to be the foundational text of Wages for Housework, which is why I use it as the

starting point for my exploration of the intellectual underpinnings of this movement. While I

cannot empirically demonstrate how many women within the movement purchased and read this

book, the fact that three editions had been printed within three years is illustrative of its

popularity.8 Additionally, even if the pamphlets, newsletters, speeches and newspaper articles of

Wages for Housework do not directly cite The Power of Women and the Subversion of the

Community, they bear the clear imprint of its ideas and theory.

The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community combined two treatises

“Women and the Subversion of the Community,” co-authored by Dalla Costa and James in 1971

and “A Woman’s Place,” written by James in 1952.9 These two treatises were published together

with the purpose of situating the philosophy of Wages for Housework within the specific

historical moment of the women’s liberation movement. It was the unique milieu of

7 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 4. 8 I attempted to find more information about Falling Wall Press, which published The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and other Wages for Housework materials. I was not able to locate any information about this press or find statistics about how many copies of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community were sold. This is a thread that future research should follow. 9 The authorship and history of “A Woman’s Place” also bear further explanation. Rosengarten made the following statement about “A Woman’s Place:” “Its ideas were the fruit of a collaborative effort by James and Filomena Daddario, were named as coauthors but with the pseudonyms Marie Brant (James) and Ellen Santori (Daddario). James says that she was the sole author of this pamphlet, and that Dadaario’s name appeared on the cover as a coauthor because C.L.R. wanted both women to be able to speak authoritatively about the pamphlet in public.” Rosengarten, 89. The chronology of “A Woman’s Place” is also striking. It was preceded by three years by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and it preceded Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique by eleven years.

33

consciousness-raising sessions, speakouts, and protests in public venues such as the Miss

America Pageant that allowed Wages for Housework to burgeon in ways that were not socially

or politically possible for first-wave material feminists or female labor activists of the early and

mid-twentieth century. The introduction to The Power of Women and the Subversion of the

Community concluded with the statement, “We’ve come a long way, baby,” which evokes the

title of James’ documentary from 1971, “Our time is coming.”10 The Power of Women and the

Subversion of the Community marked the beginning of, to borrow James’ phrase, “our time.” To

this end, the introduction remarked,

What was posed by the struggle of so-called “reactionary” or “backward” or at best “non-political” housewives and factory wives in the United States 20 years ago is taken by a woman in Italy and used as a starting point for a restatement of Marxist theory and a reorientation of struggle. This theoretical development parallels and expresses and is need for an entirely new level of struggle which women internationally are in the process of waging.11

The strategic positioning of “A Woman’s Place” alongside “Women and the Subversion of the

Community” elucidated this “theoretical development” and set forth The Power of Women and

the Subversion of the Community as the intellectual cornerstone for this “entirely new level of

struggle,” which became known as Wages for Housework.

Dalla Costa and James consciously established their work as the culmination of this

theoretical evolution through three means. Firstly, they characterized the concerns of female

laborers as a continuum that generations of women faced from the inception of capitalism.

Additionally, they demonstrated that just as these concerns were not limited to the 1970s, neither

were they limited to one geographic locale. The oppression of women that stemmed from

housework united women across temporal and international borders. Indeed, the opening lines to

the introduction are “The two articles which follow were written 19 years and 7,000 miles

10 Dalla Costa and Jams, The Power of Women, 13. James, “Our Time is Coming,” 11 Dalla Costa and Jams, The Power of Women, 13.

34

apart.”12 They explained this statement saying, “The first, ‘Women and the Subversion of the

Community,’ is a product of the new women’s movement in Italy […] The second document, ‘A

Woman’s Place,’ originally published as a pamphlet, comes from the United States.”13 Finally,

Dalla Costa and James, both of whom were labor activists, positioned their theory and the Wages

for Housework movement as a new perspective on the political struggle of feminism. They said,

“Up to now, the women’s movement has had to define itself unaided by any serious heritage of

Marxist critique of women’s relation to the capitalist plan of development and

underdevelopment.”14 The treatise “Women and the Subversion of the Community” acted as this

Marxist critique, though it was a critique built from an activists’ understanding of Marxism.

Dalla Costa’s and James’ activist heritage familiarized them with Marxist thought and allowed

them to appropriate the language of Marxism to articulate their concerns about women’s

inequality.15 “Women and the Subversion of the Community” was not meant to be a scholarly

text, and it did not initiate a new “school of thought.” Rather it was a manifesto, an activists’

handbook.

The intellectual roots of “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” are found in

“A Woman’s Place.” This text was a demand for women to have the freedom to decide whether

or not they wanted to pursue paid employment outside of the home, regardless of their marital

status. In the introduction to The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, James

reflected on the era in which she wrote “A Woman’s Place.” It was written in Los Angeles, she

12 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 5. 13 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 5, 12. 14 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 5. 15 Dalla Costa and James cited several of Marx’s works, including “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State,” Das Kapital, and Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Notably absent from their citations is Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I cannot say why they did not directly cite Engels, but Dalla Costa and James were clearly well-read, and I cannot imagine that they had not read Engels with the same attention that they read Marx.

35

said “at the height of the cold war […] where the immigration of young working men and

women had assumed Biblical dimensions.”16 This geographical and temporal context influenced

James’ work. She described the demographics of labor in Los Angeles in the 1950s by saying

that these young workers from “industrial, farming or coal-mining areas” were alone.17 Having

left their families in the east or the south, they were dependent on a paycheck for survival. Yet,

they did not become labor activists through trade unions because, she said, “by the time they

were imported West” trade unions had ceased to be the bastion of radical labor activists such as

Samuel Gompers and were “part of the disciplinary apparatus which confronted us on the

assembly line.”18 Similarly disheartened by “traditional forms of “political” organization,” James

and her contemporaries “ignored them” and “made a clean break with the past.”19 For James,

breaking from the past meant articulating labor concerns from the perspective of women.

The universal perspective and experience of women was the first cornerstone from which

the philosophy of the Wages for Housework Campaign was built. While James recognized that

the realities of working class women were influenced by their racial heritage or how recently

they had immigrated to the United States, she saw womanhood as a unifying bond among

women. This vision of women as a caste persisted throughout the period in which Wages for

Housework was active. Regardless of class or racial heritage, James wrote, all women shared a

common experience of labor in the home, and often in the factory as well. Domestic labor

isolated women from each other, and all women could relate to the loneliness, solitude, and

invisibility of this work. Female solidarity was not a product of biology, but rather was forged by

the conditions and experience of labor.

16 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 12. 17 Ibid. 18 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 13. 19 Ibid.

36

Indeed, in “A Woman’s Place,” the primary argument that James made for why women

should have the freedom to seek employment outside of the home was to overcome the isolation

of the home. Isolation is a key word that would become an integral part of the philosophy of the

Wages for Housework Campaign. James described the isolation of the housewife:

Everything the housewife does, she does alone. All the work in the house is for you to do by yourself. The only time you are with other people is when you have visitors or go visiting yourself. […] Sometimes you get so bored that you have to do something. One woman used to change the furniture around about every two weeks. Other women buy something new for the house or for themselves. There are a million schemes to break the monotony. The daytime radio serials help to pass the time away but nothing changes the isolation and the boredom.20

This isolation was compounded by the nature of housework, which unlike the factory did not

have terminal increments, but was ongoing. James said “When a man works in a factory, he may

work hard and long hours. But at a certain time, he punches out and for that day at least he is

finished. […] In the house you are never finished.”21 The consequence of isolation was

immobility. For a housewife, the figurative space of “the home” was a space beyond which she

could not move, and her political and social activity was hampered as a result. By arguing that

women should have the freedom to work outside of the home, James was actually proposing a

much more subversive idea, which would become the second cornerstone of the Wages for

Housework Campaign: women should dismantle the role of housewife. In this sense, entering

into the paid workforce not only granted women a degree of economic autonomy and removed

them from isolation, but it also had the figurative effect of transgressing a social role.

James did not propose that there was a binary relationship between the workforce and

emancipation or the home and captivity. Instead, in “A Woman’s Place,” she dwelled on the

ways that housewives were creating uprisings through collective action and as individuals within

20 Selma James, “A Woman’s Place,” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (London: Falling Wall Press, 1975), 64. 21 Ibid.

37

their own homes. James described several instances in which housewives organized. “Mama’s

OPA” was a group of women who protested against the rising cost of living in San Francisco in

the late 1940s. Their activism, such as boycotting the purchase of meat on certain days of the

week, made newspaper headlines.22 “There are many times,” however, James said, that

“housewives take actions that never reach the papers.”23 These actions included neighborhood

women who barricaded the streets in their housing project to form playgrounds for their children.

James observed, even “police with tear gas bombs can not sic drive them away.”24 The same was

true for miners’ wives who went on strike against the sale of their homes and environmental

conditions.25 They would not be silenced by the mining company, and “their husbands refused to

cross their picket lines.”26 While these actions in and of themselves are significant, the ways that

James described how these women organized are more important here, for they directly outline

what would become the structural philosophy of Wages for Housework. In regards to “Mama’s

OPA,” she said “No one person organized it. After living with their neighbors in a housing

project for so long they knew each other intimately; each other’s weaknesses and strengths.”27

Similarly, in reference to the meat boycotts, she said “Women know each other so well that they

can talk to a perfect stranger and be sure of being understood.”28 From James’ perspective, the

key to these leaderless actions was the concept of “womanhood,” which was in part based upon

22 Associated Press, “Mama’s OPA Softens Up; Texas Papa Gets Tough,” The Milwaukee Journal, August 17, 1948, retrieved December 6, 2012 from http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=NQ0kAAAAIBAJ&sjid=GyUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3412%2C3501816. In a footnote on page 79 of “A Woman’s Place,” James explained the origins of the name “Mama’s OPA:” “This name came from the government department which was supposed to control prices during the second world war, the Office of Price Administration – OPA.” 23 James, “A Woman’s Place,” 70. 24 Ibid. I do not have any additional information about this protest. It is likely that it occurred in the late 1940s and was in James’ recent memory. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. James did not provide any specific information about this protest. I was unable to locate a date or details about when and where it occurred. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

38

natural affinity and in part a product of social norms. To this end, she said “Women at as a group

because they are treated like one. They live the same way on the whole, no matter how different

the individual situation may be.”29 What James was saying was that women lived in homes, and

they worked as housewives, even if they also had paid jobs outside of the home. In this context,

the role of housewife was what created a universal perspective and experience of women that

transcended nation, race, class, and sexual orientation. This idea was foundational to the Wages

for Housework movement.

The ability of women to act collectively outside of the home did not hamper their ability

to act subversively inside of the home. Indeed, James said “The most universal organization of

women is the action that women take in their own homes. Each woman in her own way is

making a revolution.30 She characterized spousal disagreements as a way in which women

asserted themselves in the home. She saw divorce as a form of struggle against a single man and

“an act opposing the whole way of life men and women must lead in our day.”31 For James, the

danger of the isolating nature of housework was that women might not be able to recognize these

individual actions as part of a larger struggle against social roles. Therefore, going outside of the

home to work not only broke this isolation, but it was “one of the ways that women show their

rejection of their role in society.”32 James acknowledged that women were unlikely to enjoy

factory work more than housework, for the nature of both was monotonous. Indeed, women’s

work in the home or the factory did not often reflect their individual choices, but rather their

lifecycle as it was shaped by their domestic obligations. Women would begin working in the

factory when they were single or newly married; they would return to the home to raise their

29 James, “A Woman’s Place,” 71. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 James, “A Woman’s Place,” 72.

39

children, and then later would return again to the factory. In terms of James’ argument, the work

itself was of secondary import to women having a choice about the space in which they worked.

“A woman’s place,” James said, “is becoming wherever she wants to be.”33 In 1952, the spaces

in which women could work outside the home were much more constrained than they were

during the height of second-wave feminism.34 But, James’ key words are “is becoming,” for

what she charted in the pages of “A Woman’s Place,” was the shifting, the rumbling, the

intangible discontent that would later be articulated to a much wider audience by Betty Friedan

and would then become the part of the fodder for the Wages for Housework movement.

It seems paradoxical that “A Woman’s Place,” which advocated for women to work

outside of the home, would be one of the intellectual precursors to a movement that demanded

that women be compensated for their work in the home. These two demands were not

inconsistent, but instead represent the complexity of the Wages for Housework Campaign’s

theory. Changing the space in which women labored or obtaining remuneration for housework

were the tangible means that James and later Dalla Costa and James used to articulate their

Marxist-feminist political perspective, but they were not the end goals of their activism. In 1975

Silvia Federici, an activist in the Wages for Housework Campaign, clarified difference between

the material and the philosophical goals of the movement in her essay “Wages Against

Housework,” saying:

Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the reduction of wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss

33 James, “A Woman’s Place,” 78. 34 Many women entered the paid industrial workforce during World War II. At the conclusion of the war, they were expected to leave the paid workforce and return to the home. James described this period as “the mass entry of women into industry during the second world war, and our brutal expulsion between 1945 and 1947.” Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 12.

40

its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in a capitalist society.35

For Wages for Housework, the unrecognized labor of housewives was the product of capitalism

and the touchstone for women’s economic, social, and political oppression. Dalla Costa’s and

James’ “Women and the Subversion of the Community” then represents an evolution of, rather

than a departure from, the ideas proposed by James in “A Woman’s Place.”

