Wages for Housework

The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) is a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. It was started in 1972 by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James who first put forward the demand for wages for housework. At the third National Women's Liberation Conference in Manchester, England, the IWFHC states that they begin with those with least power internationally – unwaged workers in the home (mothers, housewives, domestic workers denied pay), and unwaged subsistence farmers and workers on the land and in the community. They consider the demand for wages for unwaged caring work to be also a perspective and a way of organizing from the bottom up, of autonomous sectors working together to end the power relations among them. In Silvia Federici's essay she argues that the domesticated work women do in the house is an act of love rather than a chore. She is persuading the reader into seeing how the unpaid nature of the work gives the capitalist society an edge over the housework that women are doing, keeping these women financially dependent which is a normal thing to have no separate money of their own, therefore having less freedom.These women made Wages for Housework into a political movement rather than just making it about how much money is earned for the job that they are completing, by making this a political movement there was more attention put on this area of the feminist movement.