More Smiles, More Money? The Politics of Making Housework Visible

Louise Toupin’s Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77 arrives as both an archival excavation and a provocation, as an invitation to re-enter a field of struggle whose coordinates feel uncannily contemporary. What Toupin reconstructs is not merely a campaign organized around a contentious demand, but a political experiment that sought to recompose the very terms through which labour, value, and subjectivity are understood. In this sense, the book operates in a register that is at once historiographic and strategic: it is concerned not only with what happened, but with what remains possible. At the centre of this reconstruction lies a deceptively simple gesture: to take seriously the proposition that housework – long dismissed as natural, private, or pre-political – is in fact “multi-faceted, invisible, and unrecognized labour” that is indispensable to capitalist accumulation. From this starting point, the Wages for Housework current unfolds less as a single-issue campaign than as a conceptual prism. As Toupin emphasizes, unpaid domestic labour becomes a way of seeing, a method for “reassembling” the fragmented experiences of women into a coherent analysis of power. The home is no longer outside the economy; it is one of its hidden engines.

What is striking, reading Toupin today, is how radical this reframing remains. In a moment when the language of care has been partially recuperated into policy discourse and managerial common sense, the insistence that reproductive labour is not simply undervalued but structurally necessary – and systematically devalued – retains a disruptive force. The demand for wages, in this context, is not reducible to a reformist claim for remuneration. Rather, it functions as a political lever, a way of denaturalizing the gendered division of labour and exposing the social relations that sustain it. As Mariarosa Dalla Costa famously argued, the wage is a point of visibility, a means of forcing into recognition what capital depends upon but refuses to acknowledge. Toupin is particularly attentive to the intellectual heterogeneity that animated this perspective. The Wages for Housework current did not emerge in a vacuum; it was forged through a series of encounters and tensions between different strands of feminist and Marxist thought. Figures such as Selma James and Silvia Federici reworked Marxist categories in ways that unsettled orthodox assumptions about production and class. Against a tradition that located value primarily in waged labour, they insisted on the centrality of reproduction – the daily and generational work of producing labour power itself. In doing so, they did not simply extend Marxism; they transformed it, introducing what Toupin describes as a “happy linkage” between anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal analysis.

This linkage is perhaps most clearly articulated through the concept of the social factory, which Toupin traces across a range of texts and practices. Although the term itself is often associated with Italian operaismo, its deployment within Wages for Housework is less doctrinal than experiential. The factory is no longer confined to the workplace; it extends into the home, the school, the hospital, the community. Women’s labour in families becomes the fulcrum that enables the entire system to function. This expansion of the analytic frame is not merely theoretical. It has practical implications for how struggle is organized: if exploitation is dispersed across the social field, then resistance must be as well. Here, Toupin’s attention to the movement’s organizational forms is particularly valuable. The International Feminist Collective emerges as a network rather than a centralized structure, linking groups across Europe and North America while allowing for local variation. The repertoire of action is correspondingly diverse: storefront organizing, conferences, pamphlets, songs, occupations, and direct interventions in communities. What becomes visible is a movement that is both intellectually sophisticated and materially grounded, capable of moving between theoretical elaboration and everyday struggle.

Toupin does not shy away from the internal tensions and external criticisms that shaped the trajectory of Wages for Housework. Indeed, one of the book’s strengths is its careful reconstruction of the debates that surrounded the demand for wages. For many within the broader women’s movement, the proposal appeared as a step backward, a capitulation to the very structures it sought to contest. To demand wages for housework, critics argued, risked reinforcing women’s confinement to the home, rather than challenging the gendered division of labour. The preferred alternative, in many cases, was the socialization of domestic work: the expansion of public services that would relieve women of their unpaid burdens. Toupin’s treatment of this debate is nuanced and generous. She shows that the disagreement was not simply a matter of misunderstanding, but reflected different strategic orientations within feminism. Where Wages for Housework emphasized the impossibility of fully socializing reproductive labour – given its affective and relational dimensions – other currents prioritized integration into waged work and the transformation of public institutions. What emerges is a picture of a movement grappling with the limits of its own categories, attempting to articulate a politics adequate to the complexity of women’s lives.

