In 2013, journalist Kristin Wartman reduced the plea for “wages for housework” to “pay people to cook at home.” Her goal was to improve familial health and welfare, which, she argued, had suffered from the movement of wives and mothers into the paid labor force (“Pay People to Cook at Home.” New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/opinion/pay-people-to-cook-at-home.html?_r=2&). Yet wages for housework (WFH) was no simple appeal for monetizing cooking, cleaning, and caring, what activist feminist theorist Silvia Federici and her sisters-in-arms nearly a half century ago called women’s “first shift.”
As recorded in this invaluable collection of manifestos, pamphlets, photographs, flyers, speeches, and “media coverage,” drawn from Federici’s personal archive, WFH was a revolutionary claim. The New York Wages for Housework Committee, and its counterparts in Italy, Britain, Canada, and across the United States, called on women to reject the task of reproducing labor power by performing activities necessary to...
