In the United States, as in many nations around the world, people are having fewer children. According to the CDC, the country’s birth rate is at a record low, a trend that may eventually threaten tax bases and strain social services as the population ages and the workforce shrinks. But some who are concerned with this trend line see the problem less in practical than in spiritual terms. Among right-wing “pronatalists” who view having children as a moral good, the declining birth rate betrays a growing reluctance on the part of American women to have babies in traditional family structures. President Donald Trump has responded to this anxiety by promising a “baby boom.” To that end, Republicans have proposed putting $1,000 in a “Trump account” for all newborns; the White House has also been considering an array of proposals that include giving mothers $5,000 for each birth, as well as awarding a medal to those with six or more. (As Mother Jones has noted, Stalin and Hitler handed out similar awards.) A goal for this ascendant strain of pronatalism is, as CNN recently put it, to “glorify motherhood.”
Of course, a medal is meaningless, and $5,000 is at best a few months of help, relative to the economic factors—a nationwide housing crisis, wildly expensive child care, debt—that cause many Americans not to have children or to have fewer than they might like. Glorifying motherhood, meanwhile, in practical terms, may only make mothers’ daily lives worse. Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, has found that contemporary birth rates are declining fastest in highly developed, patriarchal countries—places where women can have any career they like but where it’s assumed that they will do the bulk of child-care and household labor, such that motherhood and a fulfilling work life become incompatible. This is somewhat the case in the U.S.; a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center showed that though husbands and wives earn roughly equally in a growing share of heterosexual marriages, women in these households still spend more time on child care and chores. Encouraging childbearing by attaching prestige to motherhood without material support would surely make this disparity worse.
But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn’t have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement’s most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn’t consign them to a life without anything else.
Not even at the height of the Wages for Housework campaign was it mainstream, and, as can happen on the left, it suffered from a utopianism that kept it from achieving tangible victories, as the University of Wisconsin historian Emily Callaci shows in her new survey of the movement, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor. But the campaign’s ideas are worth another look. Wages for Housework was, in a sense, the opposite of $5,000 and a medal: Its activists dreamed of a society that would give women the economic freedom to do and be anything they wanted, not one that would narrowly incentivize motherhood. Callaci’s deeply researched book is a compelling guide to the world the movement wanted.
Callaci came to Wages for Housework through motherhood. After having children, she found that the dual demands of her professorship and her family life meant that she was doing some sort of task 18 hours a day. Caring for her sons was, she writes, “work that I knew I could never refuse,” but so was her job. Having grown up with the girl-power feminism of the 1990s and joined the workforce in the 2010s (the era of the girlboss), she’d absorbed the lesson that professional success “was the source of my liberation, autonomy, and sense of accomplishment.” Added to this tension was the day-care loop that many American parents of young children know well: Callaci and her husband “rely on paid childcare; to pay for childcare, we need to work; and this entire cycle relies on the fact that the extremely skilled women who care for our children are paid less money for their work than we are for ours.” This is unjust, Callaci argues, and also implicates parents in the devaluation of child care, which is their labor as well as that of their children’s nannies or day-care providers. She wanted another way.
In the contemporary United States, most families don’t have one. But in the writings and archives of the Wages for Housework activists Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, Callaci found a pitch for a society in which care work isn’t unpaid or poorly paid—because, without it, everything else falls apart. Callaci explains that Wages for Housework began with a question prompted by the Italian philosophy of operaismo, or “workerism,” which wanted to change the workplace so that worker well-being was no longer a distant second to productivity. Dalla Costa, one of Wages for Housework’s co-founders, was a militant operaista, but she was also a feminist, and she wanted to understand how operaismo was relevant beyond job sites full of men. Callaci writes that Dalla Costa started by asking, “If factories were the places where exploitation happened, why didn’t women who stayed at home feel free?” From there, she “began to rethink the entire history of capitalism from the standpoint of the housewife.”
Dalla Costa’s questions led her to the idea that women who don’t work outside the home produce “the single most valuable thing, without which capitalism could not exist: labor power itself.” Mothers create workers, and especially in Italy in the ’70s, mothers and wives more often than not fed those workers, clothed them, did their laundry, made the beds in which they slept at night. Dalla Costa shared her ideas with other feminists, including Selma James, who lived in London and had been married to the eminent cultural historian and Pan-Africanist C. L. R. James. Having grown up working-class in New York and come to politics partly through Black liberation, Selma James espoused a more inclusive and more intuitive feminism than that of many of her white, middle-class peers. She saw money for housewives as not just fair pay for labor but also a source of liberation from men. At the same time, she wanted the feminists she knew to identify themselves more closely with waged workers and their struggles, because, as Callaci puts it, “women were working all the time, even if their work conditions varied.” When James added this concept to Dalla Costa’s reframing of labor power, Wages for Housework was born.
