Wages Against Housework
By Silvia Federici
Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the reduction of wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective.
To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role which women have been confined in a capitalist society.
If we take wages for housework as a political perspective, we can see that struggling for it is going to produce a revolution in our lives and in our social power as women. It is also clear that if we think we do not ‘need’ that money, it is because we have accepted the particular forms of prostitution of body and mind by which we get the money to hide that need. Not only is wages for housework a revolutionary perspective, but it is the only revolutionary perspective from a feminist viewpoint and ultimately for the entire working class.
‘A Labor of Love’
True, under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally mystified, but the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle around and against the terms and the quantity of your wage, the terms and the quantity that you work. There is also a separation between you and your job.
But in the case of housework the situation is qualitatively different. The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character.
Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work.
By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone. It has gotten a hell of a lot of work for free, and has made sure that women, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the best thing in life.
At the same time, it has disciplined the male worker also, by making his woman dependent on his work and his wage, and trapped him in this discipline by giving him a servant after he himself has done so much serving at the factory or the office.
If women are not workers they are slaves/servants
Once housework was totally naturalized and sexualized, once it became a feminine attribute, all of us as females are characterized by it.
The Revolutionary Perspective
If we start from this analysis we can see the revolutionary implications of the demand for wages for housework. It is the demand by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.
It should be clear that when we struggle for a wage we do not struggle to enter capital relations, because we have never been out of them.
To demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity
It is one thing to set up a daycare center the way we want it, and demand that the state pay for it. It is quite another thing to deliver our children to the state and ask the state to control them, discipline them, teach them to honor the American flag for 15 hours. It is one thing to organize communally the way we want to eat (by ourselves, in groups, etc.) and then ask the state to pay for it, and it is another thing to ask the state to organize our meals. In one case we regain some control over our lives, in the other we extend the State’s control over us
A nod at Davis’s p.o.v.
The things we have to prove are our capacity to expose what we are already doing, what capital is doing to us, and our power in the struggle against it