On today’s show, host Ali Muldrow speaks with Emily Callaci, author of Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor. In it, Callaci writes about the second-wave feminist movement, Wages for Housework, and the important questions about unpaid labor, gender, economy, and social reproduction that it raised. Muldrow calls the book “immensely relevant for this moment.” 

Callaci describes the 1970s as a time when social movements were focused on expanding people’s rights. But the Wages for Housework movement tried to address what they thought was a fundamental source of inequality: the economic inequality in the home due to the invisible, unrecognized, and unpaid labor of women. She says that this movement was asking for two things: a paycheck and a change in thinking about how we organize our society. 

They talk about how love becomes a mechanism of exploitation, and how women are oppressed by the expectation of their care work. Callaci says that men lose out by being told that care work isn’t for them. One response is to distribute labor equally across partnerships and genders as well as across the community. Callaci says that the Left needs to claim the terrain of supporting domestic labor, care, and mothering, so that the value of this work isn’t based on the misogynist rhetoric of childrearing being the natural domain of women. 

Emily Callaci is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she teaches courses on African History, Reproductive Politics and Global Feminism. Her most recent book is Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor, which is now available at bookstores. She is a mother of 2 and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Featured image: remix of the cover of Wages for Housework by Sara Gabler/WORT.

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