Wages for Housework

Callaci reconstructs the 1970s campaign led by Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and others to demand state wages for domestic labor, a movement that split feminists at the time, since paying women for housework could be read as either overdue recognition or a way of re-entrenching them in the home just as many were trying to leave it. Callaci, writing partly out of her own experience of new motherhood colliding with an academic workload, doesn't resolve that tension so much as sit inside it, treating the campaign's contradictions as the most interesting thing about it rather than a flaw to explain away. Reviewers have noted the book's strength is less in vindicating the movement's practical failure than in taking its theoretical provocation seriously on its own terms.