YouSaid · the spoken record

Emily Callaci

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19

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2025-03-30

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2025-03-30

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1. “Yeah, yeah, and it was so provocative. I mean, it's still provocative, you know, but I think, you know, what made it so provocative is this is a moment, you know, when so many women are basically like what they're trying to fight against is the expectation that they identify with housework, right? They're trying to separate that link and say, we're not going to be housewives. Exactly. And so to say, actually, no, we have to do the opposite. We need to double down and recognize that work, regardless of whether we have been able to escape some forms of it through professional success or through class mobility, we need to identify with this labor that is still expected of us and that is expected disproportionately among working class and poor women and women of color as a way to undermine that system, undermine those expectations and demand that we actually are recognized, that we can actually have a world where we have more power and more authority and more of the world.”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “I think that's, but what I tried to do is give voice to it and put it there in the book and to take these women at their word about what they experienced and to elevate that as part of the history. I mean, I think it's really critical.”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Lay out that part of the history, right? And put forward that testimony as part of the book, your question about whether that goes far enough, you know, is, it's a good one. And I think it's something that I struggled with is figuring out how to adjudicate that as an historian, how to go into archives and actually do more than, you know, And put it into my book.”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Could not actually organize with black women, did not know how to take leadership from black women. And that was her experience. That's what led her and Margaret Prescott. They initially joined the New York Wages for Housework Committee, and I think it would have been 1975 or 76. And they very quickly formed their own organization separate called Black Women for Wages for Housework. Particularly drawing in this idea of autonomy rather than separatism, right? The idea that we want to be part of this bigger movement because we want to recognize what we share in common as unwaged workers of the world, right? But we also need a space where our particular experiences as black women facing racism and racial capitalism and the particular ways that racism shapes this experience of unpaid work. We need our own kind of space to articulate that. So that was where black women for wages for housework was formed and it really drew on the struggles of welfare mothers in the US who had, you know,”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Yeah. So, as you mentioned, this is something that I hadn't realized the tensions and the pain when I first started researching this. And then I started interviewing people and seeing just how painful people found that split on all sides of it, right? As you mentioned, one of the big issues had to do with race. And it's only in recent years that Selma, James, and Margaret Prescott have said on the record, that was the reason for the split in the movement. And Margaret Prescott talks about personally experiencing racism from members of the Italian and New York committee. And then, you know, the way Moulin Moulin Brown described it, you know, earlier in the 1980s was she didn't talk about it in personal terms. She talked about it in terms of she just described it as a kind of a social worker kind of relationship, right? She said all these well-meaning people who have anti-racist politics in theory, in practice, you know,”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Interview the housewives and working class women in her neighborhood about their lives. And really, you know, she really, for her, the thing that the labor movement was missing was the potential of all these women who were working class, even if they weren't working in the factory. They were certainly part of capitalism, she could see. They could certainly doing work for the capitalist system. So she from very early on was saying, we have to organize these people. You are missing out as a movement if you are not understanding that all this potential and all this political consciousness is here. So that when feminism kind of explodes in 1970, she's like ready to go. She's been thinking about this for decades already, right? And for her, this moment was, you know, not something that was a totally radical departure from what she'd been doing. But for her, that was an extension of the class struggle, you know, recognizing women and their work and their unpaid work as part of class struggle. That's right.”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Such a fascinating person. She was about a decade older than the others in the movement. She had been around in like the 1930s. So she was born in 1930 in Brooklyn at a time when people are mobilizing for the Spanish Civil War. Her parents were fellow travelers of the American Communist Party. She herself, when she was 13, joined the Socialist Workers' Party. So she grew up in that real kind of class politics, you know. And particularly, you know, she's always very attentive to women in that struggle. Of course, there's the male worker, but there's the women in her neighborhood who are organizing tenant strikes, you know, and who were demanding their benefits. So when she went on to marry CLR James, the great Trinidadian Marxist anti-colonial thinker. And she organized together with him and his movement. And she was always very attentive to women like herself. She herself was a factory worker. She was a mother, and she would go around and...”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Differently, right? I mean, one of the questions she asks is Can we really talk about emotional satisfaction and sexual pleasure? How can we even really know ourselves if we are financially dependent on the person we're sleeping with? Like how can you actually have that kind of self-knowledge and exploration and really figure out what it means to live an emotionally fulfilling life and to have relationships with each other if you're not financially autonomous, if you are pushed together by these directors of capitalism to live in a nuclear family with your heteronormative roles, to discipline children so that they can become good capitalists? So really kind of wages for housework and exposing this is about changing the economic system. It's about totally upending the kind of hierarchies that structure our world. It's also about emotion liberation and discovering how we might”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Sex. And for her, you know, that's a kind of emotional blackmail, right? That is why it is undervalued. That is how we are convinced to do this for free. That's how we impoverished by this. Recognizing this kind of emotional manipulation that's happening with that, by calling it work, by recognizing it as work, rather than seeing it as something we simply do out of love, we are actually exposing that system. We are putting it out in the open, you know, like for her, it's like the others in the movement. It's about. exposing how capitalism actually works as a way of ending that system or of challenging that system of finding a new way to do things. And for her, I think one of the things that you really see in her work is also a huge amount of imagination about how we might live differently, how we might feel differently, how we might relate to each other.”

