A Room of One’s Own is thrilled to host Emily Callaci in celebration of her new release, Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, An Idea, a Promise. She will be joined in conversation with Pernille Ipsen.
This is an in-person event at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore.
About the book
Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise.
Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement.
Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?
Emily Callaci is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison and the author of Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, An Idea, a Promise, (2025). Her writing has appeared in Dissent, Boston Review and Public Books. She is editor of “History Unclassified,” an historical creative non-fiction series published in the American Historical Review.
Pernille Ipsen was a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2009 to 2025, specializing in gender, women, feminism, race, and colonialism. She is now a fulltime writer. Her newest book, My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming fall 2025) is a collective memoir of her seven mothers and their lives and politics in the women’s and lesbian movements in Copenhagen in the 1970s.
