In their 1972 pamphlet The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa presented an original and influential analysis of “unwaged work.” This concept, which identified the care work that women do in the home as an essential element of the reproduction of capitalism, opened the door to powerful new forms of struggle among working class women and men. James founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, based on the demand that women should be paid for their round-the-clock care work, since it reproduces labor-power day after day.
This was not an attempt to subject women to
the same exploitation as male workers. In 1970s Italy, the Wages for
Housework movement was connected to Lotta Feminista, a group that sought
to challenge male-centered forms of workers’ struggle. Silvia Federici argued, in a 1974 essay reprinted in the recent issue of The Commoner
on care work, that the feminist struggle for a wage had to be
understood in terms of “its significance in demystifying and subverting
the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society.”
Introducing a reprint of James and Dalla Costa’s pamphlet in 1975, the
Padua Wages for Housework Committee explained, “If our wageless work is
the basis of our powerlessness in relation both to men and to capital,
as this book, and our daily experience, confirm, then wages for that
work, which alone will make it possible for us to reject that work, must
be our lever of power.”
Recently James has coordinated the International Women Count Network and the Global Women’s Strike. Several weeks ago, she kicked off a tour to promote her new book with PM Press, Sex, Race and Class – The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952–2011. At Occupy Philadelphia’s Dissecting Capitalism series, James gave a talk on “Women, Capitalism, and the State,” and later appeared at a special women-led International Women’s Day
general assembly. Between her engagements, I spoke with her about the
relevance of Wages for Housework today, her current involvement in US
and UK welfare campaigns, and the challenges facing care workers.
Selma James at Occupy Philadelphia. (Photo by Jenna Spitz)
I wanted to start with The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community
and the central ideas around that, because they might not be completely
familiar to people who are reading this publication from other
perspectives. As I understand it, one of the central ideas in that
publication is that women’s work is fundamental to the reproduction of
capital, and that women’s struggles are not secondary to labor politics.
In fact, that women’s struggles are
labor politics, but they’re unwaged labor politics. And they’re not
less important or more important but integral to the entire picture.
There is waged work in the society, and there is unwaged work in the
society, and they’re both absolutely crucial to the accumulation of
capital and to its destruction.
Thank you. You put it much more
eloquently than I could. So with that as the foundation, and the fact
that this publication came out in ’71-’72…
’72.
’72. I’m wondering if you could
explain, with changes in women’s struggles and changes in labor, how
that applies today, particularly for younger people who are new to these
ideas or coming into this without having been alive at that time.
Some things are different. The first thing that’s different from 1972 is that we have a much more international view of unwaged work. There’s not a lot in Power of Women
on the unwaged work on the land. And it’s much more directed at women
in industrial countries. The housework of women in industrial countries.
Whereas most of the housework in the world, and most of the caring work
in the world, and obviously, most of the agricultural work in the world
that’s unwaged, as well as waged, is in the non-industrial world.
And we understood that not long after. There are hints of that in Power of Women,
because I had lived in the Third World and been involved in struggles
in the Third World. But it was hard enough to make the case for unwaged
work with women in industrial countries because a lot of feminism was
not interested in that. They thought that, and said that,
housework… you could more or less eliminate it. Do just a little
something every day, which is at best absurd, at worst sexist. So that
was a big change.
The other big change is that women went out
to work in much greater numbers, for a number of reasons. Because we
didn’t think we could get wages for housework. And we thought
the important thing was to get the money to have the independence. And
because, after the Seventies, there was an enormous attack on women
having any money from the state. And single mothers were thrown
off benefits. In this country it was absolutely horrendous by the
Eighties. But increasingly, it’s happened everywhere, where women are
driven out to work, irrespective of what happens to their
children. Their children are nobody. Their children are irrelevant. The
important thing is that the state not give anything, and that the women give more. That’s a big change.
What is not a change, is that
women do the housework. And that the housewife is hidden behind her
wage. That is, the fact that she goes home every day to see that her
child has clean socks for the morning, and that her oldest son has his
sports gear, and that her mother has somebody to look in on her, because
she just lost her husband.
I mean, all of that enormous caring work
has not gone away at all – except, and to the degree that it has gone
away, to that degree, we’re not distraught that [women] don’t know
what’s happening to their children, they don’t know what’s happening to
their parents, their elderly parents.
