Historian Callaci delves into the 1970s movement to demand fair pay for household labor in Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor (Seal, Mar.).

What piqued your interest in the wages for housework movement?

I grew up as a feminist in the ’90s. Housework just seemed like an old-fashioned, uninteresting topic, something I associated with an earlier generation of feminists who fixed that problem, so now we’re all equal and we don’t have to worry about it anymore. And then when I had a baby in 2017, I was overwhelmed. The empowering feminism I had grown up with that talked about equality didn’t address the fact that I still had more work than could be done in a single day. So I found myself looking to past feminists, starting with Sylvia Federici, probably the most well-known proponent of wages for housework. She wrote some really pithy, brilliant essays in the ’70s that continue to resonate. I happened to discover that she was in the process of putting together her personal archives, which I was able to access. And that’s how I learned that this little movement from the ’70s was thinking so capaciously, not just about this struggle within the household to manage all the work, but also how unpaid labor factors into so many of the issues that face our contemporary world.

You write that wages for housework was seen as “a curiosity.”

Women were trying to leave behind the role of housewife, having been forced into it for so long. So to then claim that not only are we going to recognize housework but identify with it and demand payment for it seems contradictory to a feminist ethos.

Why did you choose to focus on the movement’s key leaders?

I thought focusing on their individual stories would illuminate how these politics arise out of some radically different circumstances. Wilmette Brown grew up in Newark, in a catchment zone of polluting factories. She had an experience of housework and women’s unpaid labor that had to do with living with the health effects of that, with the aftermath of cancer that results from this environmental toxicity. That’s very different from someone like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who grew up in Italy after Mussolini, in this era when the patriarchal family was being upheld as the model of traditional citizenship, or from Margaret Prescod, an immigrant born in Barbados who watched as many of the women in her community went abroad to work as domestics and nannies. They all shared a struggle in that they were expected to perform household labor. But their experiences of that labor were so different.

What do you most hope readers will take from the book?

That we all have a relationship with housework. If we’re privileged, we might have others do housework for us, but we’re all the products of housework.