In the introduction to The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, James

reflected that during the nineteen years between the publication of “A Woman’s Place” and

“Women and the Subversion of the Community” women learned that unpaid housework and paid

industrial work were two fronts of the same battle:

[…] [I]n the baldness of our confrontation with capital […] we were making our way through what has become increasingly an international experience. This experience taught us: the second job outside of the home is another boss superimposed on the first; a woman’s first job is to reproduce other people’s labor power, and her second is to reproduce and sell her own. So her struggle in the family and in the factory, the joint organizers of her labor […] is one whole. The very unity in one person of the two divided aspects of capitalist production presupposes not only a new scope of struggle but an entirely new evaluation of the weight and crucially of women in that struggle.36

Women could only win this struggle by subverting the very ground on which it was fought:

labor. The struggle for women’s labor rights and women’s social and political rights were two

parts of a whole, just as women’s struggle in the family and the factory. Dalla Costa and James

opened “Women and the Subversion of the Community” by saying “These observations are an

attempt to define and analyze the “Woman Question,” and to locate this question in the entire

‘female role’ as it has been created by the capitalist division of labor.”37 They continued, “We

place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this female role. We assume

35 Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework, in The Politics of Housework, ed. Ellen Malos (London: Allen & Busby, 1980), 253. 36 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 13. In this quote, Dalla Costa and James are referring to “reproductive labor,” which I will expand on in the coming pages. 37 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 21.

41

that all women are housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be

housewives.”38 Two themes emerge from these opening lines: capital as a social and economic

influence and the universal role of “housewife.” These themes were the primary theoretical

guideposts of Wages for Housework.

Dalla Costa and James began their treatise with a section titled “The origins of the

capitalist family” in which they outlined a brief genealogy of capitalism and its influence on the

home. The first marker in this genealogy was a description of pre-capitalist or feudal society,

which they described as “patriarchal.”39 This description is important because it underscores an

argument that recurred throughout this text; capitalism did not create patriarchy, but rather labor

in a capitalist society became a vehicle of patriarchy. Prior to capitalism, they said, “the home

and the family were central to agricultural and artisan production.”40 The second marker in this

genealogy was the advent of capitalism, which resulted in a social reorganization wherein the

factory replaced the family as the “center” of labor and production.41 Karl Marx saw the wage as

a structure that alienated workers from their labor. The theory of alienation is present in Dalla

Costa’s and James’ text, yet they replaced the word “alienation” with “isolation,” arguing that

the wage created three waves of isolation. The first was to divide the home from labor, resulting

in the association of productive space with the public and unproductive space with the private.

What followed was the solidification of a gendered division between paid and unpaid labor,

which “detached the man from the family and turned him into a wage laborer.”42 The final result

was what Dalla Costa and James termed “the expulsion from the home of all those who did not

38 Ibid. 39 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 23. 40 Ibid. Emphasis in original text. 41 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 24. 42 Ibid. Emphasis in original text.

42

procreate and service those who worked for wages.”43 Men were expelled from the home to the

factory and children were sent from the home to school. The result was that women were left

alone, isolated, in the home, which became the “unproductive” space.

For Dalla Costa’s and James’ argument, like Marx and Engels before them, the

separation of men and children into public spaces (the factory and school) and women into

private space (the home) had great symbolic power. It caused “the sexes” and “the generations”

to have “contradictory experiences” in every aspect of life, and these disconnections resulted in

“a more profound estrangement” and “a more subversive relation” between men and women and

children.44 It is at this point in the text that Dalla Costa and James make the interesting choice to

explain the fissure between men and women in terms of the rift between children and adults,

saying:

We must stress that this separation of children from adults is essential to an understanding of the full significance of the separation of women from men, to grasp fully how the organization of the struggle on the part of the women’s movement, even when it takes the form of a violent rejection of any possibility of relations with men, can only aim to overcome the separation which is based on the “freedom” of wage labor.”45

One of the goals that Wages for Housework articulated was that compensation for housework,

which included procreation and nurturing, would recognize these as labor and not women’s

natural obligations. Accordingly, Dalla Costa and James stated “Where women are concerned,

their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital.”46 Similarly, Federici argued that

wages for housework “is the demand by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because

just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and

43 Ibid. Emphasis in original text. 44 Ibid. 45 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 24-25. Emphasis in original text. 46 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 28. Emphasis in original text.

43

therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.”47 It seems that to

define the struggle between women and men terms of women’s role as nurturers would solidify

rather than weaken the “natural” connection between women and their child-centered labor.

The manner in which Dalla Costa and James formulated their argument was informed

both by the historical context in which it was written and their interpretation of Marxist

philosophy. The advent of second-wave feminism occurred alongside an international wave of

youth activism for civil rights and peace.48 Indeed, Dalla Costa and James were aware of this

context and did not see the women’s movement as an isolated social phenomenon. To this end,

they said:

We wanted to make these few comments on the attitude of revolt that is steadily spreading among children and youth, especially from the working class and particularly Black people, because we believe this to be intimately connected with the explosion of the women’s movement and something which the women’s movement itself must take into account. We are dealing here with the revolt of those who have been excluded, who have been separated by the system of production, and who express in action their need to destroy the forces that standing the way of their social existence, but who this time are coming together as individuals.49

One of the most striking aspects of this statement is that it alluded to the New Left and Black

Power movements in the United States, but limited its attention to labor and class without

expounding upon issues of racial oppression. Similarly, Dalla Costa and James couched the

youth movement solely in terms of labor and class, without mention of the other pressing issues

of the era, including peace protests, counterculture, and free love. Dalla Costa and James were

certainly aware of issues apart from class that drove youth movements in the 1960s. Yet, from

47 Federici, “Wages Against Housework,” 257. Emphasis in original text. 48 John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman provide a succinct discussion of some of the ways in which women sexualized and undervalued by the New Left. One example they use was the taunt “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” that Shulamith Firestone, a female member of the Students for a Democratic Society, faced. Estelle B. Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 311. 49 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 28.

44

their perspective, labor, specifically “exploitation through exclusion” was the central issue of

these revolts, even if specific revolts were organized by race or gender.50 Likewise, Dalla Costa

and James saw the labor of housewives as the nucleus from which social and economic

inequalities emanated and as a central concern of feminism. These social uprisings were placed

in their genealogy of capitalism as part of working class resistance to capitalism. The specific

foci of these actions represented the concerns particular to groups of young people, but they were

part of the same overarching labor resistance.

Dalla Costa and James clearly set their philosophy, which rejected “class subordinated to

feminism and […] feminism subordinated to class,” apart from that of other women who were

activists in New Left and later second-wave feminist movements.51 From Dalla Costa’s and

James’ perspective, these activists failed to engage in a revolutionary struggle on two fronts: the

manner in which they protested and the goals of their activism. Dalla Costa’s and James’

discontent is most clearly illustrated in terms of feminism, for the activism of mainstream, liberal

feminists such as Betty Friedan did not challenge social, political, and economic structures, but

rather fought for women’s “full participation” within them. Accordingly, The National

Organization for Women’s Statement of Purpose, which was written by Friedan in 1966, said

“The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream

of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal

50 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 27. 51 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 9. The connection between second-wave feminism and the New Left, both in the United States and internationally, is a topic that merits further scholarly, historical exploration. A classic text that addresses this connection is Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). A more recent text is Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

45

partnership with men.”52 NOW’s statement of purpose asserted the political participation of

women as one of its primary concerns, saying

WE BELIEVE that women must now exercise their political rights and responsibilities as American citizens. They must refuse to be segregated on the basis of sex into separate-and-not-equal ladies' auxiliaries in the political parties, and they must demand representation according to their numbers in the regularly constituted party committees -- at local, state, and national levels -- and in the informal power structure, participating fully in the selection of candidates and political decision-making, and running for office themselves.53

The difference between the approach and perspective of women how supported NOW and

women who were members of Wages for Housework is shown in stark relief by a statement that

James made in 1971 in the documentary “Our Time is Coming:”

We want to make it clear. We are not concerned with the few women who make it in this society. We’re not concerned that there be more members of Parliament who are women. That would be very nice. It would be very useful. But that is not our concern. We are concerned with redefining politics and what we mean by politics is people taking hold of their own environment and changing it to suit themselves and not being at the mercy of events.54

Dalla Costa and James wanted to transform the environment that allowed patriarchy to exist, and

they did so by addressing patriarchy through an economic critique informed by their Marxist

heritage. Indeed, they were advocating for a complete subversion of the existing economic

structure, rather than for women obtain greater economic equality within it. Dalla Costa and

James referred to women such as Friedan as being akin to “just ‘Marxist’ men in drag,” for

The struggle as they see it is not qualitatively different from the one the organized labor movement under masculine management has always commended to women, expect that now, appended to the “general struggle,” is something called “women’s liberation” or “women’s struggle” voiced by women themselves.55

52 The National Organization for Women, “The National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of Purpose,” retrieved November 26, 2011 from http://www.now.org/history/purpos66.html. 53 Ibid. 54 James, “Our Time is Coming,” 26:19. 55 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 8. Emphasis in original text.

46

Through this statement, Dalla Costa and James indirectly addressed the fissure between liberal

feminists and radical feminists within second-wave feminism. This fissure was succinctly

characterized by Bonnie Kreps, founder of the radical feminist movement in Canada, in 1968

when she said, “We in this segment of the movement […] do not believe that the oppression of

women will be ended by giving them a bigger piece of the pie as Betty Friedan would have it.

We believe that the pie itself is rotten.”56 In a similar vein, the intent of Dalla Costa’s and James’

theory was not just to insert feminism and a discussion of women’s domestic labor into a

heritage of Marxist activism in which these concerns had been negated, but to re-envision

Marxist theory from the perspective of women’s domestic labor; they saw the “pies” of Marxism

and feminism alike to be rotten. I think that the criticism that Dalla Costa and James leveled

against the traditions of feminist and Marxist activism were warranted. This criticism does not

strike me as being reactionary, but rather as been seeded in careful reflection about their

experiences as female laborers and activists.

Dalla Costa and James saw Marxist, and paradoxically traditional feminist, thought as

being male-centric. In both traditions the personhood and experience of women was measured in

56 Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, 1st ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 87. Original quotation taken from Bonnie Kreps, “Radical Feminism I,” in Radical Feminism, eds. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anna Rapone (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), 239. Note: Characterizing Wages for Housework as a radical feminist or cultural feminist movement is not one of the goals of this thesis. Indeed, to do so would require a much more in-depth analysis of feminist theory and would require a different methodological approach than I have used. I have, however, given some thought as to where Wages for Housework fits into second-wave feminism. I think that Wages for Housework had ideological connections to both radical feminists and cultural feminists. Temporally, radical feminists came of age slightly before Wages for Housework, emerging in the late 1960s and dissipating in the mid-1970s. Cultural feminists such as Robin Morgan became vocal in the early and mid-1970s, at the same time that Wages for Housework began. Even though the imprint of these two brands of feminism can be seen in the ideology and activism of Wages for Housework, Wages for Housework was clearly on the outskirts of both. If radical and cultural feminists represented the fringes of second-wave feminism dominated by liberal feminists like Betty Friedan, then Wages for Housework represented the fringes of the fringe, so to speak. For an overview of radical feminism, see: Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975, American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). For an overview of cultural feminism, see: Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 405–436.

47

relation to that of men, and yet men and women did not advance alongside each other. Not only

had working class labor activism ignored the issue of domestic labor, but “every phase of the

working class struggle ha[d] fixed the subordination and exploitation of women at a higher

level.”57 The discontent that Dalla Costa and James felt with labor activists was echoed by

women who became Wages for Housework activists. The essay “Slavery or a Labor of Love?” in

What’s A Wife Worth? (1975) by Lisa Leghorn and Betsy Warrior, stated:

In every period of labor reform, the lot of the houseworker has lain outside the sphere of interest of reformers and radicals alike, and has remained untouched by any improvements accruing to those workers whose jobs are outside the home. This continues to be the case today.58

Because women did not share in the gains of working class men, each advance for working class

men meant that women were relegated to a lower the status, both within labor movements and in

society at large.

Dalla Costa and James explained how they felt traditional Marxism marginalized women

in a footnote to a section of the text titled, “The ‘political’ attack against women.” The footnote

began by referencing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the fact that many of the

revolutionaries “found female partners among the dispossessed aristocracy.”59 In regards to this

example of patriarchy within Communist movements, Dalla Costa and James said “When power

continues to reside in men both at the level of the State and in individual relations, women

continue to be ‘the spoil and handmaid of communal lust’ (Karl Marx, Economic and

Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1959, p.94).” They then quoted

“Work Among Women,” a section of the “Decisions of the Third Congress of the Communist

International,” written in 1921, saying:

57 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 34. 58 Lisa Leghorn and Betsy Warrior, What’s a Wife Worth? (Somerville: New England Free Press, 1975), 4. 59 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 55 footnote 20.

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The Third Congress of the Comintern confirms the basic proposition of revolutionary Marxism, that is, that there is no ‘specific woman question’ and no ‘specific women’s movement’, and that every sort of alliance of working women with bourgeois feminism, as well as any support by the women workers of the treacherous tactics of the social compromisers and opportunists, leads to the undermining of the forces of the proletariat….In order to put an end to women’s slavery it is necessary to inaugurate the new Communist organization of society.60

Dalla Costa and James remarked that because the theory of Marxism was male, its practice was

to “neutralize” the assertion of women’s interests.61 They continued by quoting “one of the

founding fathers” from the “First National Conference of Communist Women of the Communist

Party of Italy on March 26, 1922:”

Comrade Gramsci pointed out that special action must be organized among housewives, who constitute the large majority of the proletarian women. He said that they should be related in some way to our movement by our setting up special organizations. Housewives, as far as the quality of their work is concerned, can be considered similar to artisans and therefore they will hardly be communists; however, because they are the workers’ mates and because they share in some way the workers’ life, they are attracted toward communism. Our propaganda can therefore have an influence over [sic] these housewives; it can be instrumental if not to officer them into our organization, to neutralize them; so that they do not stand in the way of the possible struggles by the workers.” (From Compagna, the Italian Communist Party organ for work among women, Year I, No. 3 [April 2, 1922], p.2.

