New Books in Political Science Emily Callaci, "Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor" (Seal Press, 2025)
Nov 21, 2025
Emily Callaci, a historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, reveals the revolutionary essence of the 1970s Wages for Housework movement. She delves into the lives of its architects, including Selma James and Silvia Federici, and discusses the movement's expansive global reach. Callaci tackles provocative questions about prioritizing care over production and how this shift could reshape society and women's lives. Engaging with resistance from within the left, she highlights the movement's challenges and ambitions, making a compelling case for the significance of unpaid labor.
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Personal Revelation From A Poster
- Emily Callaci hung a Wages for Housework poster on her wall and first saw it as a provocative piece of feminist art.
- After becoming a parent in 2017 she realized the slogan spoke to her lived, totalizing experience of unpaid labor.
Movement Was Global, Not Local
- Emily discovered Silvia Federici's archives and realized Wages for Housework was a global, ambitious movement.
- That archival evidence reframed the campaign from a quirky slogan to a sustained international project.
Diverse Roots, Shared Diagnosis
- Diverse backgrounds of Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod showed housework's universal political stakes.
- They united around revealing unpaid domestic labor as foundational to capitalism and a potential source of power.
