CONCEPT
Wages for Housework
The 1972 feminist demand that domestic labor be waged — a political intervention forcing recognition that capitalism depends structurally on unwaged reproductive work.
The Wages for Housework campaign, launched in 1972 by the International Feminist Collective, demanded payment for domestic labor — cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, emotional care. The demand was deliberately provocative, designed to expose capitalism's dependence on a vast substrate of invisible, feminized, unwaged work. By insisting that housework be compensated as work rather than dismissed as women's natural vocation, the campaign forced a confrontation with what Federici identified as capitalism's foundational mystification: the transformation of labor into love. The movement was not primarily about securing wages but about making visible the labor that accounting systems were designed never to see.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The campaign emerged from the recognition that Marxist analysis had systematically ignored the labor of social reproduction. Classical political economy measured the factory, the wage, the commodity produced. It did not measure the labor that produced the worker — the cooking that fed him, the washing that cleaned him, the childcare that raised him, the emotional work that sustained him. This labor was