According to this statement, because the labor of housewives was not considered industrial and

did not create a product that could be bought and sold, it existed outside of the wage labor

system that is inherent to capitalism. Women’s involvement in communism was limited to the

60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. Dalla Costa’s and James’ assertion that Marxism was a “male” theory is complex. One can ask: If Marxism was male, then why were women attracted to it? I think that Dalla Costa and James were not asserting that the essence of Marxist thought was male, but rather that the great Marxist and New Left theorists such as Antonio Gramsci were male. To their view, men were directing Marxist thought and activism alike. Another question that is raised is one that has been particularly plaguing to feminists: identity. Did Dalla Costa and James identify first as women and second as members of the working class? Although the use of this term is anachronistic, I wonder if Dalla Costa’s and James’ understanding of class and gender identities was more along the lines of intersectionality. They participated in the New Left because of their working class identities, but they developed their own Marxist-feminist theory because Marxism alone did not address their identity as women. Overall, this section represents perhaps one of the most complex threads of Dalla Costa’s and James’ thought. I have tried not to criticize or point out places where they might be misinterpreting or overlooking aspects of Marxist thought, for the goal of this project is to explicate their theory. My hope is that once their theory becomes part of the scholarly record, historians, Marxists, and feminists can begin to interrogate it. My sense is that Dalla Costa’s and James’ theory will withstand interrogation, because they seem to have a full, nuanced grasp of Marxist thought.

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fact that they shared the benefits of the workers’ wages. They were placed in a secondary, non-

contributory position. Dalla Costa and James so strongly emphasized women’s isolation from

men in their genealogy of capitalism in response to this gendered labor structure. This isolation

was so profound that they witnessed and experienced it even in their participation in the Marxist

struggle against capitalism.

At the conclusion of the genealogy of capitalism, the remainder of “Women and the

Subversion of the Community” elaborated a new Marxist theory according from the perspective

of women’s domestic labor and charted a course for women’s activism. The central thread of this

theory was the isolating nature of the labor of housewives. For Dalla Costa and James, isolation

was etched into the female body by the labor women perform. As a housewife, the female body

was enclosed within the walls of her domicile, which was the space in which she labored. But the

source of her isolation was more profound than her physical surroundings. In the role of

housewife, the woman was isolated from the functions and pleasures of her own body. Dalla

Costa and James spoke of this isolation as “the destruction of woman as a person” through the

“diminution of her physical integrity.”62 For Dalla Costa and James, the nuclear family was “the

very pillar of the capitalist organization of work.”63 Within this familial structure, women were

separated from social forms of labor that occur outside of the home. They were therefore

prohibited from “the possibility of developing their creative capacity.”64 In this sense, women

were isolated from the use of their own minds. The functions of housework that they managed

did not require the engagement of their intellect, their “psychological and emotional

autonomy.”65 Dalla Costa and James described housework as “using in isolation the same broom

62 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 30. Emphasis in original text. 63 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 35. 64 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 31. 65 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 31.

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in the same few square feet of kitchen for centuries.”66 This phrase is a reminder that when Dalla

Costa and James spoke of a single housewife, they were referring to all housewives, for

“housewife” was a universal role, a caste of labor.

The second point of isolation that Dalla Costa and James mapped onto the female body

was the uterus, which performed the “capitalist function” of “reproducing labor power.”67 This

statement disproved the assertion of male-driven labor movements that domestic labor was not

productive labor. Dalla Costa and James saw this “reproductive labor” as harmful, not beneficial

for women. Just as women were robbed of their creative potential, so too were they deprived of

developing their sexual autonomy and directing the course of their sexual life. The text describes

lack of access to effective birth control and abortion services as means of maintaining the uterus

as a tool of capitalism, outside of women’s control. Essentially, women were alienated from their

own creative (reproductive) powers. This argument created a direct link between Dalla Costa and

James and second-wave feminism, one of the primary concerns of which was reproductive

rights. All of the feminist arguments that Dalla Costa and James made in this text point back to

labor. In other words, the capitalist system of labor that they described was constructed in a

manner that did not allow women to access to birth control and abortion services. Additionally,

the oppression caused by lack of access to these services was compounded by the relationship

between reproductive sex and housework, both of which were seen to be natural obligations for

women.

Dalla Costa and James further developed their argument by proposing that the

constriction of creativity and sexuality within the role of housewife was iterative, for it in turn

solidified the connection between women and this role. Accordingly, they said:

66 Ibid. 67 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 30-31.

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The passive sexual receptivity of women creates the compulsively tidy housewife […] The trivia of most of housework and the discipline which is required to perform the same work over every day, every week, very year, double on holidays, destroys the possibilities of uninhibited sexuality […] we are taught to derive happiness from clean sex on whiter than white sheets; to sacrifice sexuality and other creative activity at one and the same time.68

At this point in their argument, Dalla Costa and James entered the fray of the sexual politics of

second-wave feminism, focusing first on the female orgasm and secondly on homosexuality, as

they related to women’s labor.69 They began by establishing one of the gains of second-wave

feminism saying, “So far the women’s movement, most notably by destroying the myth of the

vaginal orgasm, has exposed the physical mechanism which allowed women’s sexual potential to

be strictly defined and limited by men.”70 Yet, Dalla Costa and James continually pushed the

boundaries of feminism, arguing that this type of gain should not be the end goal, but rather the

point of departure for women’s liberation. In the introduction to her radical book Sexual Politics,

Kate Millet stated that the first part of her work was “devoted to the proposition that sex has a

frequently neglected political aspect.”71 For Dalla Costa and James, proposing that there was a

“political aspect” to sex was akin to Friedan’s recognition that women were not equally

represented in the political structure. These types of statements relegated women’s liberation to

being part of a general political struggle marked by the rallying cry “the personal is political.”

68 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 43. 69 The sexual politics of second-wave feminism was complex, and it marked a point of deep discord among feminists. Two of the most polemic issues were lesbianism and pornography. Historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman characterize the period of 1969 to 1971 as the height of the “gay-straight split” that “wracked” women’s organizations across the country. Indeed, Betty Friedan famously referred to lesbians as “the lavender menace.” For an overview of this issue, see Estelle B. Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 316-318. Feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin started their crusade against pornography in the late 1970s. See: Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee Books, 1981) and Catharine A MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Two influential feminist texts regarding women’s sexuality and sexual pleasure were Anne Koedt, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (Somerville, Mass.: New England Free Press, 1970) and Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1970). 70 Ibid. 71 Millet, Sexual Politics, 11.

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Dalla Costa and James continually and emphatically pinpointed labor as the locus of this political

struggle. For them, the personal was a space for political and economic subversion. Accordingly,

they framed the clitoral orgasm not as a culminating point in women’s sexual autonomy, but

rather as a piece of the larger struggle between women and their labor, stating:

To explode the vaginal myth is to demand female autonomy […] But it is not only the clitoris versus the vagina. It is both versus the uterus. Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labor power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment. Sexuality after all is the most social of expressions, the deepest human communication. It is in that sense the dissolution of autonomy.72

In the context of this statement, sex, as a component of housework, cemented women’s isolation

and oppression; their alienation from their own bodies and bodily pleasures. In contrast, sex as

an expression of women’s sexuality integrated women into society, allowing them to break away

from housework. Dalla Costa and James saw sexuality and sexual pleasure as means of

subverting the economic structure.

In the structure of capitalism and the family that Dalla Costa and James described, the

relationship between men and women was such that it “subordinat[ed] woman as object, the

“complement” to man.”73 The power dynamics of this hierarchical yet harmonious bond could be

seen in the relationship between the wage laborer and the housewife and in mechanics and social

significance of heterosexual sex. Dalla Costa and James stated that “the gay movement is the

most massive attempt to disengage sexuality and power.”74 Unlike many groups in second-wave

feminism, Dalla Costa and James accepted lesbians as “important for the movement” because

they urgently encouraged the women’s movement to “claim for itself the specificity of women’s

72 Ibid. 73 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 31. 74 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 32.

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struggle” and “to clarify […] all facets and connections of the exploitation of women.”75 Dalla

Costa and James were primarily interested in the relationship between heterosexuality and

homosexuality and labor. They spoke to the division of labor as a “homosexual framework of

living” and state that capitalism “undermines” the possibility for intimacy in heterosexual

relations, making it a “sexual, economic and social discipline.”76 While they did not expound

further on lesbians in this text, Wages Due Lesbians, which will be discussed in the following

chapter, would become a strong voice within the Wages for Housework movement.

As Dalla Costa and James described it, housework was a debilitating force for women. It

was the nucleus of their oppression. Considering this fact and the argument that James made in

“A Woman’s Place” that women should seek employment outside of the home, it seems that the

next logical component of Dalla Costa’s and James’ argument would be to advocate that women

become part of the paid workforce outside of the home. They forcefully stated, however, “Those

who advocate that the liberation of the working class woman lies in her getting a job outside the

home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation

from slavery to a kitchen sink.”77 In the genealogy of capitalism that Dalla Costa and James

outlined, wage labor was an enslaving economic and social force. Indeed, when this text was first

published in 1972, they included a statement against advocating for wages for housework:

In fact, the demand that would follow, namely “pay us wages for housework”, would run the risk of looking, in the light of the present relationship of forces in Italy, as through we wanted further to entrench the condition of institutionalized slavery which is produced with the condition of housework – therefore such a demand could scarcely operate in practice as a mobilizing goal.78

75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 35. 78 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 36.

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The third edition of this text, published in 1975, appended a lengthy footnote to this statement,

which demonstrates the evolution of Dalla Costa’s and James’ thought in response to the Wages

for Housework movement that grew out of their writing. The first paragraph of the footnote

addresses the demand for wages for housework:

Today the demand of wages for housework is put forward increasingly and with less opposition in the women’s movement in Italy and elsewhere. Since this document was first drafted (June ’71), the debate has become more profound and many uncertainties that were due to the relative newness of the discussion have been dispelled. But above all, the weight of the needs of proletarian women has not only radicalized the demand of the movement. It has also given us greater strength and confidence to advance them. A year ago, at the beginning of the movement in Italy, there were those who still thought that the State could easily suffocate the female rebellion against housework by “paying” it with a monthly allowance of £7- £8 as they had already done especially with those “wretched of the earth” who were dependent on pensions.79

It is noteworthy that the demand of wages for housework was described as a radicalization of the

movement, for Dalla Costa and James were fundamentally opposed to the conditions of wage

labor as constructed by capitalism. This discrepancy is clarified in the second paragraph of the

footnote, which said:

Now these uncertainties are largely dissipated. And it is clear in any case that the demand for a wage for housework is only a basis, a perspective, from which to start, whose merit is essentially to link immediately female oppression, subordination and isolation to their material foundation: female exploitation. At this moment this is perhaps the major function of the demand of wages for housework. This gives at once an indication for struggle, a direction in organizational terms in which oppression and exploitation, situation of caste and class, find themselves insolubly linked. The practical, continuous translation of this perspective is the task the movement is facing in Italy and elsewhere.80

One of the key phrases in this statement is that demanding wages for housework was not the end

goal of the movement or the philosophy that informed it. Rather, this demand became a practical,

79 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 54, footnote 16. Note: the last sentence of this quote references Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1963). A topic of future exploration would be to analyze The Power of Women and other Wages for Housework texts according to a theme of anti-colonialism. 80 Ibid.

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tangible way for the movement to bring visibility to the fact that housework was the “material

foundation” for the exploitation of women.

The true mobilizing goal that Dalla Costa and James elaborated was that women needed

to “destroy the role of housewife” and the structure of the nuclear family that reinforced this

role.81 “Women,” they said must escape their labor-induced isolation by “overthrow[ing] the

relation of domestic-work-time to non-domestic-time and must begin to move out of the

home.”82 Instead of performing excessive amounts of housework, such as “ironing sheets or

curtains” or “cleaning the floor until it sparkles,” women needed to “look beyond their own four

walls,” and identify their private grievances as a microcosm of the issues that women as “caste”

faced.83 James and Dalla Costa continued by saying, “[W]e mean their point of departure must

be precisely this willingness to destroy the role of housewife, in order to begin to come together

with other women, not only as neighbors and friends, but as workmates and anti-workmates; thus

breaking the tradition of the privatized female.”84 This unification, the formation of a sisterhood

“against a common form of labor,” was the first stage for women’s rebellion.85 The second stage

was for women to “stop meeting their husbands and children only as wife and mother […] after

they have come home from the outside world.” 86 Instead, they must interact with their families

as women, thereby shedding the artificial roles of wife and mother. By destroying the role of

housewife, women would abolish “the home” as a sacred entity. Dalla Costa and James

continued by saying, “every sphere of capitalist organization presupposes the home,” therefore

81 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 38. 82 Ibid. 83 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 6, 36, 37. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid.

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“[e]very place of struggle outside the home […] offers a chance for attack by women.”87 If

women nullified the symbolism of the home and refused to perform the allegorical labor of the

housewife, then they effectively destroyed the division between the public and the private labor,

and by extension public and private spheres, that the wage created.

The destruction of the role of housewife was only the first step towards liberation for

women. Dalla Costa and James framed the second step as the “struggle not to work.”88 In

practical terms, abandoning all forms of work, paid or unpaid, would not be possible in the social

and economic structures in which they wrote. While the struggle, “not to work,” was the end

goal, the intermediary step was for women to refuse to be defined by their work, whether they

worked as housewives, as factory laborers, or in offices. They said, “Women must completely

discover their own possibilities—which are neither mending socks nor becoming captains of

ocean-going ships. Better still, we may wish to do these things, but these now cannot be located

anywhere but in the history of capital.”89 The struggle not to work was also the struggle to view

work as a source fulfillment or purpose, but rather as part of an economic system. In this sense,

Dalla Costa and James were not solely articulating a feminist struggle against patriarchy, but

they were also outlining a Marxist struggle against capitalism. These two distinct struggles work

in tandem in Dalla Costa’s and James’ philosophy, but they run the risk of destroying each other

in action if the fight for women’s liberation becomes separated from the fight against capitalism.