   2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “So, I Yeah, so Sophia Federici, you know, she was a, um, well, she grew up in Italy kind of after, you know, in the aftermath of World War II and Mussolini. And she really, as someone as a brilliant, sort of tomboy-ish young woman really chafed against those gender roles and basically the expectation that she would grow up and become a housewife. And so she really fled that. And she came to the US and became a philosophy student. And when she joined Wages for Housework, she just wrote some of the most beautiful insights about the emotional aspects of this. Her famous kind of manifesto wages against housework starts with the really memorable phrase. They call it love, we call it unpaid work. And that really gets at how we are conditioned as women to think this is our natural destiny, to think that we are naturally destined to do this work, that we find it rewarding, that it is somehow inherent to our”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Absolutely, yeah. I was just thinking again about Margaret Prescott because, you know, just the backdrop a little about her, you know, she was born in Barbados and she grew up in this community that had produced so much of the wealth of the slave trade, you know. And growing up in a relatively poor community, she watched so many women in her community travel abroad to London, to Amsterdam, to New York, to work as domestic workers, to do low-paid care work in homes. So for her as a child, that was clearly an extraction of labor, an extraction of resources from her community. Those women were not there, you know, someone else had to step in and care for their own families, right? And then when she gets to London and New York, when she migrates as a teenager, she encounters this anti-immigrant rhetoric that basically says immigrants are freeloaders. They're coming here and using our social services and getting these handouts. When for her it was totally clear that it was the other way around, right? That their labor was being extracted, you know? Yes. I think that puts a different interesting and powerful.”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Getting rid of things we can't afford. And the way that wages for housework reframed that was to say, so much of this work that you're, or so much, these programs that you're cutting, this is essential work. You're cutting health care, you're cutting childcare, you're cutting care for the community, right? When you cut that, that work doesn't go away. It's just performed for free by people. So basically you're taking essential work that is compensated and recognizing, and you're making it uncompensated, you're extracting that from people. It's coerced labor.”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “No, I found that that's so interesting. I found the ways that wages for housework movement talked about austerity for me was just it totally framed it in a new light because I think that we often think about austerity or it's presented to us anyway as a kind of fiscal responsibility and tightening the belts.”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “Is the kind of global reach? So some of their people who join this movement in the Global South, for example, Andai, the great feminist from Guyana, talked about living with the effects of climate change, right? When you have massive flooding, for example, who is it that's going to rebuild that infrastructure? Who's going to care for the sick when the hospitals kind of collapse? That work of coping with climate change and adjusting to it is disproportionately borne by people who are not paid to do that work. So I found that really, really eye-opening.”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “About in the places where you have radiation, where people are exposed to radiation either in the form of nuclear weapons, but also in the form of these factories and disposal of waste products, right? What kinds of care work are invisible and being expected of people in the wake of that? And you can also talk about, for example, asthma rates in cities that are polluted, right? And how that's disproportionately experienced by poor people and by people of color. And of course that adds incredible burdens to people who are doing care work. Again, work that's unpaid unrecognized, not considered part of the cost of this, not considered part of the economy. So that was just so eye-opening for me to think about housework in that expansive way as not just the work that delivers profit for capitalism, but also the work of surviving capitalism and makes it for its arms. And just as one final note on that, I really, one of the things I really loved about studying this movement.”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “And so, as you mentioned, Willette Brown is kind of the person who really kind of makes this connection with environmental racism. She grew up in a place along the kind of Pasaic River where there are all these petrochemical factories. That's also a theme in the work of Maria Rosa della Costa, who was working and organizing as Italy was undergoing its major industrial kind of shift in the 1970s, 60s and 70s. But just thinking about how living with the effects of environmental degradation is another form of unpaid work. So will that brown, for example, was doing this work at, you know, in the 80s, after Chernobyl and thinking about the effects, for example, of the movement against nuclear weapons, right? And they talked about nuclear housework, right? What kinds of, you know, when you calculate the cofter effects of this kind of form of energy and the kind of pollution of it, they were arguing you have to factor in, for example, the high rates of illness that come”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Absolutely, yeah. And I think that that's part of why I was so drawn to this topic. I mean, you know, one of the first motivations for me was my own personal life and becoming a parent. But as I kind of started looking into this movement and looking at it, it's kind of like you get x-ray glasses and you can suddenly see this work everywhere, not just in the kind of nuclear family home, which might be the first thing you think of when you hear wages for housework, right? You think of housework in the home. But just how much work is going on everywhere to make society safe, you know, to cope with climate change, to cope with violence, to cope with racism that many children face when they go to school. So I think one of the moments when I kind of thought that this topic”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Course, I'm talking about, as you mentioned, housework, the work of caring for children, of caring for the sick and the elderly, of maintaining households, of feeding people, right? You know, without this work, the entire global economy would grind to a halt. And yet those who do this work are not recognized for it. They're not compensated for it. In fact, often the fact that they do that work actually impoverishes them. So by demanding wages for housework, by demanding recognition and compensation for this work, they were after a lot more than just a paycheck. They were really trying to challenge that entire global system that relies on the extraction of that unpaid work. So they're really kind of trying to imagine a totally different way that we might live together as a society.”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “So, maybe just to briefly start, it might make sense to talk about the moment in the 1970s, where you have feminists all over the world are coming together and talking about the situation of women. And one of the kind of core elements of the mainstream feminist movement was to talk about women's rights, legal rights, the right for equal pay for equal, the right to abortion and contraception. All these really critically important things. And yet some of the women in wages for housework, their insight was that while all these discussions about women's rights are really important and all appropriate and well and good, they didn't go far enough in addressing one of the key factors inequality, which is the fact that we live in a global economic system that relies on just hours and hours and hours of work that is not counted as part of the economy. That is not compensated in any way.”

    2025-03-30 · Intelligence Squared · Revisiting Wages for Housework, with Emily Callaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT