Economic EmpowermentPapers

Anna Moser places Wages for Housework and the contemporary self-care industry in one political-economic history, showing how capitalism privatizes reproduction and resells individual solutions.

Gwendolyn Mikell examines how African women’s political struggles are distorted when Western feminist categories or nationalist narratives claim to represent them without attending to material survival and local institutions.

This classic Marxist feminist text reveals the truth of housework as central to capitalist relations of production. Federici argues that by naturalizing housework as women's 'labor of love,' capitalism obtains massive amounts of unpaid labor. Demanding wages for housework is not about institutionalizing this labor but about politicizing it, exposing capitalism's exploitation of women's labor.