Dalla Costa and James spread their ideas from Europe to James’s hometown of New York, where they caught on with a young Italian graduate student named Silvia Federici—perhaps the most well-known of the movement’s members today. As more famous American feminists concentrated on the Equal Rights Amendment and on equity in white-collar workplaces—a focus on achievement outside the home that would later appear, in glossier form, as girlboss feminism—Federici and her Wages for Housework committee advocated instead to get cash to all women, but especially those not presently earning money for their labor. In their estimation, only economic power could lead to freedom. For instance, when various states began to recognize rape within marriage as a crime, Federici pointed out—though no legislators or more prominent feminists listened—that this recognition “gives women the right not to be raped; but only money would give them the power to actually leave a violent relationship.”
Federici’s committee acknowledged that, in a sense, welfare served as the wage they wanted—but it was both restrictive and stigmatized. Margaret Prescod, who was part of Federici’s committee before co-founding Black Women for Wages for Housework with Wilmette Brown, spearheaded the only material victory Callaci describes by standing up to one of welfare’s constraints. She led an activist group at Queens College that, along with Black Women for Wages for Housework, got a bill passed in the state of New York that enabled welfare recipients, whom the local press described as “savvy scammers,” to get educational grants and loans without having that money counted against their benefits.
Prescod seems to have been Wages for Housework’s most practical member by far. Brown, in contrast, was an expansive, systems-level thinker who saw housework as including the effort of repairing society’s damage, mitigating the harm that racism or gentrification or environmental devastation has done. Dalla Costa, James, and Federici land somewhere between them, but none of the three ever seem to have lowered their gaze from the campaign’s lofty overall agenda to smaller proposals for which they could have fought one by one. Callaci quotes the English feminist Lynne Segal, who wrote in her 2023 memoir that Wages for Housework’s activists, when asked to consider issues less grand than or different from their own, gave responses that were “vanguardist” and “hectoring.”
As a result of this attraction to the revolutionary over the practical, the campaign alienated many women who found its aims simply implausible. Callaci interviewed Alisa del Re, a feminist operaista who, rather than joining Wages for Housework, campaigned for improved public schools and day cares—one of Wages for Housework’s many stated goals, but not one that its members seem to have actively worked toward. When Callaci asked del Re why she’d made this choice, the latter said that she was a mother, and “maybe it was not revolutionary, but I had to put the babies somewhere!”
It is this point that many of today’s pronatalist advocates seem not to get. When you have babies, you have to put them somewhere: in a home you can pay for, in a safe day care where they can learn. $5,000 per child cannot do that; a living wage for housework would. Even if the Wages for Housework campaign was too radical to make real headway toward the conditions its members wanted—too busy explaining the need for universal, free day care to help del Re get a place to “put the babies”—its members undeniably understood the gravity of mothers’ need. In Wages for Housework, Callaci argues convincingly that the campaign’s comprehension of women’s reality is important to keep in view today, when the horizons of what governments offer families are shrinking. Wages for Housework may not have been a practical movement, but a government that acted on its ideas of what wives and mothers need would be more likely to stimulate a baby boom than one offering a single check for each birth.
But Callaci thinks the campaign’s revolutionary tendency matters too. Researching the Wages for Housework campaign, she writes, awakened “something in my imagination, connecting my daily efforts to lives and labors beyond the four walls of my house.” This sense of connection makes Wages for Housework a relevant rebuttal to those who would like women to devote themselves to having and raising children. Wages for Housework’s activists, as Callaci shows, linked seemingly disparate lives and struggles, extending a fundamental empathy for anyone who is exploited or overworked and cannot live in the way they wish to. The campaign, which began with the premise that cleaning and cooking are labor at least as vital as assembling commodities on a factory line, ultimately wanted all women to have access to the lives they desired. For some women, that might mean being able to afford to have six children and stay home with them; for others, that might mean never marrying or reproducing, and devoting their lives entirely to art. I, for one, would like to live in a country where that vision has—or might yet—come to pass.
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