Compilation of documents and texts from The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977 and from other branches of the Wages for Housework movement.

A history of the feminist movement that changed how we see women's work forever

The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.

Annotation This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labour in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States.

The Problem with Work develops a Marxist feminist critique of the structures and ethics of work, as well as a perspective for imagining a life no longer subordinated to them.

At a time when we are witnessing a worldwide expansion of capitalist relations, a feminist rethinking of Marx’s work is vitally important. In Patriarchy of the Wage, Silvia Federici, bestselling author and the most important Marxist feminist of our era, asks why Marx's crucial analysis of the exploitation of human labor was blind to women’s work and struggle on the terrain of social reproduction. Why was Marx unable to anticipate the profound transformations in the proletarian family that took place at the turn of the nineteenth century creating a new patriarchal regime? Patriarchy of the Wage does more than just redefine classical Marxism. It is an urgent call for a new kind of radical politics.

Cultural Writing. Essays. This collection of essays was first published in 1980. THE POLITICS OF HOUSEWORK aimed to make questions involved in the domestic labor debate accessible to a wider audience, and to disentangle some of the contradictory ideas about where women's unpaid work in the home and for their families fitted into women's oppression and their marginalization in the world outside the home. In this new edition, Ellen Malos re-establishes the importance of the housework issue in contemporary society and broadens the debate to include its growing international dimension. However, the aim remains to rejoin the argument to its roots in people's lives, and to answer the question: what can we do about it?