The relationships on which the whole society rests are in wreck condition, are in disastrous
condition because women are going out to work. It’s not just a few
minutes a day. It’s taking care of the relationships that are the
foundation of our lives. That’s what women do. And when we can’t do
that, when most of us can’t do that, we are either furious,
resentful, or we begin to be uncaring ourselves. And that has happened
to some women.
It’s happened to all of us to some degree. That we don’t want to know
about how the people that we would ordinarily have been taking care of,
how they’re suffering. We don’t want to know. We can’t cope with the
knowledge of the mess that people we love are in, as a result of the
fact that we have no time to take care of them. I think there are really
a lot of women in that situation. They call it the Sandwich
Generation. They call it whatever they like. Any nice little name they
give it, it’s definitely the suffering of the carer as well as those
that they care for, obviously, which is why the carer is suffering.
Now something else has happened which I was not aware of until I read an article very recently by a woman called Allison Wolfe, who seems to be from Britain, who says that a major change among women, has been that the elite
of women – and there is now much more of an elite, as a result of
feminism – has resulted in a class divide among women as it has never
been seen before. In fact, I was reading that article again this
morning, and I can give you one or two quotes, like: ”The revolution has
taken place at the top. A majority of trainee barristers and almost two
thirds of medical students are now female (up from 29 per cent in the
early 1960s), and the majority of doctors will be women by 2012 on
current trends.”
As a result of that, [Wolfe suggests that]
the wage hierarchy based on gender does not apply to them. Hmm. It
applies to us more than before, okay?
So that, she says, I want to just find
another quote that I was kind of mind-blown by. She says: ”Academic
experts on the female labour market occupy very different points on the
political spectrum, but they agree on the polarisation of women’s
experiences. The feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting and feeding
into a revolution in women’s lives, spoke the language of sisterhood
– the assumption that there was a shared female experience that cut
across class, ethnic and generational lines. The reality was that at
that very moment, sisterhood was dying.”
Sisterhood was dying because most of us
were not gaining pay equity. Most of us were deeply suffering from
sexism, and the ones who were the leading feminists were not.
In fact, every once in a while, they got
very angry and said, “It hasn’t all disappeared.” And they would mention
something that they are still affected by, still attacked by, which
they thought they would no longer be affected by. In other words, it’s a
shock to find out that they’re still suffering as women when they
thought, once you got the job, once you got the prestige, once you got
the position, once you got equality, all that [would be] left behind.
Now I mentioned this to an audience last
night, and I said, “I’m not absolutely certain she’s right.” But I think
there’s a lot to be said, and the figures do prove that she is right in
terms of the wage gaps in the boardroom are not what they are
on the shop floor. I mean there isn’t even a shop floor anymore. You
know, in the call center or in general, nursing as opposed to doctors
and all the rest.
So that’s a change. Those are the things
that have changed. We have changed; we are more international. But the
situation for women has changed. More of us are doing the double day,
and there is a change in the class, the extent of the class split in
feminism… That’s a very big answer.
I was at your talk last night, so,
informed by that and by things I’ve tried to read up on, I was hoping
that you could talk about particular struggles or sites of struggle that
you’re involved in today or that you think are important and linked to
that original understanding of unwaged work. Particularly the work
around welfare that you had mentioned last night, if you could comment a
little more on that.
We’re just getting a petition together.
That’s what Phoebe [Jones] and I were working on with women on the West
Coast because [Congresswoman] Gwen Moore has put forward the Rise Out of
Poverty Act. And a number of us, that is, the Global Women’s Strike,
the Welfare Warriors in
Wisconsin, who have fought welfare reform every minute. You see, I’m
just familiarizing myself with this. I knew the Act had come up at a
meeting, which we have often on Skype, between the US and the UK and
Guyana, in particular, and sometimes with Ireland. We can’t do it with
Peru or India because the language barriers are too great. But this is
the core of the strike. Those are the country cores. They’re the
countries that are part of the core.
And it’s something that we absolutely
must pursue. Michael Moore has done us a great service in his film
where he deals with the fact that this little boy who was unguarded
while his mother was at work, working for workfare, had killed another
child. Did you see that movie?
Yes, yes. A while ago.
