Reclaiming the Earth: The World-making Vision of the Wages for Housework Campaign

Reclaiming the Earth: The World-making Vision of the Wages for Housework Campaign

Feminists have long seen housework as political. But can the mundane everyday work of cleaning and caring and nurturing be a starting point for an anti-capitalist revolution? In this talk, I will explore the ideas and activism of Black Women for Wages for Housework: an international group of Black feminists who came together in the 1970s to demand that the governments of the world compensate women for all their unpaid work in the home and community. They were after more than equality between the sexes: by demanding wages for housework, they sought to dismantle white supremacy, reverse global hierarchies of wealth and inequality, bring an end to war, and repair the earth. For the women of Black Women for Wages for Housework, paying women for housework was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it.

Emily Callaci is an historian of modern Africa and global feminism. Her first book, Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania, explores the creative lives of urban migrant youth to the city of Dar es Salaam during Tanzania’s socialist era, from 1967 through 1985. She is the author of a forthcoming book about the global feminist Wages for Housework campaign. Along with Kate Brown, she is co-editor of the AHR series History Unclassified.