Wages for Housework: great idea, terrible PR?

It’s a phrase that lands awkwardly. Somewhere between the obvious and the absurd. A demand for a payslip for cleaning, cooking, care. Easy to misunderstand. Easy to dismiss.

Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question. Was it a great idea, poorly framed?

Because the Wages for Housework campaign, led by activists including Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, was not asking for pocket money for chores. It was making a far more radical claim. That capitalism does not simply overlook women’s unpaid labour, it depends on it.

The waged worker does not exist in isolation. Their capacity to work, to show up and produce, is sustained by care, domestic labour and reproductive work happening elsewhere, for free. In that sense, capitalism gets two workers for the price of one.

Two workers. One wage.

This was not a reformist demand. It was a challenge to how labour itself is defined.

And yet, despite the scale of that claim, Wages for Housework has often been remembered as simplistic, fringe, even naïve.

So the question is not just whether it was misunderstood, but why it was so easy to misunderstand.

Part of that answer sits in the language itself.

Wages for Housework deliberately framed domestic labour as “reproduction” in contrast to capitalism’s “production.” The point was political as much as descriptive. What happens in the home was being named as part of the same system that takes place in the factory, the office, the workplace. Not separate from it, but necessary to it.

“Production” creates goods and value that can be seen, measured and paid for. “Reproduction” sustains the conditions that make that production possible. The worker’s body, time and capacity to labour are maintained elsewhere, outside the wage.

But outside that framework, the word “reproduction” does not hold that meaning. It narrows almost immediately. Pregnancy. Childbirth. Biology.

Women’s labour is pulled back into something natural, inevitable, almost pre-economic, rather than understood as ongoing work that sustains life and enables production to continue.

There is a strange irony here. We use the word “labour” for childbirth, but rarely recognise the labour within it. It is treated as something that simply happens, rather than work that takes effort, risk and time.

So the only place where women are clearly associated with “labour” is also the place where that labour is most easily stripped of its economic meaning.

Within that context, the argument of Wages for Housework becomes harder to hear. A structural claim about how capitalism functions starts to sound like a literal request. Something expansive is reduced to something domestic.

The result is not just misunderstanding, but containment. A challenge to the system is translated into something the system can more easily dismiss.

It is tempting to look back at Wages for Housework and locate the problem in its language. To say it was misleading, too literal, too easy to dismiss.

But that places the burden in the wrong place.

What Wages for Housework exposed was not just the invisibility of domestic labour. It exposed capitalism’s reliance on that invisibility. A system that functions by extracting more labour than it pays for. Two workers, one wage.

That is not an easy claim to accommodate.

Where some feminist demands could be taken up and integrated, access to work, power and existing structures, they did not require capitalism to fundamentally change how it operates. In many cases, they extended it. More workers, more productivity, without changing the underlying logic.

Wages for Housework did something different. It pointed to a dependency the system would rather keep hidden. Not just inequality within the system, but the conditions that allow it to function at all.

And capitalism does not absorb ideas neutrally. It takes up what benefits it and sidelines what does not.

So perhaps the issue was never that Wages for Housework was poorly framed.

It is that it named something the system has no incentive to fully acknowledge.

The question is not whether they asked for the wrong thing.

It is whether we are still mishearing what they were saying.