Well, I was deeply affected by that. And I
have been a single mother, raising a child, by myself. His father was
there and ready to take him for one or two nights a week. I have no
complaints about the father, but the situation is unbearable.
You are, every minute, worrying about what’s happening to your kid. And
you don’t want to ruin his life because that will ruin your
life, among other effects. And yet, when we said “wages for housework,”
there were feminists who didn’t take that seriously, and that is not
very nice.
Anyway, we think it’s really important. In 1977, some of us in the US went to the conference in Houston.
US President Carter had organized that. He was different. He was a
white southern anti-racist; that’s what made him different on
everything. And we said, with the welfare rights movement, the welfare
rights movement was still vigorous, that women receiving income transfer
payments – that’s welfare but in legalese or something – should have
the dignity of having that payment called a wage, not welfare. And we
said, “right on.”
There’s a photograph in the book of that conference where Margaret Prescott and Johnnie Tillmon
and – I can’t remember the name of the other woman who was so great
from the welfare rights movements – celebrating this decision, which
transcended the divisions between the North women and the South and
between the Left women and the Right. There were white southern women
who joined with these black women to say that welfare should be called a
wage, because of course, most women on welfare at that time were white
farm workers. But the movement was spearheaded by black city women. So
we’ve always been involved in the defense of welfare and tried to
prevent welfare reform, as Mr. Clinton and his lady feminist wife socked
it to us.
Now there’s a possibility of, again,
getting welfare without workfare, and we’re gonna fight like hell for
it. And we’re also fighting the same battle in the UK.
So, I had mentioned, I’m a teacher.
I work in a non-unionized context, and I think in the UK, from what I
understand, the same sort of tendency towards privatizing public
education is happening.
Yes, it’s terrible.
Perceiving of schooling as
intricately connected with the family in the reproduction of capitalism,
I was thinking a lot about how, since these things are already
connected, teachers and educators might ally in these struggles. Because
there’s all of this rhetoric about putting children first, which is,
you know, not happening in the home, and not happening in the school…
Anywhere!
But it seems to be driving force
for privatization. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts about
linking these educators’ struggles.
My sister had been a teacher, but she’s no
longer with us. In the UK, from Margaret Thatcher, 1979, equating to
Ronald Reagan, 1980 – the best of friends, they were – they attacked
teachers as a way of attacking education, and the unions did not defend
teachers as educators. They defended teachers as workers. But they did not defend teachers as carers.
My son was educated in that system in the UK, and from when he was little, he used to love to go to school. This was not
my experience in this country, but the teachers were – many, not all,
but many of the teachers – were dedicated to the kids, fought for the
kids, supported the kids. If they were studying a play, they would work
out which of the kids were interested and take them to the play at the
West End to see Olivier or whoever else. They were interested
in education. It was a vocation, and, the union narrowed the demand to
where you were just doing a job and how much money am I getting.
When one of the women at our center in London complained that police were in the school, and she wanted police out
of the school where her children were going, her two daughters, the
teachers didn’t agree with her because they said, “They can keep order.”
And we thought, “You mean a teacher can’t keep order? What kind of a
teacher is it who cannot keep even the attention of the kids?” What are
they doing in that classroom, you know, that these kids are
undisciplined, raucous, and feel that there is no difference between the
repression they may find in the society generally and what’s going on
in this classroom, that they need the policing of the kids? So,
I feel that the unions have not helped to maintain the dignity and the
mission – not a word I use often because I’m an atheist – and the
mission of the teacher as a civilizing influence, as an enhancement of
the lives of the children.
I think that something similar has happened
with nurses – and nurses are fighting to take care of patients, you
know. They’re not only fighting that they’re overworked and underpaid.
They’re fighting so that they can take the proper care of the patients.
You know, one of the nurses was complaining to me that his boss on the
ward says that, “You spend too much time with the patients. If you have
to go bandage a leg, just bandage a leg, but then you sit and talk with
them, and that’s no good!”
So, I think there’s a real crisis – this is
in general – between us carers and those who exploit us. On the one
hand, we want to care. But on the other hand, we don’t want that wish to
care to be used against us as workers. And we have always to decide, as
carers, as teachers, as nurses, as mothers, as neighbors, we have to
decide how to defend our caring but not allow ourselves to be exploited
because we have this “weakness,” and in fact, this vulnerability
is the right word. We have to say, “You have to pay us to do the right
thing.” And we don’t take the little bit that [either] we want to do the
right thing, or we want to take the money. We want both.