To this end, Dalla Costa and James remarked:

Capital itself is seizing upon the same impetus which created a movement –the rejection of millions of women of women’s traditional place – to recompose the work force with increasing numbers of women. The movement can only develop in opposition to this. It poses by its very existence and must pose with increasing articulation in action that women refuse the myth of liberation through work. For we have worked enough. We

87 Ibid. Emphasis in original text. 88 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 49. 89 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 50.

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have chopped billions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies, by hand and in machines. Every time they have “let us in” to some traditionally male enclave, it was to find for us a new level of exploitation.

For Dalla Costa and James, capitalism was a machine, a vehicle of class slavery and within this

class slavery of patriarchy and the peonage of the caste of women. The tension between the goals

of Marxism and feminism was not lost to Dalla Costa and James, but their vision of feminism

laid down a theoretical gauntlet for activism, stating:

The challenge to the women’s movement is to find modes of struggle which, while they liberate women from the home, at the same time avoid on the one hand a double slavery and on the other prevent another degree of capitalistic control and regimentation. This ultimately is the dividing line between reformism and revolutionary politics in the women’s movement.90

The Wages for Housework Campaign came to embody these revolutionary politics, and it was a

cause around which women of diverse backgrounds could unite. Indeed, its resonance with

disparate groups of women – black women, lesbian women, prostitutes- from scattered

geographic locales –Europe, Canada, the United States - is one of the most compelling

characteristics of this movement.91

90 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 50. 91 Wages for Housework was a diffuse grassroots movement that did not have any “top-down” structure. In her book, Sex, Race, and Class, James remarks that The Power of Women was “the launch pad for the ‘domestic labor debate’” (44). I do not know what exactly transpired between the publication of The Power of Women and the inauguration of the Wages for Housework Campaign. I speculate that The Power of Women was circulated among feminists, and because it resonated with them, groups of women began to form chapters of Wages for Housework.

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CHAPTER III IDENTITY -BASED ACTIVISM IN THE INTERNATIONAL WAGES FOR

HOUSEWORK CAMPAIGN .

The demographically diverse character of Wages for Housework gave rise to the

formation of identity-based groups within the movement.1 This chapter explores three such

groups: Black Women for Wages for Housework, formed in 1975 in London; Wages Due

Lesbians, established in Toronto in 1976; and the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement, which began in

the United States in 1973 and in Europe in 1975.2 These groups demonstrated two of the primary

tensions between theory and activism in Wages for Housework. Firstly, whereas the wage was

originally envisioned by Dalla Costa and James as a symbol for the movement’s political goals

and a precursor to other revolutionary social changes, these groups brought a sense of urgency to

their pursuit of the wage. While its political symbolism was important to them, their pursuit of

the wage was grounded less by theory than by their experience as economically marginalized

women. Secondly, these groups embodied the dichotomous struggle of Wages for Housework to

separate women from the labor of housework, but to also gain respect for this labor; to imbue it

with the recognition as a valid occupation that merited compensation. Identity-based groups in

1 There were also non-identity based groups within Wages for Housework. These groups tended to organize geographically, for instance “Los Angeles Wages for Housework.” My understanding is that identity-based groups were formed after some of the general groups were established. Women were drawn to the philosophy of Wages for Housework, but recognized the need to relate this philosophy to their particular experience. I expand on this idea throughout this chapter. 2 Note: Because of the grassroots nature of Wages for Housework, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact starting points for these groups. Though I am highly confident that I have the correct dates and locations for Black Women for Wages for Housework and the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement, I am less certain about Wages Due Lesbians. I estimated the 1976 as its date of inception because the “First International Conference on Lesbians and the Wages for Housework Campaign” was held in Toronto from July 23-25, 1976. See: Wilmette Brown, “The Autonomy of Black Lesbian Women,” from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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Wages for Housework also intervened in the identity politics of the women’s liberation

movement. This chapter demonstrates that considering the relationships among these groups and

the manners in which they interpreted and applied the theory of Wages for Housework elucidates

the complexity of this movement both internally and in relation to the women’s movement.

Part I: Black Women for Wages for Housework

Black Women for Wages for Housework was “conceived” as an idea in London in 1975

during the annual conference of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and was

formally created by Wilmette Brown in Brooklyn, New York in April of 1976.3 A “Birth

Announcement” for this group was published in “Power of Women,” the magazine of the

International Wages for Housework Campaign.4 It declared:

We are pleased to announce our presence as an autonomous group of Black Women for Wages for Housework within the International Wages for Housework Campaign. We came together for the first time at a conference sponsored by the New York WFH Committee on Wages for Housework and Welfare, which was held in Brooklyn on April 24, 1976. We’ve been meeting every week since then.5

It is noteworthy that this announcement employed maternal language and imagery. The identity-

based groups within Wages for Housework attached great significance to the role of motherhood

as a component of housework, with some women trying to extricate themselves from maternity

and others embracing it. This tension paralleled the place of housework itself in the movement.

3 Safire, newsletter of BW-WHW, Fall 1977, from Coyote Records, folder 541, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. International Wages for Housework Campaign, “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. From here forward, I will refer to Black Women for Wages for Housework by using the acronym BW-WFH. 4 International Wages for Housework Campaign, “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 5“Birth Announcement” in International Wages for Housework Campaign, “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, pg 5 from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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This announcement detailed some of the activities and protest actions that the group engaged in

during its first months. These events showed the application of a two-part approach that can be

traced back to The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and was common

throughout the International Wages for Housework Campaign: studying and adding to the theory

of Wages for Housework and acting on this theory in publicly visible protests. The events listed

in the announcement included studying Wages for Housework literature, speaking to women in

their neighborhoods, and distributing leaflets about BW-WFH at “welfare offices, daycare

centers, shopping areas and wherever women meet.”6 In June of 1976, they also attended a

“Black women’s conference” at Hunter College and a public meeting of BW-WFH and New

York Wages for Housework Committee, which was followed by a “day of action” rally in

downtown Manhattan in front of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where they

picketed “using posters, songs, mops, brooms, pots, spoons, and a speakout with bullhorns.”7

The formation of identity-based groups such as BW-WFH within the International Wages

for Housework Campaign did not represent a fragmentation, but rather an amplification of this

movement. Dalla Costa and James based their philosophy upon the idea that the housewife was

the unifying figure of womanhood.8 This philosophy was an umbrella that was meant to

encompass the experience of every individual woman in every nation. Identity-based groups

within Wages for Housework found that this philosophy resonated with their personal

experiences and gave them the tools to act on their own behalf to subvert oppressive social,

economic, and political structures. Accordingly, these groups had their own agendas, which were

part of the global struggle of Wages for Housework. This perspective is illustrated by a statement

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women, 21.

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that Wilmette Brown made in 1976 at the conclusion of her speech titled “Autonomy for Black

Lesbian Women:”

Our autonomy is not a splitting of our power but really an extension of our power. Because the more we are able to articulate each and every one of our needs and to organize on the basis of those needs, the stronger we become. The more clearly we define what it is we are after, and struggle for the money which will give us the power to begin to define and discover our own possibilities, the more powerful we will become.9

For Dalla Costa and James, Wages for Housework represented the evolution and confluence of

their labor activism and feminism. BW-WFH identified their ideological and activist roots as the

Welfare Rights Movement during the 1960s in the United States. This genealogy informed how

they interpreted and acted upon the philosophy of Wages for Housework.

Re-telling the history of the Welfare Rights Movement was fundamental to the formation

of the identity and consciousness of BW-WFH. This narrative was articulated in an unsigned

article titled “Every Mother is a Working Mother” in the fall 1977 edition of “Safire,” the

newsletter of BW-WFH (USA).10 The beginning point of this narrative was the Civil Rights

Movement, which the article described not from the perspective of well-known male historical

figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X, but from the vantage point of black

women. It stated:

[…] Black women of all ages the world over – from Soweta to New York – had come out of our homes claiming our right to a standard of living equal to wealth in money and technology that our unpaid work building the world’s richest and most developed nations had produced. We took to the streets in marches, boycotts, pickets, sit-ins, freedom rides, rallies, and demonstrations; we took up arms in every possible way demanding food, shelter, clothing, health, education, justice, and peace. With one voice we said it was

9 Brown, “The Autonomy of Black Lesbian Women,” from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. From top of speech: “This speech was made by Wilmette Brown, a member of Black Women for Wages for Housework, at the first international conference on lesbians and the wages for housework campaign called “Toward A Strategy for the Lesbian Movement.” The conference was organized by Wages Due Lesbians in Toronto from July 23-25, 1976. The speech was delivered on July 24.” 10 I know that there were chapters of BW-WFH in London and New York. There were likely other chapters, but identifying them requires additional research.

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costing us too much to live among the people we loved in the cities and fields which our own hands had produced. We said ya basta – enough. Uhuru – freedom now.11

Through asserting that black women were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement, BW-

WFH also argued that black women were leaders and protagonists in every social movement that

burgeoned in the 1960s. Accordingly, the article stated:

Through our struggle by any means necessary in every area of our lives – as mothers, grandmothers, schoolgirls, teachers, nurses, lesbians, clerks, salesgirls, prostitutes, maids, and housewives – we led not only the Black movement, but the student movement, the anti-war movement, and the women’s movement as well.12

This article imbued power in a marginalized group of women, and it went one step further and

declared that welfare mothers, who were disregarded socially, politically, and economically,

were leaders among black women. “From the bottom of the richest nation on earth, Black

welfare mothers came out refusing ever to be bottom again and so led the way for women

everywhere [..],” declared the article. It expanded on the role of welfare mothers, saying:

No one more expressed the total refusal of Black people, of all people, to be satisfied in a ghetto of poverty in the midst of plenty. […] Black welfare mothers took the streets, took over city-halls, offices, factories, and schools demanding money for the work of raising Black children and being the support and comfort of Black men in the ghettoes of America. They demanded money for that work – money which alone could destroy the walls of those ghettoes which divide us from other women, from other races, from other nations, from men, from children, and even from ourselves once and for all.

The last sentence of this statement echoes the paradigm that Dalla Costa and James established

in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community wherein the wage isolated men,

women, and children from each other and housework, the unpaid void and the contrapositive to

wage labor, isolated women from themselves. The ghetto was a place where black women could

not access a wage. It was the unpaid void, the poverty of individual women relegated to their

homes and dependent on men, writ large. Welfare was a wage that, cent-by-cent, began to

11 Safire, newsletter of BW-WHW, pp1-2, Fall 1977, from Coyote Records, folder 541, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 12 Ibid.

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dismantle both the symbolic and the actual walls of the ghetto; though it was a wage that had

high personal costs. Accordingly, the article declared, “By their demand for money in their own

hands from themselves and their children, Black welfare mothers established once and for all

that EVERY MOTHER IS A WORKING MOTHER. They won the first wage for housework. In

claiming their money, they staked everyone’s claim. And they are not alone.”13 This declaration

embodied the rallying call of BW-WFH and contained the key to its interpretation of the

philosophy of the Wages for Housework Campaign. For BW-WFH, advocating for a wage was a

concrete demand for monetary compensation. BW-WFH saw the wage as empowering, for it

vanquished the legacy that black women were free labor, as they had been under the institution

of slavery, and that their labor was invisible, as it continued to be when they worked as domestic

servants, nannies, cooks, or even as prostitutes. Indeed, BW-WFH mapped the theory of Wages

for Housework onto their economic and historical realities alike.

Destroying the role of the housewife, which was defined by the labor of housework, was

one of the key components of Wages for Housework. The same was true for BW-WFH, which

crafted its own definition of “housewife.” For Dalla Costa and James, capitalist labor was the

primary channel through which women’s oppression flowed, and it was the touchstone that

amplified this oppression through all levels of society. BW-WFH added another layer to this

model, proposing that the labor of black women, “the housewife,” embodied centuries of racism.

In this framework the ghetto, a space replete with violence (especially sexual violence), poverty,

racism, and sexism, replaced the home as a space that black women could not escape. Similarly,

the working mother personified the figurative housewife of Wages for Housework’s philosophy.

For BW-WFH, the working mother represented the double bind black women faced and the role 13 Ibid. Capital lettering in original text. This quote refers to the passage of welfare rights. For more information about t the welfare rights movement, see Felicia Ann Kornbluh, The Battle Over Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

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that BW-WFH fought. One side of this bind was the struggle to work outside of the home, a

struggle that was caused and sustained by racism. Wilmette Brown articulated this struggle

saying, “Black women have less access to education,” in comparison with both black men and

white women, and “our jobs are always the lowest paid, the dirtiest, the least status […] The vast

majority of Black women are ‘service workers.’ One out of every five Black women is actually a

‘domestic laborer.’”14 Even though the wage had the potential to offer financial freedom, a

degree of economic autonomy, black women often did not pursue second or third jobs outside of

the home out of choice. Rather, they were forced in what Brown referred to as “a double and

triple struggle” to find second jobs outside of the home “in greater numbers than white women”

because the wages of black men were lower than those of white men.15 The result was that some

of the “lowest paid, dirtiest” jobs that black women had to take included prostitution.

