1950s advert encouraging women to do housework (Photo: flickr/mrquizzical)
How did motherhood change your relationship to capitalism?
I was born in the 1980s and grew up in the 1990s. I was a feminist but to me feminism was about career success and creative expression.
These are things which I still value, but I also grew up in a labour movement household and was taken to picket lines. And these two things were not connected in any meaningful way.
Then I had my first child, and it was all-consuming, but it didn’t fit into either paradigm. It was interesting to me personally to think “How do I make sense of the experience of motherhood politically and personally.”
All the advice you get is individual parenting advice, and lifestyles hacks to be more efficient. But I wanted to understand the system.
Do you think is it important to confront housework as a site of women’s systematic oppression, rather than trying to escape it as individuals?
I absolutely think that. Every day we labour to make everything function, not just in the home.
This was one thing that sparked me to think about it in a political sense, to think about how the issues we face as parents are also wider concerns.
Here in the United States there is the threat of mass school shootings. There is a culture of parents training their children to cope with a mass shooting. The responsibility is all put on care givers.
And it is the same with climate change. Think about what happened in Flint, Michigan, when the water was poisoned by lead pipes.
Think of all the ways in which mainly low income, black families must work to bring into filtered water.
If we see housework as an individual struggle, we miss the point of wider context.
You emphasise that housewives are not victims in need of charity but are exploited workers in need of justice. What is the relationship between housework and waged labourers?
This is a critical point. People who do essential labour are written off because we have bought into the idea that is not work.
It all about giving charity, about welfare queens and charity cases. But the work women do in the home is essential. It adds economic value to our society and that creates the potential to organise around something.
It is not about begging for charity, nor is it something that can be cut in times of austerity.
Housework is a working class issue, not a charity issue. We divide wage labour from other labour, but it is all part of the same system.
Is there a danger that the slogan “wages for housework” institutionalises women as housewives?
People have been asking this since the 1970s. It is not wages for housewives, it is wages for housework.
Women are not naturally suited to housework. It is not about keeping women at home. It is about what we think of as work, and how we distribute resources across society.
Talking about wages for housework is about creating alternatives to the nuclear family and the role of housewife, not strengthening the gendered idea of housework.
What would it be like to live in a society that rewarded care and the environment as much as the production and consumption of commodities? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?
There are so many different possibilities. Being a parent is round the clock work and it has to be combined with paid work. Both are rewarding but it is a moment when you come alive to politics, to environmental harm and poverty.
You have a new connection to these issues through parenthood, but you have no time or bandwidth to do anything about it.
The ways we spend our time just doesn’t fit into the bucket of what you do in your job.
It’s about how to build in communities, how to create communities, how to enjoy leisure and explore creativity. There’s a romanticisation of women who are “doing it all” and being productive but I don’t think that model is very liberating.
A key point is the awareness of the work you do and this gives you confidence. For instance, in Guyana, labour and feminist activists transformed women’s consciousness by getting women to write down all the things they do.
This awareness gives you confidence to demand support.
You focus on the experiences of five activists—Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod. Why these five women?
There were many women who contributed to the wages for housework movement. I chose these women because each had made a different contribution.
In northeast Italy, the debate was different from that in London. There are different ways of thinking about the project as well as lots of shared ideas. These are global stories.
These women were also prolific, so as a researcher it helped that there was lots of information about them, and they wrote a lot.
Selma James is in her 90s and is still really sharp and still revolutionary.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa looked at capitalism from standpoint of the housewife whose unpaid labour produced the next generation of workers. Silvia Federici developed the slogan, “They say its love, we say its unpaid work.”
Wilmette Brown focused on the environmental aspects of housework. She argued that housework creates profits for capitalism and that housework is the work thrust on us by capitalism in the form of repair work for its harms.
Margaret Prescod was born in Barbados and she had a unique perspective on care work. She talked about the nannies who couldn’t afford to bring their own children over to the US.
Are these debates about housework still relevant?
One of the things I take from the debates is how ambitious they were.
We get so frustrated with our political system that we dial back what we think is possible in a narrow electoral framework.
But now we face these overlapping crises, and we need to think more ambitiously. It is time to think more ambitiously about what sort or world we want to live in, especially at a time of climate catastrophe, soaring inequality and continuing racism.
The moment is right—this is the perfect time for an alternative lens through which to think about what is possible.