That’s really crucial, and it took a lot of years, I think, to be
absolutely clear, to be able to say that in that succinct way because
it’s very hard to figure out, if you are a carer, if your work is the
health and well-being of other people, how to be dedicated to it but not
exploited, not allow yourself to be exploited by it.
I think that that is what the
teachers should be saying and doing. They should be spelling it out.
They should be telling the parents, “If you want me to teach, fight for
my wages, and fight for my time. Fight for the facilities, and fight for
the children to have instruments to play in band and things like that, on school time, with school money.” You know, we want to give these children an education that really fits them to have a happy life, not fits them to be a repressed individual at the service of the state.
In the new anthology
– there’s only one anthology, of course it’s new because there wasn’t
any before – I edited a speech that I was asked to make by President
Aristide in Haiti, to the students, because my husband was a great historian and an historian of Haiti.
He thought, “Well, let’s take a chance on you.” And I said there was a
distinction, a crucial distinction that kids have to make – kids, but
teachers should help them – between rising out of poverty and destroying
poverty. Do you use education to get out of it, or do you use education
for all of us to get out of it? That’s also something that the
teachers haven’t made clear. They’ve entered into the competition – I
must be jet lagged because a lot of these words I can’t remember, and I
did, I was alright in England, so it must be jet lag – entered into the
competition which schools invited children to be part of. And teachers
should be saying, “Yes, I want you to know this. This will be useful to
you. You’d like to learn this. Yes, you might want to know this, and
this is the way that everybody can move. You know, you have to pass
exams, but the fewer exams, the better. The more education the better.”
And I think this is something that that new
movement, which Occupy really signals and personifies, really has to
address. The teachers within it have to address that. What do you think
of that?
I think particularly, this tension
between wanting to care, feeling that your work has meaning and knowing
that it’s still work, is really difficult. I want to provide children
with these wonderful, eye-opening experiences and support but at the
same time, resist the exploitation that that work can involve. It’s a
major tension that I, personally, feel.
You have to speak about it as that. It’s
terribly important that you spell it out, and you say exactly how it is,
and how some people do one thing, and some people do another, and that
you want to do both.
Yeah.
You know, I think it’s very important to
say that and to say that loud and clear in every single quarter, in
every single place where this question would be suitable to be raised.
It can be hard to say, particularly
in contexts where, you know, there’s no union, there’s no protection.
But it’s essential, I agree.
It is. But when you’re organizing for a
union, that’s the basis on which you want to organize for it. Because if
you organize on the narrow stuff, you’ll never get to the wider stuff,
you know. Even if it takes you longer get the union, when you get it, it
will be for the right reasons.
I had an International Women’s Day conversation with all of my students today. I teach high school English.
How old are they?
They’re tenth graders.
Tenth is what?
15, 16.
Teenagers.
Yeah. And I told them a little bit
about what I was doing this afternoon, and what I did last night, and
tried to give them a little background information. I asked if they had
any questions for you based on the little they knew.
Oh!
So one committed and interested student had a question. I was wondering if I could ask you…
Certainly, you can.
She was wondering: “What keeps you
motivated in continuing the campaign?” I talked a little bit about Wages
for Housework, and so I think that’s the campaign she was talking
about. I explained that you had been around through a lot of struggles
for a lot of time, and she was like, “Wow! Why is she still doing it?”
What keeps me motivated is that I want to
enjoy my life, and the closest I can get to full enjoyment is to attack
my enemies. And I find that, if I do it honestly and with others in a
collective way, I have a good chance to know what’s happening in my own
life. So my own life is not mystified, so I don’t believe the lies they
tell me about what I think and what I feel or should feel and should
think. That I really begin to see other members of the human race in the
round rather than with the nonsense that all of us spew out from time
to time when we don’t know what better to say. And that’s what really
keeps me motivated. I have a very high opinion of my own life, and
therefore, I want to use it in a way that is elevating to me but also to
all those who are down here with us. I don’t know if I’ve said that
very clearly, but you know, it’s something that I want for myself. To be
part of this struggle is to be learning, all the time. And that’s more
fun than anything I know, I mean, like anything. To learn what’s really going on is such a major thrill that it’s what really keeps me motivated.