These jobs ensured that black women could not obtain the same level of social legitimacy

as white women. If white women were marginalized, oppressed by housework as Wages for

Housework argued, then black women were doubly, even triply marginalized. Brown articulated

this multi-leveled marginalization, built upon a heritage of racism:

For while racism and sexism define all women as objects […] white women are the legitimate objects of love, of femininity. Black women are not. There is a division of labor, growing out of slaver y in the United States, which as defined white women as ladies, as having physical characteristics that are beautiful, as being feminine, as being objects of love […] Black women […] have been the animals of Western society. We have been the animals. We have been the sexual animals. We have been the whores, defined as whores. And in fact the whores – in search of access to men’s wages. We have been the ones who have had no standard of femininity of our own. Of beauty of our own […] We are the mammies, we are the maids […] We are the Whores, we are the illegitimate mothers.16

14 Brown, “The Autonomy of Black Lesbian Women,” pg 1 from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 15 Brown, “The Autonomy of Black Lesbian Women,” 2. 16 Brown “The Autonomy of Black Lesbian Women ,” 4-5.

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This statement illustrates that BW-WFH organized “on the basis of the particular conditions of

our lives […] and the particular nature of our struggle which is a constant battle against indignity

and against self-hatred.”17 The housewife was taken for granted, unseen, the figure of the mother

was venerated; her work lauded not as labor, but as a natural expression of love, a higher calling.

Black women were denied this brand of motherhood; they were seen as “illegitimate mothers,”

and this illegitimacy was one of the primary battlefields of welfare.

Indeed, the second side of the double bind of the working mother was welfare. While

BW-WFH lauded welfare in the United States as “The first money we women have won directly

from the government for the work we do in our homes,” it was an income that had to be

consistently defended.18 Women on welfare had to demonstrate that housework, including

motherhood, was valuable labor that merited compensation, which was one of the missions of

Wages for Housework. This defense was scorned by public opinion and limited by legislative

actions such as the oft-quoted words from President Jimmy Carter’s “Welfare Reform Message

to the Congress,” of 1977 in which he said that one of the goals of his “Program for Better Jobs

and Income” was to “ensure that work will always be more profitable than welfare.”19 Welfare

became a double-edged sword, for while it offered the possibility of escaping the ghetto, it also

further enclosed black women within these walls. In a statement titled “Money for Prostitutes is

Money for Black Women,” BW-WFH said:

A ghetto is built around prostitutes like the ghetto in which all Black women, in one way or another, are forced to live. It is a ghetto where we are branded, denied our legal rights, and isolated from other women. If we are on welfare, doing the work of taking care of

17 Brown “The Autonomy of Black Lesbian Women ,” 5 18 International Wages for Housework Campaign, “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, pg 4 from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 19 Safire, newsletter of BW-WHW, pg 2. Full text of Carter’s speech: Jimmy Carter: "Welfare Reform Message to the Congress.," August 6, 1977. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7942 accessed October 29, 2012.

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our children and ourselves that all women do, we are branded as cheats, as if we are getting something for nothing.20

Under these conditions, welfare became “a pittance that can always be taken away from us as if

it were charity,” because welfare allowed “our lives to be investigated as if we had committed a

crime.”21 These investigations and the castigatory legal ramifications of welfare served to further

cement the illegitimacy of black motherhood. BW-WFH spoke about children being forcibly

removed from homes and of the widespread forced sterilization of black women.22 Motherhood

as a component of housework became an ideological front within Wages for Housework; a front

not in the sense that identity-based groups within the movement fought against each other, but

rather as a fragmented place characterized by a cacophony of voices.

Although BW-WFH contrasted their experiences with those of white women, they also

subscribed to the concept of unity, of womanhood, of a sisterhood of shared experiences that

Wages for Housework Campaign espoused. BW-WFH stated “As long as housework is not

considered work […] We women are pitted against one another as if our problems and our work

were not the same.”23 The Wages for Housework literature is replete with similar statements,

including that of activists Wendy Edmond and Susan Fleming:

All women are housewives. Single or married, young or old, with or without children, lesbian or straight, that housework is our first job. But that job of work is so identified with being female, so tied to what’s expected of us from birth that it’s hard to see where work ends and we begin. If we had a wage for that work, we would begin to know what is us and what is our work. Even to ask for a wage is already to say that we are not that work.24

20 “Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black Women,” pg 1-2, from Coyote Records, folder 542, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 21 International Wages for Housework Campaign, “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, pg 4-5, from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, eds, All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework and the Wages Due. London: Power of Women Collective (1975), 6.

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This quote illustrates that the wage was the first step of a larger process, not necessarily the end

goal of the movement.

Indeed, part of the overarching pursuit of Wages for Housework was identity. It was a

search for a sense of womanhood that was separate from the labor of housework. As the

narrative that BW-WFH wrote about the Civil Rights era and the activism of welfare mothers, it

was not only a search, but also an assertion of identity in a society in which women as a group,

and to varying extents within this group, were isolated, seen always in their relation to men but

not for their own merit. As Brown stated, the labor of black women was defined by racism; they

were “mammies” or “whores,” even if they worked as neither. For Dalla Costa and James,

capitalism was the force that defined women’s labor and that created the housewife. For BW-

WFH, this force was racism, and they sought both to obtain recognition for their labor and to use

the wage to take ownership of their labor and deny power to the structure of racism. BW-WFH

described self-determination, saying:

The struggle of prostitutes is the same struggle Black women are making. It is the struggle to have the money –which is the power to be independent: to determine the conditions of our lives; to determine whom we want to sleep with; to determine whether we have children or not and to be able to keep our children; to satisfy our own needs and to build a life for ourselves. It is the struggle to be paid for all the work we do as women, including sexual work.25

The perspective of the wage as a means to independence and power was a sharp departure from

Marxism and the feminist-Marxist ideology that Dalla Costa and James set forth in The Power of

Women. Dalla Costa’s and James’ view of feminism and women’s labor was informed by their

heritage as labor activists. In contrast, identity-based groups within the Wages for Housework

movement filtered this underlying philosophy through an experiential lens. Though their

25 “Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black Women,” pg 3, from Coyote Records, folder 542, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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particular vantage points emphasized distinct portions of the Wages for Housework ideology, it

is telling that these disparate groups of women found this ideology to be personally resonant and

were able to unite around it.

Part II: Wages Due Lesbians

Wages Due Lesbians allied itself with Wages for Housework, the women’s liberation

movement, and the lesbian rights movement.26 The character of WDL and its various

collaborative relationships is illustrated by a conference that WDL-Toronto hosted on July 24

and 25, 1977 called “Toward a Strategy for the Lesbian Movement.”27 A summary of the

conference in “Power of Women,” the magazine of the International Wages for Housework

Campaign said:

[…] nearly 100 women gathered from all over North America and Britain […] The conference was open to all women, and quite a number of women who came were not lesbian. Some women came from complete isolation – one lesbian mother from a small town told of a three year search to find other lesbians. Others came from lesbian organisations, and from gay organisations of women and men.28

The conference began with a panel on lesbian autonomy, which included speeches by Ruth Hall

of Wages Due Lesbians in England who discussed the need to overcome separatism in the

women’s movement, Wilmette Brown of BW-WFH who discussed the need for black lesbian

women to organize autonomously, and Francie Wyland of Wages Due Lesbians Toronto, who

described how Wages for Housework could be used as a strategy for lesbian women.29 A second

26 From this point forward, I will refer to Wages Due Lesbians as WDL 27 “International Lesbian Conference,” pg 30 in International Wages for Housework Campaign, “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

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panel focused on sexuality, and the multiple ways that housework limited sexual expression. The

conference concluded by passing the following resolution:

No lesbian or any other woman should face the blackmail of losing custody of her children, in court, through social pressure or through poverty. We demand from the government the money we need to keep our children without being forced to depend on a man.30

This statement illustrates that motherhood was the component of housework that acted as one of

the strongest unifying force within the Wages for Housework movement.

Identity-based groups within Wages for Housework clearly argued that their labor and

their identities were part of a larger socio-economic conflict. For WDL, housework and

motherhood were steeped in a long history of discrimination against lesbian women. This

discrimination provided a framework for WDL to articulate its interpretation of Wages for

Housework, just as racism served as a lens for BW-WFH. The convergence of these two

perspectives can be seen in the issue of motherhood. In 1977, Francie Wyland, an activist in the

Toronto chapter of WDL published a book titled Motherhood, Lesbianism and Child Custody.31

An advertising flyer for this book contained the following excerpt:

…We are demanding not only the power to choose to be lesbian without losing our children, or the possibility of having them. We are also demanding the power to be with those children in a way that is not work. And we will apologize to no one for rearing children who are – like their mothers – making a ferocious fight for the power to determine their own lives. -Francie Wyland.32

This statement encapsulates the activism of WDL. Indeed, the literature that they published and

the speeches that they gave were replete with the word “power.” Feeling that they, like welfare

30 Ibid. 31 Francie Wyland, Motherhood, Lesbianism and Child Custody (Toronto: Wages Due Lesbians, 1977). 32 Advertisement for Wyland, Motherhood, Lesbianism and Child Custody, from Coyote Records, folder 542, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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mothers, were invisible, women who were part of WDL intended to assert themselves on two

fronts: as lesbians and as housewives.

Unlike BW-WFH, WDL did not re-write the history of lesbian activism. Instead, they

clearly pointed to social movements and social structures from which their voices were absent. In

effect, they created a map of silences that they meant to counteract through interpreting the

ideology of Wages for Housework through the lens of their experience as lesbians. In an article

in the Los Angeles Times excerpted from her speech at a Gay Pride rally in Hollywood in July of

1977, Wyland said “The number of lesbians demonstrating in the streets today has been small.

Yet there are thousands of us in Los Angeles. So why are so few marching here in

Hollywood?”33 She continued, saying “The sad truth is that lesbians are invisible – much more

so than gay men.”34 The source of this invisibility was “women’s dependency on men –overwork

and deprivation of wages – that prevents us lesbians from “coming out” and denies us free choice

in every part of our lives.”35 Consequently, she said, “We’re under-represented in the gay

movement, while men speak out, because we got to stay home to do housework.”36 The

invisibility that Wyland attributed to lesbians was due to their condition as women that made

them economically dependent on men and immobilized them socially and politically. “Where are

all of these invisible lesbians?” Wyland asked. They are “everywhere:”

We come from all walks of life, all races and ethnic groups. Often we work as many as 18 hours a day, are isolated from other women and have no money of our own.[…] The lesbian woman is a housewife […] The lesbian woman is a welfare mother. […] The lesbian woman is a nurse, a bank teller, a teacher, a typist. […] The lesbian woman is a prostitute.

33 Francie Wyland, “Wages for Housework: A Lesbian Issue Too,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1977, from Coyote Records, folder 542, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid.

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The map that Wyland created in her article overlaid the experience of lesbian women and

heterosexual women. She walked a thin rhetorical line that ran throughout identity-based groups

within Wages for Housework. One side of this line was the experience of black women, of

lesbian women, of women who worked as prostitutes. The other side of this line was the lived

experience of being a woman. Wyland and her peers in WDL and other identity-based groups

maintained a delicate balance, stating that their experiences and perspectives were unique, but

that they were also part of a larger struggle. Wyland concluded her article by illustrating the

convergence of lesbian rights activism, Wages for Housework, and the women’s movement. She

began by examining the internal landscape of Wages for Housework, commenting on the

symbiotic goals of lesbian and heterosexual women within the movement:

Straight women in the International Wages for Housework Campaign understand that the struggle for lesbian rights symbolizes a greater, common cause. What we all want is what they want: the power to determine our own sexuality, our own lives and the ability to live independent from men – without paying the price of poverty, isolation, overworked and forced childlessness […]37

She continued by proposing that “Wages for housework is an issue in which all women have a

stake.”38 It represented an issue, housework, that affected all women and therefore became the

junction at which all women could unite. Wyland finished by arguing that “every women’s issue

is a lesbian issue, too, for every hardship on women –such as unpaid housework – is doubly

oppressive for lesbians.”39 The goals of independence, autonomy, identity, and self-

determination would not been met incrementally, with different groups of women advancing at

unequal paces. Instead, women could only advance as a group, for if inequality remained for any

one set of women, it would seep into the lives of all women:

37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

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No one –gay or straight – will be free until we women see in our hand the money we have earned by our labor. Until lesbians are strong, all women are weak. Therefore we are fighting to destroy the conventional definition of what is ‘natural” and “feminine” for women.40

The idea that women were united by a sameness that overcame the prism of differences that

separated them was an ideological strategy that allowed Wages for Housework to flow across

international borders. This movement served as a space in which marginalized women could

assert their relevance to the women’s movement and could begin to dismantle the structure that

they attributed as the primary cause of their oppression: labor.

The activism of WDL was centered on defining lesbianism as a source of power through

which they could overturn the labor structure of housework. Part of the way that WDL framed

lesbianism as a source of power was by using rhetoric that included the word “choice.” As

Francie Wyland stated, “We are demanding […] the power to choose to be lesbian.”41 By using

this word, WDL was not taking a stance on whether being a lesbian was part of an innate sexual

identity or a chosen lifestyle. Instead, they were focusing on what being lesbian meant for them

as women and as activists. A speech, “Lesbianism and Power” given at the International

Conference of the International Wages for Housework Campaign that was held in London,

England July 18 to 20, 1975, explained WDL’s interpretation of lesbianism:

[…] I want to deal with one idea that shouldn’t come up in this network, but that is still around […] That idea is that lesbianism has nothing to do with power. This assumes that […] it is “just sexual”, not a part of our political life. […] Women in this network in general know better than to make this separation between the personal and the political. If we accept that our whole lives are political, that every moment of our lives is determined by our work, our relation to capital, that every moment is a moment where we are forced to struggle with and against that work, then we have to understand lesbianism as a form of struggle and therefore as a challenge to capital’s power over us.42

40 Ibid. 41 Advertisement for Wyland, Motherhood, Lesbianism and Child Custody, from Coyote Records, folder 542, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 42 “Lesbianism and Power,” pg 1 from Coyote Records, folder 542, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. The copy of the speech that I have is unsigned.

