Social Studies: Jessica Bennett The Day Care of Mom or Dad

Paying parents to stay home could help solve the child-care crisis.

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IT WAS A COOL AND MISTY Mother’s Day in 1974, and in a shady corner of Prospect Park, a group of women handed out flyers and chanted slogans: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”

“They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.” “Every miscarriage is a work accident.”

They were targeting mothers walking from the laundromat or to the grocery store, and they had a message to deliver: “All women are unwaged workers. We work from morning to night, but at the end of the week, we have no money to show for it.”

It was the early days of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, a small but mighty movement with a simple demand: Pay women for domestic work, including caring for children. Led by a group of feminist organizers—among them the Marxist philosopher Silvia Federici (then a young Ph.D. student)—the movement was radical even for the radicalism of the time. “They irritated feminists who were trying to reject housework as destiny,” says Emily Callaci, a history professor at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and the author of Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor.

A few years ago, when Callaci found herself at home with a newborn baby, she began thinking about that nascent movement and its ideas. She had cobbled together an unofficial maternity leave through accumulated sick days and eventually found, once she returned to her day job, that she was doing some sort of work-or child-related task 18 hours a day. “As a historian, I had known about this group. I had one of their posters hanging above my kitchen table,” Callaci tells me. But as a new parent, she began to feel like the movement's somewhat forgotten argument—that unpaid carework underpins the entire economy; that women, who do the brunt of it, should be compensated for their time—was perhaps more relevant than ever.