Wages for Housework by Toupin Louise

Author:Toupin, Louise [Toupin, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of British Columbia Press

LOHN FÜR HAUSARBEIT IN BERLIN13

In Germany, several groups and individuals advocated for and promoted wages for housework, notably in Munich (around Gisela Erler), Bremen (around Ute Brockhaus), Bielefeld (Claudia von Werlhof and Maria Mies), Göttingen (Hannelore Schröder), and Hamburg. However, these groups remained at a greater distance from the IFC than did the group in West Berlin and had a shorter lifespan.14

Circumstances of Formation

The Wages for Housework group in Berlin was created in 1975. The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community had been translated into German in 1973, and various Italian, English, and French texts by IFC groups, including the IFC’s founding manifesto, were published in German the following year.15

Gisela Bock was behind the creation of the Berlin group. She had met Mariarosa Dalla Costa and the activists of Lotta Femminista in 1972 during one of her stays in Italy. She had also met Selma James and some of the activists in the London Power of Women group when they visited Germany to give talks around the same time. Then, during a one-year stay at Harvard University (where she was researching American worker and feminist movements) in 1974–75, she met Silvia Federici and American and Canadian activists (including Judy Ramirez) of the Wages for Housework groups.

The Berlin group, which was formed when Bock returned from the United States, had about twenty members. Several were active at the same time in lesbian groups, or with “prostitutes,” or with Afro-German or Berlin Turkish women, or in the healthcare sector, or in the scholarly environment of feminist studies.16 So, these women who lived in Berlin, some of whom were not German, who joined Lohn für Hausarbeit had diverse interests that they grafted to the Wages for Housework campaign in an attempt to integrate the multiple dimensions of the situation of women and of feminism.

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