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According to this statement, being a lesbian meant that one was also engaged in a larger political

struggle. The way that one became a lesbian, through birth or through choice, was immaterial for

this argument. The overt acknowledgement of the phrase “the personal is political” is an

indication of the connection between Wages for Housework and the broader women’s liberation

movement, wherein, as historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedmen commented, the “terrain

of politics” was “vastly expanded” to include women’s individual experiences in “marriage, the

family, and motherhood.”43 The Wages Due Collective (Toronto) affirmed the connection that

Dalla Costa and James had made in The Power of Women between sexuality, housework, and

capital, saying:

Heterosexuality is part of the definition of housework. It is a role that has been imposed on us by and for the benefit of capital. The institution of our work –our factory—is the family. In the family we do the work of producing and training a new generation of workers.44

Because housework was a heterosexual labor structure that was imposed on women, by being a

lesbian one was automatically engaged in pushing against this structure: “Women know that sex

is work. Men do not. […] Because lesbianism is a refusal to sexually service men it is a fight

against that work.”45 WDL spoke about the sexually repressive nature of housework in terms that

strongly evoked Dalla Costa’s and James’ argument that housework limited all forms of

creativity, including sexual creativity. The speech “Lesbianism and Power” spoke of the

fragmentation of self, the impossibility of fully living under the structure of housework that

caused sex to be either an act of subservience to capital or an act of revolution against it:

43 Estelle B. Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 311. 44 Wages Due Lesbians were also known as Wages Due Lesbians, which was sometimes shortened to “Wages Due.” “Lesbian and Straight” in All Work and No Pay, 21. 45 “Lesbian and Straight” in All Work No Pay, 22.

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Our sexuality has been separated off from the rest of our sexual capacities; our sexual relations are separated off from the rest of our social life. While the rest of our lives are openly disciplined and exploited by capital, sex is supposed to be undisciplined. We look to it often as an area of resistance to the domination of our lives by work. But even the high hopes we have for our sex lives turn out to repress us still further. Our sexuality is destroyed […] also by the demands we make on it […] We want it to substitute for all the other channels of self-expression, communication, intimacy and sensuality that are blocked to us.46

In this framework, sexuality is not part of an identity, but rather is a tool to be used for

emancipation. BW-WFH sought self-determination, and WDL sought power through the right to

have an identity that was not influenced by labor.

The source of power for the lesbian movement and WDL was that lesbianism was “an act

of defiance – defying the mould into which capital wants to force you.”47 Additionally, owning

the label of “lesbian” removed its ability to deride and threaten women, thereby strengthening

lesbians and heterosexual women alike. “Lesbianism and Power” acknowledged the linguistic

force of the term “lesbian” by stating:

Women are told that if they step out of line, if they are not submissive enough to men, or refuse their housework – any part of it from the laundry to the smiles on the street – they will be taken for a lesbian, ostracised as a lesbian, may even, horror of horrors, become a lesbian. It is not accident that the entire women’s liberation movement has been given this label in an attempt both to stop it in its track sand, especially, to separate it from other women and prevent them joining it or looking to it for support.48

WDL recognized that there were limits to the power and autonomy that lesbian rights

movements alone could obtain. Lesbian women in the Power of Women Collective of London

said “Lesbianism has sometimes been put forward in the Women’s Liberation Movement as a

solution to all our problems. It is not. It is a powerful starting point for struggle.”49 The reason

46 “Lesbianism and Power,” 2. 47 “Lesbianism and Power,” 3. 48 Ibid. 49 “Lesbian Women: Love and Power,” in All Work No Pay, 48.

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that a lesbian identity did not lead directly to women’s liberation was that it existed within but

did not subvert oppressive structures.

“Lesbianism and Power” expounded on this point by arguing that lesbians were a

category of women. Their experience and identity did not overcome the universal categories of

“womanhood” or “housewife” but was instead part of these entities, “Being lesbian doesn’t

change our fundamental position as women -- we are all housewives, we are all wageless, we are

all powerless in relation to capital and to men, and we are all dependent on the strength of all

women to destroy this position.”50 Lesbian women turned to Wages for Housework because

the fundamental inequalities between women and men could not be overcome “simply [by]

attacking heterosexuality – one form of one part of our labour,” and indeed lesbians alone could

not propel women towards equality.51 Instead of engaging in a separate struggle, WDL was

formed because “the fight for wages for housework can begin very concretely to change the

relations – power relations- that determine our sexual lives, and to win the time, place, energy,

and understanding that we need for them.”52 The reason that “Lesbianism and Power” gave for

attributing such high potential to Wages for Housework was that “it is a strategy for organisation

which can break through the divisions which have isolated us in our struggles and organise the

power of women against capital.”53 To this effect, the lesbian women in the Power of Women

Collective of London used vehement language to oppose “separatism,” calling it “anti-feminist”

and “the failure to recognise that other women are struggling too.”54 Wages for Housework

cultivated a brand of empathetic activism grounded in labor and gender, not sexuality. This

characterization is not meant to suggest that it was a movement free of strife, for the absence of

50 “Lesbianism and Power,” 4. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 “Lesbian Women: Love and Power” in All Work and No Pay, 48.

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conflict in the documents that constructed Wages for Housework’s public face does not mean

that there was no discord within the movement. Yet empathy and solidarity was precisely what

smoothed the way for diverse groups of women to participate in the same cause.

Part III: International Prostitutes’ Rights Movemen t

The International Prostitutes’ Rights Movement evolved alongside of the International

Wages for Housework Campaign in the early 1970s, and the connections between these two

movements were manifold.55 They supported each other’s goals, participated in joint activism,

and provided each other with “information and support.”56 In the article “Hookers and

Housework: Economic Connections” that appeared in the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s

Newspaper in May of 1982, Selma James was quoted as saying:

The most significant achievement of this international cooperation has been the translation, publication and distribution of Prostitutes: Our Life [which] documents the conditions which led to the French prostitutes’ strike of 1975 and the lives of six women who participated in the strike.57

James continued by saying that “another important achievement” was “Establishing the

connection between prostitution and all women’s underwaged work, specifically housework.”58

The English Collective of Prostitutes was a member of Wages for Housework and formed

identity-based groups within this movement as had black women and lesbian women. COYOTE

(Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), a prostitutes’ union based in San Francisco, found an

55 From this point forward, I will refer to the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement as PRM. 56 “Hookers and Housewives, Economic Connections,” from Coyote Records, folder 445, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.

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ideological ally in Wages for Housework, sparking what Peter Gorner of the Chicago Times

referred to as “an alliance peculiar even to the tangled skeins of feminist sisterhoods.”59

The primary ideological and activist connections between Wages for Housework and the

PRM were articulated by the way that PRM interpreted housework and motherhood. The PRM

built upon Wages for Housework’s idea that sex was a part of housework to define prostitution

(sex work) as a component of housework and the service industry that was also inhabited by

black women in their roles as domestic servants and nannies. The PRM also struggled for the

right of motherhood, advocating the separation of their labor-identity and their maternal labor.

The purposes of the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement were diverse, but just as paid compensation

for housework was the concrete goal around which Wages for Housework organized, so too was

the decriminalization of prostitution the driving force of the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement. In

1987, Priscilla Alexander, a feminist active in both COYOTE and the National Organization for

Women, described her vision of decriminalization to be:

the repeal of all existing criminal codes regarding voluntary prostitution, per se, between consenting adults, including mutually voluntary relationships between prostitutes and agents or managers (pimp/prostitute relationships), and non-coercive pandering (serving as a go-between). It could involve no new legislation to deal specifically with prostitution, but merely leave the business which surround prostitution subject to general civil, business, and professional codes that exist to cover all businesses.60

She continued her argument by stating that “decriminalization of prostitution […] offers the best

chance for women who are involved in prostitution to gain some measure of control over their

work.”61 This control, Alexander argued, could take the form of collective bargaining, including

the formation of prostitutes’ unions or other professional organizations to regulate codes of

59 Peter Gorner, “Prostitutes and Housewives Unite, Forming a Surprising Sisterhood,” Chicago Tribune, April 17, 1977, from Coyote Records, folder 541, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 60Priscilla Alexander, “On Prostitution,” from Coyote Records, folder 33. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 61 Ibid.

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behavior and ethics. In addition to protecting their labor rights, decriminalization would afford

prostitutes with physical protection from violence because it would be possible to “prosecute

those who abuse prostitutes, either physically or economically,” without also prosecuting the

prostitute who is the victim.62 Decriminalization was important to the PRM because it would

mark the recognition of prostitution as a legitimate form of labor and lead to labor protection for

prostitutes.63

The birthplace of the PRM in Europe was Lyons, France when, in 1975, a group of

prostitutes occupied a church for two months and wrote a “Letter to the Population,” the opening

lines of which were “We are mothers talking to you.” 64 An iconic photograph of this protest

contains the banner, “Nos enfants ne veulent pas leur mere en prison,” (Our children don’t want

their mothers in jail).65 Positioning themselves as mothers and occupying the sacrosanct space of

a church, these prostitutes transgressed not only a physical space, but also the iconic moral

territory of motherhood. The English Collective of Prostitutes, a member of the Wages for

Housework Campaign, was also founded in 1975 under the banner “No bad women, just bad

laws.”66 Its statement echoed the French prostitutes by arguing that prostitutes were only

criminals because prostitution was illegal. The law, not their form of labor, defined appropriate

62 Ibid. 63 COYOTE, for example, was both a grassroots advocacy group and a labor union for prostitutes. Its platform included many issues that were specific to prostitutes, including forced venereal disease testing; the unequal enforcement of prostitution laws against female prostitutes and male customers; and the dangers associated with working in an illegal profession. “Testimony on Prostitution,” from Coyote Records, folder 188. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Wages for Housework was also concerned about violence against women; particularly domestic violence and marital rape. In 1977, the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee sponsored a National Day of Protest Against Rape. They quoted the Rape Tribunal, held in Trafalgar Square in London on July 16, 1977: “Financial dependence is an open invitation to rape.” The slogan for the National Day Against Rape was “No to rape in the name of love! Yes to financial independence for all women!” Coyote Records, folder 543. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 64 Margo St. James and Claude Jaget, eds., Prostitutes, our life (Bristol, Eng.: Falling Wall Press, 1980)., 13. For additional information, see Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 215-216. Also see, Valerie Jenness, Making It Work: The Prostitute’s Rights Movement in Perspective, (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), 2. 65 St. James & Jaget, Prostitutes: Our Life, 44. 66 International Prostitutes Collective, “Who We Are,” retrieved 11/26/11 from http://www.prostitutescollective.net/.

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and inappropriate spaces – both in terms of concrete, public venues, and figurative relationships

– in which women could engage in sexual relations. The degree to which women transgressed

these artificial spaces reflected their position along the spectrum of “good” and “bad” women.

The PRM in the United States began earlier than its European counterparts when Margo St.

James, a lawyer and former prostitute, founded COYOTE in 1973. COYOTE was the largest

prostitutes’ union in the United States and the forerunner of other prostitutes’ rights groups in the

United States, including PUMA (Prostitute Union of Massachusetts Association), PONY

(Prostitutes of NY), and others.67

The PRM embodied the polemic sexual politics of second-wave feminism, which

culminated with a vehement dispute about pornography in the 1980s, known as the “sex wars.”

For feminists like Andrea Dworkin, pornography represented the violent, oppressive intersection

between labor and sexuality. More visible, legal, and commercially marketed than prostitution,

pornography was a convenient symbol for the social misappropriation of gendered power roles

and women’s sexuality.68 The PRM offered feminists an alternative to the argument that sex

work, the sale of women’s sexuality through pornography and prostitution, was wholly

exploitative. They proposed instead that all women, including prostitutes, were exploited by the

assumption that women naturally served men through their domestic and sexual labor. To

feminists who sided with the position, which Andrea Dworkin came to embody, that there was a

direct connection between pornography and violence against women, the Prostitutes’ Rights

Movement would answer:

[T]here have been allegations that whores and other workers in the sex industry encourage rape. We’ve faced the same charges or variations of it: it’s prostitutes who are responsible

67 For more information about the international activism of the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement, see Gail Pheterson, ed, “A Vindication of the Rights of Whores,” Seattle: Seal Press, 1989. 68For a more prolonged discussion of feminists’ reaction to prostitution and pornography and the tension over sexual freedom versus censorship, see Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, 211-222.

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for rape and not strippers, or it’s strippers and not prostitutes who cause rape, or it’s every woman who trades her body. But what about fashion models – did Twiggy cause sex role stereotyping? What about movie stars – did Marilyn Monroe cause rape? What about waitresses? We could go on…69

The Prostitutes’ Rights Movement carved a unique space the terrain of the sexual politics of

second-wave feminism by restructuring the dyad of sex object and lack of agency. It

acknowledged that prostitutes were seen as sexual objects. “B,” the author of the essay, “It’s Not

outside Morality” in Prostitutes: Our Life disclosed, “What’s tough is being seen as an object,

being looked at and bought like an object. The guys ask you to get your clothes off, to show

yourself and let yourself be treated like an object.”70 Yet, the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement

proposed that prostitutes defined the terms under which they would act as sexual objects. In this

context, prostitutes were instrumental in determining the boundaries of in which they would

consent to being objectified. “B” and other prostitutes clearly separated their identity as women

from their labor-identity of prostitute. Indeed, “D,” whose story follows, said that prostitutes

control the terms under which they accede to being sexual objects:

They say that we allow ourselves to be bought, that we sell ourselves. But we hire ourselves out, and that’s very different. When I buy something, I do what I want with it. It becomes my property, I use it when, where and how I like. It’s not the same with a prostitute. In actual fact, it’s me who decides who I’ll go with, it’s me who says yes or no to what the guy wants. I don’t sell myself any more than the man who works in a factory […]71

The terms of the prostitutes’ labor were that she embodied sexual fantasy while she worked, but

these terms do not necessitate that she consent to objectification in other areas of her life.

