Wages For Housework : The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise - Kate Winter

Wages For Housework

The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise

Read by: Kate Winter

Author: Emily Callaci

At a Glance

Published: 13th February 2025

Digital Audiobook


$27.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $7.00 with

OR

Free With 30 Day Trial

Audiobook subscription $12.99/mo after 30 day trial. Cancel anytime.

Instant Digital Delivery to your Booktopia Reader App

Listen on
IOS
Android

Brought to you by Penguin.

What would women do with their lives if they had more time? The riveting, untold story of a revolutionary campaign to change the way work is valued
'The women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don't get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!'
Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise.

Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City's fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement.

Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism - and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?

© Emily Callaci 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Listen on
IOS
Android

More in Feminism & Feminist Theory

All Women Want - Claudia Karvan

DIGITAL AUDIO

Digital Audiobook

$42.99

Intimacy - Ita O'Brien

DIGITAL AUDIO

Digital Audiobook

$27.99

Nothing Grows by Moonlight - Amrita Acharia

DIGITAL AUDIO

$27.99

A Beautiful Evil - Bea Fitzgerald

DIGITAL AUDIO

Digital Audiobook

$27.99