The Lost Manifestos on Social Reproduction: Revisiting Wages For/Against Housework

In light of the resurgence of feminist attention to social reproduction, this essay revisits the manifestos of the 1970s ‘wages for housework’ campaign, in particular Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’ ‘The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community’ (1972), Silvia Federici’s ‘Wages Against Housework’ (1975) and Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici’s ‘Counter-Planning From the Kitchen Table’ (1975). While feminist legal scholarship has been less inclined than other feminist disciplines to draw upon these 1970s manifestos, this essay argues that they offer important provocations and lines of inquiry for feminist legal scholars today. First, the essay considers how the manifestos problematize the domains of the nuclear heteropatriarchal ‘family’, and the ‘market’, what counts as ‘work’, and who gets to be a ‘worker’, including by historicizing how the domains of family and market were spatially, economically, ideologically and legally split apart. Second, it offers a reparative reading of the manifestos’ ‘housewife’ figure. Third, the essay considers the manifestos’ more radical challenge to the dominant liberal paradigm of modest incrementalist legal reform in relation to matters of care and gender equality. Most vitally, these manifestos continue to push legal feminists to more ambitiously reimagine the possibilities for revaluing and redistributing reproductive labour and what a new social reproduction bargain might look like.