While WDL focused on the effect of housework on constraining sexuality, the PRM

removed sexuality from their discussion of sex work and housework. Instead, they emphasized

69 St. James & Jaget, Prostitutes: Our Life, 15. 70 St. James & Jaget, Prostitutes: Our Life, 88. 71 St. James & Jaget, Prostitutes: Our Life, 127.

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that prostitution was a form of labor and shifted the dialogue surrounding sex work so as to

“desexualize” prostitution.72 The manner in which the PRM achieved the seemingly impossible

end of desexualizing prostitution is illustrated by the position paper that Priscilla Alexander

wrote in 1987 titled “Prostitution: A Difficult Issue for Feminists.” She said:

Whatever you or I think of prostitution, women have the right to make up their own minds about whether or not to work as prostitutes, and under what terms. They have the right to work as free-lance workers, just as do nurses, typists, writers, doctors, and so on. They have the same right to work for an employer, a third party who can take care of administrative or management problems. They have the right to relationships outside of their work, including relationships in which they are the sole support of the other person, so long as the arrangement is acceptable to both parties. They have the right to raise children. They have the right to a full, human existence. As feminists, we have to make that clear, we have to end the separation of women into whores and madonnas.73

In Alexander’s statement, “prostitutes” could be substituted with any type of labor; women have

the right to work as lawyers, women have the right to work as politicians, women have the right

to work as housewives. Women, Alexander asserted, have to right to labor in the profession of

their choice and to reap the benefits of that profession. She pushed this idea further by refusing to

define labor in moral or symbolic terms. Women did not become mothers or prostitutes because

of their character; women should not be defined by their labor. Indeed, when Wages for

Housework described “all women” as housewives, they clearly and intentionally included

prostitutes in this definition. In an interview in 1982 with The San Francisco Bay Area Women’s

Newspaper, Selma James explained the relationship between housewives and prostitutes:

Now, nothing has been as invisible as sexual work that women have done […] but those that took that reality and worked on it as a full-time job [i.e. prostitute women], were so separated from those who did it as a traditional part of housework, that we were not able

72 Laura Prieto, Professor of History at Simmons College and my academic advisor, used the phrase “desexualized” to describe how COYOTE framed prostitution during a conversation in her office on November 28, 2011. I use this phrase with her permission. 73 “Prostitution: A Difficult Issue for Feminists,” from Coyote Records, folder 33. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. In 1978, COYOTE was largely absorbed by the National Task Force on Prostiution (NTFP), an ad hoc committee of the Virginia C. Woodhull Memorial Foundation. For more information, see Valarie Jenness, Making it Work: The Prostitutes’ Rights Movement in Perspective (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), 42-44, 66, 75, 11. Also see Finding Aid for COYOTE Records at Schlesinger Library.

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to see the really important connection between what seemed to be a few housewives over here and those ‘harlots’ on the other side. In fact, they are the same people.74

Domestic labor included sexual labor to the same extent that it included housecleaning. Until

housework, including sex, was compensated, it would continue to be thought of as part of

women’s nature.

The ramifications of naturalizing housework were heavily vocalized in the PRM, and the

primary case they used to illustrate their point was violence against women. A statement to the

Board of Supervisors of San Francisco that was signed by The San Francisco and Los Angeles

chapters of Wages for Housework on February 15, 1977 described some of the daily violence

that prostitutes faced:

The Supervisors claim that they are arresting street prostitutes in order to fight violent crime. In reality, it is prostitute women who are the victims of these crimes. Prostitute women are robbed, raped and beaten by clients. They are brutalized by the police and thrown into prison. The hotels and other pimps make money off their work, and the state, through fines on prostitution, is the biggest pimp of all.75

The effects of this overt street violence were felt by all women, in the street and in their homes

alike. Drawing from the philosophy of Wages for Housework that Dalla Costa and James set

forth, this violence was seen not solely as a reflection of patriarchy or misogyny, but rather as an

consequence of the economic structure of capitalism. Women’s inability to access a wage,

legally in the case of prostitutes, or a living wage apart from welfare, in the case of housewives,

made them vulnerable. On August 4, 1978, at the Speakout before the Third Annual Walk

Against Rape, The N.Y. Collective of Prostitutes spoke to this issue, saying “Because women

don’t have money of our own to begin with, our lives are considered less valuable and we are

forced to put ourselves at risk in order to get money. That can mean turning a trick with a total

74 “Hookers and Housewives, Economic Connections,” from Coyote Records, folder 445, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 75 “Statement to the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco,” from Coyote Records, folder 541, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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stranger or living with a violent husband.”76 Obtaining wages for housework would not end

violence against women, but it would be a step towards weakening the structures that produced

violence. Accordingly, the N.Y. Collective of Prostitutes said:

We need wages for housework in order to be financially independent of men, to be able to tell these men NO! They often think that they can get away with rape and assault because we depend on them for a living. With money in our hands, we’ll have more power and our lives won’t be considered cheap – as they so often are.77

The word “power” in this statement evokes the arguments of BW-WFH and WDL. It

demonstrates that like BW-WFH and WDL, the PRM saw the wage as a means for obtaining

social, political, and economic autonomy and influence.

This shared goal alone, however, does not explain the deep connection between Wages

for Housework and the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement. Indeed, if one of the uniting factors in the

Wages for Housework movement was shared experience, then it seems that prostitutes and

housewives would have very little around which to unite. These movements proved this

assumption to be untrue and established both experiential and ideological bonds among

prostitutes and housewives. The most essential experience that united housewives and prostitutes

was that sex was part of their daily labor. Yet some within the movements saw prostitution as a

step towards obtaining wages for housework, for even though the labor of prostitutes was not

socially respected (or considered respectable), they were compensated for their work. In this

vein, Priscilla Alexander argued that by “demand[ing] substantial payment for her time and

skills,” the prostitute had already taken the first step towards economic power. She explained

this argument by addressing the relationship between sex and power in the transaction of

prostitution:

76 Speakout on Rape, from Coyote Records, folder 445, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 77 Ibid.

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Prostitution also involves an equation of sex with power: for the man/customer, the power consists of his ability to “buy” access to any number of women; for the woman/prostitute, the power consists of her ability to set the terms of her sexuality, and to demand substantial payment for her time and skills. Thus, prostitution is one area in which women have traditionally and openly viewed sex as power. 78

Not only did prostitutes view sex as power, but they largely controlled the monetary and physical

terms of the sexual exchange, unlike the “sexual labor” of the unwaged housewife. Similarly, in

their statement “Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black Women,” BW-WFH said,

“Prostitution is one way that Black women are using increasingly to refuse our poverty and

dependency on men which is brought about by not getting paid by our first job.”79 Redefining

prostitution as a manifestation of women’s power was a step towards rewriting both the history

and the social position of prostitutes. It was the same strategy that BW-WFH used to redefine the

role of welfare mothers in the Civil Rights Movement.

One of the keys to repositioning prostitution was to challenge the linguistic power of the

word “prostitute” to diminish women. Accordingly, “Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black

Women” also stated:

To turn back the rising tide of our refusal to be penniless, the Man makes sure that part of the job of being a prostitute is to be used as a sign to other women of where the bottom is – to be labeled a whore and an unfit mother, a Negress (which they used to call us), a loose woman. So that part of the work of being a prostitute is to be made an example of what it costs us to refuse the poverty the Man forces us to live in, to be a whip against other women to make sure that they strive always to be “respectable” though poor. 80

To be a prostitute, to be compensated for one’s sexual labor, was to be marked as a “bad”

woman, to be relegated to occupying a negative moral territory. Women would therefore choose

to avoid having this label cast upon them at all costs. Silvia Federici, an activist in Wages for

78 Priscilla Alexander, “On Prostitution, “from Coyote Records, folder 33, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 79 “Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black Women,” from Coyote Records, folder 542, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 80 Ibid.

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Housework, made a similar point about the label “housewife” in her essay “Wages Against

Housework,” saying:

Unfortunately, many women –particularly single women—are afraid of the perspective of wags for housework because they are afraid of identifying even for a second with the housewife. They know that this is the most powerless position in society and so they do not want to realize that they are housewives too.81

In this vein, the second experience that united prostitutes and housewives was having the name

of their labor be used as a weapon against them. Indeed, the descriptive categories of “lesbian,”

“working mother,” or “welfare mother” were used as social weapons in their own right and their

harmful influence was compounded when coupled with the terms “housewife” or “prostitute.”

Federici said weakness “is maintained and perpetuated through the lack of self-identification.”82

She continued, “We want and have to say that we are all housewives, we are all prostitutes and

we are all gay, because until we recognise our slavery we cannot recognise our struggle against

it.” 83 Jill Tweedie in her article about Wages for Housework in The Guardian in 1976 made a

similar argument, saying that antipathy towards Wages for Housework was a sign that their

arguments resonated too closely with women’s reality:

If you find that you feel as deeply uneasy and dismayed as I did when I first heard the arguments for wages for housework, ask yourself why. What is it about the idea of wages that is so unsettling, even obnoxious. I cannot presume to answer for you. My own answer? I do not want to think about the anger I actually feel about “women’s work.84

Self-identification removed the power of labels to harm women, for women became the owners

and not the subjects of these labels. The liberatory potential of claiming ownership of labels such

as “lesbian,” “prostitute,” “housewife,” would only be fully realized if the partitions among

women were also dismantled.

81 Federici, “Wages Against Housework,” 261. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Tweedie, “Slave Wages.”

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One instance in which unity was translated into an assertion of strength was the Los

Angeles and San Francisco chapters’ of Wages for Housework statement to the San Francisco

Board of Supervisors on behalf of prostitutes, which closed by saying:

The Supervisors are attacking street prostitutes because they believe that prostitute women have no power and can be isolated form the power of other women. We are here to say that the Board of Supervisors is mistaken. Prostitute women have power and are organizing that power. And prostitute women cannot be isolated from the rest of us […] We are all women and if the Board of Supervisors continues its policy of harassing prostitute women, the Supervisors will have to answer to all of us.85

Another example of how cross-identification translated into activism was the street trial,

“Women vs. Business and Government, held on Boston Common 1977. It was sponsored by

New York and Boston collectives of Wages for Housework and supported by PUMA (Prostitute

Union of Massachusetts Association) and the Cambridge Women’s Center. The placard for this

street trial proclaimed “Whereas: By demanding wages for our sexual work, those of us how are

prostitutes give all women more power to: Demand to Be Paid for Our Time and Our Work and

Refuse To Be Dependent on Men for Money.”86 In Wages for Housework, cross-identification

was a source of power. Its literature was abounding in phrases such as “We are all prostitutes,”

“We are all lesbians,” “We are all housewives.” These words carried with them a mobilizing

force because they allowed women to present a united front against shared oppression.

85 “Statement to the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco,” from Coyote Records, folder 541, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 86 “Come Testify How Business and Government Pimp off Your Work,” from Coyote Records, folder 541. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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CHAPTER IV CONCLUSION : WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK AND THE PRESENT

Black Women for Wages for Housework, Wages Due Lesbians, and the Prostitutes’

Rights Movement address some of the primary concerns of Wages for Housework and provide

an indication of its geographical scope and its diversity. Yet Wages for Housework was even

more diverse than these groups alone can convey. The Wages for Housework Committee of Los

Angeles published a bilingual English-Spanish newsletter to reach out to Spanish speaking

women.1 The exploitation of immigrants and domestic servants was a concern for Wages for

Housework, and the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee devoted their entire “Campaign

Bulletin” of Winter 1979 to this issue. Contributors included both Wages for Housework

activists and domestic workers.2 Nurses, students, secretaries, and other service-industry workers

wrote about their occupations from the perspective of Wages for Housework.3 Welfare, family

assistance, child benefits, and displaced homemakers were part of both the general discourse of

Wages for Housework and part of the advocacy platform for regional groups. Violence against

women, rape, forced sterilization, abortion, and birth control were also subjects that received

substantial attention from the movement. The list continues, and it seems that one could hardly

excavate the numerous publications and statements of Wages for Housework without touching

upon nearly every subject that second-wave feminists addressed.

1 “Wages for Housework Newsletter / Sueldo por Quehaceres del Hogar Carta de Noticias” from Coyote Records, folder 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 2 “Wages for Housework Campaign Bulletin Special Issue on Domestics,” Toronto, Canada, vol 4. No. 2 Winter 1979, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 3 For an overview of these topics, see Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, eds, All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework and the Wages Due, (London: Power of Women Collective, 1975).

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Considering the scope and diversity of Wages for Housework, it seems that such a

movement would not end quietly. Yet, the International Wages for Housework Campaign

declined much in the same manner that it began – at the margins of the women’s movement.4 Its

decline is not discussed by scholars or, it seems, by its feminist contemporaries. In the mid to late

1980s it seems the International Wages for Housework Campaign quietly ended. The end of this

movement, however, did not mark the conclusion of its ideas. Exploring its afterlives requires

more research, but I think the evolution of Wages for Housework in contemporary activism and

theory is well-represented by Selma James, who continued her writing and activism. She

participated in the international Occupy movement, which burgeoned in 2011 and 2012,

speaking at an Occupy London (Occupy LSX) event on November 25, 2011.5 Some of her more

recent written works include “The Challenge of Diversity” (1990), “Women’s Unwaged Work”

(1991), and The Milk of Human Kindness, co-authored with activists Solveig Francis, Phoebe

Jones Schellenberg, and Nina López (2002).6 In describing The Milk of Human Kindness, James

said:

We had urged for some years the recognition of women’s vital work of breastfeeding and babies’ right to this vital first food, rather than beginning life with formula, the first junk food […] To dismiss caring work, which is overwhelmingly the work of women, is to dismiss the reproduction of human beings. […] There have been famous international campaigns against the murderous formula companies […] Less well known are the constant struggles, for example of African village women […] to retain the right to feed the young in the traditional (and free) way.7

4 I do not know much about its decline. I did not see any documentation announcing the “end” of the movement. This type of documentation would have been unlikely given the grassroots nature of the movement. My sense is that Wages for Housework declined naturally, as happens with grassroots movements. Indeed, activism in general, particularly in the United States, sharply declined in the 1980s. I do not think that it disappeared however, but rather morphed into a new, quieter movement. 5 Global Women’s Strike,” Selma James Speaks on Sex, Race, and Class at Occupy LSX,” http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/events/selma-james-speaks-sex-race-and-class-occupy-lsx. Retrieved November 11, 2012. 6 Selma James, Sex, Race and Class, the Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (London: Merlin Press, 2012). 7 James, Sex, Race and Class, 224.

