The Most Important Job In the World by Gina Rushton

Author:Gina Rushton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

It didn’t have to be this way. In the 1970s in Padua, Italy, a radical campaign refused to put the workplace over the home as the most important site of women’s liberation. Wages for Housework began drawing attention to the unpaid work women were doing – cooking, cleaning, rearing children, caring for the elderly – that kept paid workers fed and clothed. These physical, repetitive, skilled vital tasks were made visible not as acts of devotion but for what they were: labour. The movement’s pamphlet, authored by Silvia Federici, ‘Wages Against Housework’ (1975) opens: ‘They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.’ She challenged the notion that housework was an aspiration ‘coming from the depth of [their] female character’, an innately womanly desire. ‘Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work,’ it read. Nurturing is natural, housework is inevitable, mothering is purpose. On some of the pamphlets, an exhausted mother steadies herself with a broom as a flock of children tug at her skirt. In her other hand, she holds a wad of cash. The dollar sign is a tiny scribble but it makes the image feel radical even almost half a century later. The crass audacity to put a price on something you have been socialised to believe is as fulfilling as it is fated.

You only have to look at the wages of childcare workers, teachers and aged care workers to see how this lingering presumption complements a ‘do what you love’ ethos to devalue work that is traditionally gendered female. Care work in the home has been denigrated for so long that it still fails to be compensated fairly outside of it. Wages for Housework made exploitation a starting point. It was not an attempt to degrade or institutionalise love, nor an attempt to make husbands pay their housewives salaries; it was an attempt to dismantle the default inequitable organisation of the home by demanding wages. It was not discouraging women seeking work outside the home but sought to ensure they did so not out of desperation for a skerrick of financial independence but with genuine agency and autonomy. As Federici wrote, contraceptives are ‘the only true labour-saving devices’ – how else to seize the means of (re)production? ‘No one’s work will be done until the work of being a woman with no money is undone,’ the ‘Black Women for Wages for Housework Bulletin’ of Autumn 1977 reads. These campaigners warned with eerie prescience that the first site of resistance should not be the workplace but the home. Paid employment was not going to free anyone until the enormous problem of unpaid work was dealt with. Neither the family nor the firm was going to liberate women. ‘They wanted, instead, time for themselves, freedom to discover what love and sexuality might look like outside of relations of power and labour,’ Jaffe observes of Federici and her peers. Women were entering the

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