money of our own that creates the battered wife
or the closet lesbian and forces so many of us to
remain in unwanted family situations. With
money in our hands, we would have the power
to walk out whenever we wanted. Men would
certainly think twice before raising their hands
to us if they knew that we could leave any
minute, without the prospect of starving.

Our wageless condition in the home is the
material basis of our dependence on men. This
weakness in the community, as wageless house-
workers, is ultimately the weakness of the entire
class. Capitalism takes away from us in the
community (through inflation—price hikes,
rent increases, fare increases, etc.) what we
have gained through our power in the factory.
Women pay a double price for this defeat.
Higher prices mean an intensification of our
work, since we are expected to absorb the cost
of inflation with extra work.

The struggle for wages for housework is a
struggle for social power—for women first, but
ultimately for the entire working class. In fact,
by demanding wages for the work we already
do, instead of demanding more work, we are
posing the question of the immediate reappro-
priation of the wealth we have produced. Ex-
ploitation is the enforcement of unpaid labor,
the only source of capitalist profits. Thus, to
attack our wagelessness is to attack capitalism
at its roots, for capital is precisely the accumu-
lated labor that has been robbed from workers
generation after generation.

In contrast, the strategy that has been offered
to us by “feminists” and the left—the strategy to
obtain more work—would only mean further
enslavement to the present system. It is capital
that poses work as the only natural destiny in
our lives, not the working class, whose struggles
are always directed toward gaining more money
and less work. To pose the “right to work” as our
road to liberation ignores that we are already
working, and that housework does not wither
away when we go out for a paid job. Our work
at home simply intensifies: we do it at night
when everybody is already asleep, or in the
morning before everyone awakes, or on week-
ends. Our wages remain low—and they quickly
disappear in paying for day-care centers,
lunches, carfare, etc. Furthermore, with two
jobs we have even less time to organize with
other women. Unions have long accused wom-
en of being backward. But when did unions
consider that we are not free to attend meetings
after our second job is over because we must
hurry to report back to our first one—picking up
the kids at the day-care center or babysitter’s,
getting to the supermarket before it closes, fix-
ing dinner for the men who expect it to be ready
when they come home from work?

Another illusion is that to go “out to work” is
to break our isolation and gain the possibility of
asocial life. Very often the isolation of a typing
pool or a secretarial office matches our isola-

tion in the home. We certainly aspire to a social
life better than the one provided by an assembly
line. But going out of the home is not much of a
relief if we don’t have any money in our hands,
or if we go out just for more work.

We also reject the idea that sharing our ex-
ploitation in the home with a man can be a
strategy for liberation. “Sharing the housework”
is not an invention of the Women’s Movement.
Women have continuously tried to get men to
share this work. Despite some victories, we
have discovered that this battle also has many
limitations. First, the man is not home most of
the time. If he brings in the money, and we are
economically dependent on him, we don’t have
the power to force him to do housework. In fact
it is often more work for us to get the man to
share the work than do it ourselves. Most im-
portantly, this strategy confines us to an in-
dividual struggle which does not give us the
power (or the protection) of a mass struggle.
And it assumes that every woman has (or wants)
a man with whom to share the work.

As for a possible rationalization of house-
work, we must immediately say that we are not
interested in making our work more efficient or
more productive for capital. We are interested
in reducing our work, and ultimately refusing it
altogether. But as long as we work in the home
for nothing, no one really cares how long or
how hard we work. For capital only introduces
advanced technology to cut its costs of produc-
tion after wage gains by the working class. Only
if we make our work cost (i.e., only if we make
it uneconomical) will capital “discover” the
technology to reduce it. At present, we often
have to go out for a second shift of work to
afford the dishwasher that should cut down our
housework!

Who will pay for this work?

We demand wages for housework from the
government for two major reasons. First, every
sector of the economy benefits from our work —
we don’t work for one boss, we work for all the
bosses. Consequently we demand the money
from the state. Second, the government already
is our boss. In every country the government is
responsible for guaranteeing an adequate labor
force to industry. This means that the govern-
ment directly regulates and controls our work
through the family, world population control,
immigration laws, and finally by entering the
community whenever we refuse to perform our
work.

The question “who will pay?” is usually posed
so as to subvert the cause. It is assumed that the
government is broke, and that our demand will
only divide the working class by forcing the
government to tax other workers to pay us a
wage. In reality, by getting more power for our-
selves, we will be giving more power not only to
men (power not over us but with respect to their
bosses) but to every sector (the young, the
elderly, and the wageless in general). We will

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