The previously published interview with Silvia Federici in Boston Review focuses on the wider relationship between local and international feminist movements, the politics of “Wages for Housework” and labor justice.
This interview, conducted by Jill Richards was published in December 19, 2018. In the interview Richards provides the background of the struggle starting the article with the two-day conference that took place in 1972 which resulted in the declaration for action, the “Statement of the International Feminist Collective.” The famous adopted the statement which rejects a separation between “unwaged work in the home and waged work in the factory, pronouncing housework as a critical terrain in the class struggle against capitalism.”
Please find the first section of the interview below and the full interview here.
Jill Richards: Why did your collective decide to organize separate from other activist groups that were doing related work around labor justice?
Silvia Federici: The women’s movement as a whole was autonomous because it was clear that our concerns were not important to the male-dominated left. By 1969 women were leaving left organizations, such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), because every time women asked for a discussion of their oppression they were booed and silenced. It was crucial for all women’s groups to organize separately from men; we would have never been able to develop an understanding of the specific forms of oppression women suffer in our society if we had remained in mixed organizations. By the time our collective formed in 1973, the need for feminist autonomy was well established.
By organizing autonomously, we created spaces where women could speak, hear each other, valorize one another’s experience, and realize that what we had to say was important. Autonomy made it possible for us to find our own voices. I must add that no feminist organization was concerned only with the question of labor justice.
JR: Can you talk about how Wages for Housework found its way to a place of deep interracial engagement, long before intersectionality was something people talked about, and at a time when women’s activism was mostly divided along racial lines?
SF: The politics of Wages for Housework was shaped by women who had an understanding of capitalism, imperialism, and the anti-colonial struggle. Thus we could not accept that women’s liberation could be a struggle for “equality with men” or that it could be limited to equal pay for equal work. We saw that in the same way as the racialization of black men and women had served to justify slavery, so had gender-based discrimination served to exploit women as unpaid workers in the home. This is why we supported the struggle of welfare mothers, which was led by black women—not because black women were the majority of women on welfare, which was not the case, but because black women were the most ready to struggle for their rights. They were the ones who were out in the streets saying: Welfare is not charity. Every woman is a working woman. They were saying, like us, that raising a child is socially necessary work. They were saying, Don’t tell us that we are parasites. Don’t tell us that we are dependent on the state. When the state needs soldiers, it turns to our children. When it needs people for its factories, it turns to our children.
So they understood that Wages for Housework would give women more power: in the short term, by having more money, by having more control over their lives, by not being forced to depend on a man or depend on whatever job came along because they would be so desperate for some money of their own; and in the long term, by refusing to continue to give the capitalist class an immense amount of unpaid labor, as generations of women have done. And refusing to continue to ignore that the home is a sort of factory, and that domestic work is what makes every other form of work possible, as it produces the workers.
This was never meant to be a prescription for women not to work outside the home. It meant rather that when we did leave the home, we would be able to do that with more power and not out of desperation, not because we would have to accept any job that came along, just so we could have some economic autonomy.