The international Wages for Housework campaign began in 1972 as a feminist movement that highlighted the role of gendered labour in the home and its connection to the production of surplus value under capitalism. The movement was founded by the International Feminist Collective, which included the feminist activists Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James.

In effect, what the Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign intended to do was become a movement within global feminism, and help chart its trajectory. WfH quickly spread from its founding location in Italy to the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and beyond, and expanded to encompass autonomous movements like Lesbians for Wages for Housework and Black Women for Wages for Housework.

Although officially dissolving a few years after its founding, the legacy of WfH has been enduring, and in the last decade a return to its foundational theorisations of domestic labour and “social reproduction” has been central to much feminist theorising, including within feminist critiques of media and technology. Via Spheres Journal