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This statement contains strains of the Marxist-feminism that Dalla Costa and James wrote about

in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. It places caregiving labor in an

international context, expounding a resounding critique of cultural and economic colonialism.

In 2000, James formed the organization Global Women’s Strike, which can perhaps be

considered as the new incarnation of Wages for Housework. The Global Women’s Strike

describes itself as an “International network for recognition & payment for all caring work, and

the return of military spending to the community starting with women the main carers sic

everywhere.” 8 Its website includes a rotating banner that describes the women who are a part of

this group, and the list evokes the same demographic diversity of the International Wages for

Housework Campaign:

We are… mothers…women of colour…asylum seekers…Indigenous & rural women…women in waged work…lesbian & bisexual women… sex workers…rape survivors…women with disabilities….older & younger women…religious activists….immigrant women…..grandmothers…9

The new brand of activism that the Global Women’s Strike represents can be more fully

understood alongside an analysis of contemporary international activism. For the legacy, the

collective memory, I daresay, of Wages for Housework, it represents what James said in 1990 to

a group of women’s studies students at the conclusion of the conference “The Challenge of

Diversity:”

I believe Marx worked on two time scales: one it’s going to happen tomorrow and one that it’s not. [Laughter] Yes. Wise, I think. One that it’s going to happen tomorrow and therefore we have to be hopeful; and one that it’s’ not going to happen tomorrow so we have to dig in for the long haul. But you can’t do one or the other; you must do both.10

8 Global Women’s Strike, “Who We Are,” http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/whoweare. Retrieved November 11, 2012. 9 Ibid. 10 James, “The Challenge of Diversity,” in Sex, Race and Class, 216.

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This statement lends insight into the long-lived fervor of Wages for Housework and James alike

and James’ continued insistence that “Our time is coming.” Becky Gardiner of The Guardian

recently interviewed James and remarked about the insistence that characterizes James’ activism,

saying:

Many years have passed, and James has long since been dismissed by many of her feminist contemporaries as an irrelevant, or even ridiculous, figure. Her work has been neglected; her key demand – wages for housework – written off. And yet James herself has neither stopped, nor slowed down for a moment. When we meet, she is fresh from a trip to the US. There to promote the new anthology of her writing, she became embroiled in a row that rocked the presidential race. One of Obama's team said Mitt Romney's wife Ann, a mother of five, had "never worked a day in her life", and in a flash, there was James, gesticulating on television again (the Amy Goodman show this time), explaining, yet again, about the significance of women's unwaged labour in the home. 11

Gardiner concluded by observing that “The gleam is still in her eye, she still burns with a strange

fever. She is 82.”12

The International Wages for Housework Campaign and the work of Selma James,

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and their contemporaries requires additional study. For historians, this

movement lends nuance to the history of second-wave feminism and the connection between

feminism and labor activism. Wages for Housework’s questioning of fundamental social,

political, and economic assumptions about women and their labor could enrich the views of

feminists and activists alike. Both housewives and prostitutes continue to be part of the political

discourse internationally and in the United States, as the comments about Ann Romney and

California’s recent ballot measure Proposition 35 “Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act”

demonstrate.13 It is time for historians to question Wages for Housework’s absence from the

11Becky Gardiner, “A Life in Writing: Selma James,” The Guardian, June 8, 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/08/life-in-writing-selma-james. Retrieved November 11, 2012. 12 Ibid. 13 Proposition 35 was on the November 6, 2012 ballot in California. According to the California voter guide, “Increases prison sentences and fines for human trafficking convictions. Requires convicted human traffickers to register as sex offenders. Requires registered sex offenders to disclose Internet activities and identities. Fiscal

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historiography and to rectify its omission through oral histories, comprehensive exploration of

the myriad issues that Wages for Housework set forth, and by analyzing Wages for Housework

according to the frameworks of feminism, labor activism, and postcolonialism.14 The wide-

range of feminist issues that Wages for Housework activists addressed and their persistent and

ubiquitous character that Jill Tweedie remarked upon in her article in The Guardian in 1976,

“Open any door marked Liberation and behind it is a woman with a Wages for Housework badge

on her bosom,” makes their absence in the historical scholarship about feminism and women’s

labor both striking and perplexing. Wages for Housework is a key component to understanding

the complex history of second-wave feminism. Indeed, perhaps one of its greatest contributions

to feminist theory and activism was its inclusivity in uniting women across boundaries of race,

class, nation, and sexual orientation, which succeeded, if only in the short term, where other

feminist movements fell short. Wages for Housework managed to craft an inclusive definition of

“sisterhood,” whereas many movements within second-wave feminism have been criticized for

their exclusionary definition of “sisterhood,” which was based on the experiences of white,

middle class women. These critiques have not solely been articulated by historians who have the

benefit of hindsight, but were also stated by women who felt marginalized by second-wave

feminism. One of these incisive critiques is from the section “Colonized Women: The Chicana”

by Elizabeth Sutherland and Chicana activist Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez in Robin Morgan’s

anthology Sisterhood is Powerful. Elizabeth Sutherland’s introduction to this section stated:

Impact: Costs of a few million dollars annually to state and local governments for addressing human trafficking offenses. Potential increased annual fine revenue of a similar amount, dedicated primarily for human trafficking victims” California Voter Guide, Prop 35, retrieved December 7, 2012 from http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/35/. Sex worker advocates such as Gira Grant opposed Proposition 35 because they saw it as a “’purposeful conflation’ of trafficking and sex work.” Natasha Lennard, “Does California’s Anti-Human Trafficking Bill get it Wrong?,” Salon, October 24, 2012. Retrieved December 7, 2012 from vhttp://www.salon.com/2012/10/24/does_calif_s_anti_human_trafficking_bill_get_it_wrong/. 14A recent article on feminism in the London Review of Books includes a short analysis of Wages for Housework. Jenny Turner, “As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes,” London Review of Books, 33, no. 24 (2011). Retrieved November 11, 2012 from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n24/jenny-turner/as-many-pairs-of-shoes-as-she-likes.

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For many militants in the Women’s Liberation Movement of this country today, the following comments of Enriqueta Vasquez may come as a shock and perhaps even seem like a cop-out – or “Tommish.” But most of these women are white, middle-class in background, and in the majority of the population. They have little gut understanding of the position of women from a colonized –not merely oppressed—group. […] Enriqueta Vasquez is a revolutionary, with her own tone of voice. Let Anglo women listen for her voice, not merely for echoes of their own.15

The last sentence in this statement is a resounding critique of feminism, for Sutherland was

pleading with feminists to truly listen to the voice of women that they saw as “other,” instead of

simply hearing reverberations of their own voices and experiences. This is the line that Wages

for Housework so successfully walked; they found a way that women could listen to each other’s

voices, recognizing that lesbian women, black women, and prostitute women, among others,

each faced unique modes of oppression. Yet, without discounting these singular experiences,

women could see themselves in the reflection of others, could see themselves as part of a whole.

Indeed, Wages for Housework makes a powerful contribution both to feminist theory and to the

history of feminism.

Wages for Housework also elucidated the complex origins and legacy of feminism in

relation to New Left movements in the United States and Europe. It clearly identified the

relationship between feminism and labor activism. In 1977, the Los Angeles Wages for

Housework Committee published an editorial in their newsletter that quoted from an edition of

the Chicago “Evening World” (June 1912) in which a socialist woman said “The women wage

earners were the first of the female sex to awaken to a realization of their economic and political

necessities because their connection with the capitalist structure of society was direct and

obvious.”16 Historical scholarship has touched on the intersection of labor activism and

15 Elizabeth Sutherland, “An Introduction,” in Sisterhood is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 376-379. 16 “Wages for Housework Newsletter,” spring 1977, from Coyote Records, folder 541, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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feminism. One example is Daniel Horowitz’s book Betty Friedan and the Making of The

Feminine Mystique in which he traced the relationship between Friedan’s early work as a labor

journalist and the development of her feminist ideology.17 A great deal of work on this topic

remains to be accomplished, and Wages for Housework provides an ideal point of departure for

this scholarship. Selma James concluded her interview with the BBC in 1971 with the words of a

female labor activist, “I think our time is coming now. Right now.”18 The historical era in which

Wages for Housework was active has passed, but these words ring true; the time for historical

scholarship on Wages for Housework is right now.

I find it difficult to encounter the appropriate last words for this lengthy project, so I will

again defer to Selma James, for what she said to students and scholars twenty-two years ago still

rings true:

Because something is going to happen tomorrow, you see. The only thing we don’t know is what. […] [W]hat we have to worry about is what we are doing, whether we are making the connections, whether we are apathetic and – yes- backward, and how much faster we have to run to keep up with a moving reality we, along with millions everywhere, are determined to transform, shaking the base of the hierarchy and letting it all hang out.19

James laid down the gauntlet for feminists, scholars, and activists (none of which are mutually

exclusive titles), and I am excited to see how we will answer her call.

17 Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism, Culture, Politics, and the Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 18 James, “Our Time is Coming,” 29:05. 19 James, “The Challenge of Diversity,” in Sex, Race and Class, 216.

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APPENDIX A GEOGRAPHIC CHART

The following is a geographic chart of groups/chapters of Wages for Housework and the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement. 1 To produce

a fully comprehensive chart would require more research. Instead, this chart is meant to reflect the geographic dispersal of Wages for

Housework and the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement that I uncovered during the course of my research. When possible, I have noted the

names of founders or prominent activists within each group.

Wages for Housework Prostitutes’ Rights Movement

United States

California Wages for Housework San Francisco Wages Due Lesbians San Francisco Wages for Housework Los Angeles

CAT (California Advocates for Trollops) CCC (Capitol City COYOTE) COYOTE [Founder: Margo St. James] National Task Force on Prostitution

Florida Florida COYOTE

1 The main sources from which this information is drawn are: Jennifer, James, Jean Withers, Marilyn Haft, Sara Theiss, and Mary Owen, The Politics of Prostitution: Resources for Legal Change, (Social Research Associates: Seattle, 1977). Valerie Jenness, Making It Work: The Prostitute’s Rights Movement in Perspective, (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993). Folder 545 of the COYOTE records at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University includes a list of Wages for Housework chapters and “sister organizations” of COYOTE in the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement. There is a list of Wages for Housework chapters in the International Wages for Housework Campaign, “Power of Women” no. 5. 1976, Coyote Records, folder 541, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, folder 540.

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Hawaii DOLPHIN (Dump Obsolete Laws; Prove Hypocrisy Isn’t Necessary)

Illinois Wages for Housework Committee

Louisiana PASSION (Professional Association Seeking Sexual Identification Observant of Nature)

Maryland HUM (Hookers Union Maryland)

Massachusetts Wages for Housework Committee PUMA, Inc. (Prostitutes Union of Massachusetts)

Michigan Alley Cat Prostitution Education Project CUPIDS (Citizens to Upgrade Prostitution in Detroit and Suburbs)

Missouri OCELOT (no information on what acronym stands for).

New Jersey HUSH (Help Undo Sexual Hypocrisy)

New York Black Women for Wages for Housework (USA) [Founder: Wilmette Brown] Wages for Housework Committee

PONY (Prostitutes of New York) Scapegoat

Ohio Wages for Housework Committee Black Women for Wages for Housework

Oregon Portland Wages for Housework Committee

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Pennsylvania Wages for Housework Committee Wages Due Lesbians

Washington Seattle COYOTE (aka, Association of Seattle Prostitutes)

Seattle

Australia Australian Prostitutes’ Collective PAG (Prostitutes Action Group) Quills and Quims

Austria Austrian Association of Prostitutes

Brazil National Association of Prostitutes

Canada Toronto Wages for Housework Committee [Prominent member: Judith Ramirez] Wages Due Lesbians [Prominent member: Francie Wyland]

BEAVER (Better End All Vicious Erotic Repression) [address care of Wages for Housework] CORP (Canadian Organization for Prostitutes)

England Black Women for Wages for Housework Committee London Wages for Housework Committee [Founder: Selma James] Wages Due Lesbians

PLAN (Prostitution Laws are Nonsense) ECP (English Collective of Prostitutes) [address care of Wages for Housework] PROS (Programme for Reform of Laws on Soliciting)

France Birthplace of the Prostitutes’ Rights Movement

Holland ICPR (International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights)

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Italy Padua Wages for Housework Committee [Founder: Mariarosa Dalla Costa]

Comitato per I Diritti Civili delle Prostitute

Germany HYDRA- Berlin HWGA- Frankfurt Solidarietaet Hamburger Huren (Solidarity of Hamburg Whores) – Hamburg Messalina- Munich Kassandra- Nuremberg Lysistrata – Cologne Nitribitt – Bremen

Mexico Anilu Elias – prostitutes’ rights activist

The Netherlands De Rode Draad (The Red Thread) De Roze Draad (The Pink Thread)

New Zealand Wages for Housework Committee

Sweden Sexualbrottskommitten Prostitutionsutredningen

Switzerland IPDC (International Prostitution Documentation Center)

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