Presented by Madison History Club.
This event will be recorded by PBS Wisconsin University Place
In the 1970s, a network of feminists across the globe came together to make a deceptively simple demand: Wages for Housework! When invoked today, the phrase commonly refers to the cash payment that was its signature demand, yet for the women of the historic Wages for Housework campaign, the wage was only a starting point for remaking the world. They asked big, ambitious questions. What would it be like to live in a society that valued and rewarded the care of human beings as much as the production and consumption of commodities? What new experiences of love, desire and pleasure would become possible if women were financially independent of men? How would geopolitics be transformed if governments recognized and compensated the unpaid work of women in the global south? And, most simply: what would women do with their lives if they had more time? In this talk, Callaci draws on extensive archival research to tell the story of this forgotten movement.
Emily Callaci is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author of the book Wages for Housework: The story of a movement, an idea, a promise.