If anything, the book suggests that the controversy around wages for housework was precisely what made it so productive. The demand functioned as a kind of conceptual irritant, forcing feminists to confront questions that could not easily be resolved. What counts as work? Where does exploitation take place? How are gender, class, and race intertwined in the organization of labour? These are not questions that admit of simple answers, and Toupin resists the temptation to impose retrospective coherence on a movement that was, by her own account, internally diverse and often contradictory. This diversity is particularly evident in the movement’s engagement with questions of sexuality and race. Toupin highlights the role of groups such as Wages Due Lesbians, which insisted on the specificity of lesbian experience within the broader framework of reproductive labour. Here, the analysis extends beyond the division of labour in the narrow sense to encompass the regulation of sexuality as a form of discipline. Heterosexuality itself becomes a working condition, a mechanism through which women’s labour is organized and controlled. Similarly, the contributions of Black feminists such as Wilmette Brown foreground the racialized dimensions of housework, emphasizing the different ways in which exploitation is experienced and resisted.

In this respect, Toupin’s account can be read as an early articulation of what would later be theorized as intersectionality. The Wages for Housework perspective does not simply add race and sexuality to a pre-existing analysis of gender and class; it reconfigures the entire framework, highlighting the interdependence of different forms of domination. The result is a politics that is both more complex and more demanding, requiring forms of solidarity that can accommodate difference without erasing it. Yet for all its conceptual richness, the movement ultimately failed to achieve widespread adoption within the women’s movement. As Toupin notes, while many groups engaged with the analysis, few were willing to mobilize around the demand for wages. The reasons for this reluctance are multiple, but they converge on a common concern: the fear that the demand would entrench rather than dismantle existing hierarchies. In retrospect, this moment appears as a turning point, marking the end of a particular phase of second-wave feminism and the emergence of new priorities and strategies.

What is perhaps most striking, however, is Toupin’s observation that the issue of wages for housework has largely disappeared from contemporary debates. Despite the intensity of the discussions it once provoked, it has left “barely a trace” in the present. This absence is not simply a matter of historical forgetting; it reflects a broader shift in the terrain of feminist politics, away from questions of social reproduction and toward other concerns. And yet, as Toupin suggests, the conditions that gave rise to the Wages for Housework movement have not disappeared. If anything, they have intensified, as the global restructuring of labour has expanded the sphere of unpaid and precarious work. In this context, the book’s insistence on the continued relevance of the Wages for Housework perspective feels less like a nostalgic gesture than a necessary intervention. The globalization of care work, the persistence of gendered inequalities in both paid and unpaid labour, the erosion of social welfare systems – all of these developments point to the enduring centrality of reproduction in the organization of capitalism. To revisit the analyses developed in the 1970s is not to return to a bygone era, but to recover tools that may still be useful for understanding the present.

If there is a limitation to Toupin’s approach, it lies in the inevitable constraints of the historical genre. As she herself acknowledges, this is a “historical sketch,” shaped by the available sources and the interpretive frameworks through which they are read. At times, the narrative risks stabilizing what was in practice a fluid and contested movement, smoothing over the very tensions that made it dynamic. The absence of a more sustained engagement with the intellectual genealogy of key concepts – such as the relationship between the social factory and its origins in operaismo – also leaves certain questions underexplored. And yet, these limitations are not simply shortcomings; they are part of what makes the book productive. By foregrounding the partial and provisional nature of its own account, Wages for Housework invites readers to continue the work it begins. It does not offer a definitive history, but a set of entry points – a map of a terrain that remains open to further exploration.

What lingers, after reading Toupin, is a sense of the unfinished. The Wages for Housework movement did not resolve the questions it posed; it amplified them. It revealed the extent to which capitalism depends on forms of labour that it simultaneously obscures, and it challenged feminists to develop strategies capable of addressing this contradiction. That these challenges remain with us is perhaps the strongest argument for the book’s relevance. To read Wages for Housework today is to be reminded that the boundaries of the political are neither fixed nor given. They are the product of struggle, of attempts to name and contest the forms of power that shape our lives. In recovering the history of a movement that sought to expand those boundaries, Toupin offers not only a valuable contribution to feminist historiography, but a resource for thinking – and acting – otherwise.