The common strategy of these early essays — which extends throughout Federici’s work — is one of accounting: by recasting all the social activities women perform as “work,” Federici economizes them to the point of logical extremity. The point isn’t actually to put a price on perfunctory marital sex, or to max out categories of value so that their utility disintegrates; it’s to illuminate how supposedly noncapitalist activities shore up the economic system that structures and controls so much of our lives. It’s a conceptual trick to trigger political and feminist consciousness — and in the 1970s, when much of what needed revolutionizing stood in plain sight, in the form of one’s most intimate relationships, this trigger seemed enough.

But even while she relies on this flip of the switch to start a movement, Federici seems to recognize early that her ideas might suffer from conceptual ambiguity. Shifting the title from wages for to wages against housework, she reiterates that the goal is not reform but revolution: “To demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do this work. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want wages for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it.” In “Counterplanning from the Kitchen,” co-authored with Nicole Cox in 1975, Federici reiterates: “We do not say that winning a wage is the revolution. We say that it is a revolutionary strategy because it undermines the role we are assigned in the capitalist division of labor and consequently it changes the power relations within the working class in terms more favorable to us and the unity of the class.”

The camera reads over her shoulder as she recites a laconic monologue:

as if Rosler no longer trusts her audience to infer ambiguous cues or take her Frankfurt School meditations for anything but soporific jargon

In the 1970s, Western women who were radicalized by feminism were women doing housework. They knew firsthand what that work was like: how strained and boring it was, what social obligations it involved, how it shored up their position in relation to men. Self-knowledge was fundamentally what made consciousness-raising — talking in a room to other women — such a powerful tool: it confirmed that your personal experience of sexism didn’t belong to you alone. It offered solidarity as well as a theoretical framework, a picture of social reality, on a scale that made the personal, as they say, political. The early work of people like Rosler and Federici — and Flo Kennedy, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Kate Millett, Valerie Solanas, and many others — allowed women, suddenly, to see their lives anew. It was like changing the lights in a room: all the furniture was the same, but, seen in a new cast, never quite the same again.

Decades later, the daughters of the predominantly white, middle-class women at the front lines of the WLM (if they had daughters) were no slaves to housework. If they valued it, they hired someone else to do it — and the people they hired were overwhelmingly women from the global south, pulled by the growing demand for domestic work in the West and pushed by structural and political forces in their home countries. This happened on such an enormous scale that an international division of labor emerged: maids, nannies, and nurses working in the US, Canada, Europe, and Saudi Arabia increasingly came from South Asia, North and East Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America, and the former Soviet countries — and still do. This was, and is, no mystery to employers, but what may seem mysterious is why these women left their countries to begin with.

As the international division of labor grows starker, the condition of the housewife is writ large, leaving the women of the “third world” to clean up the damage inflicted by the first.

Economists have known for a long time that women do a lot of work for free in times of social need. Remarkably, they have used this fact against women as part of the rationale behind massive neoliberal retrenchment: Why fund state services when you know that women will supply them for free? In the ’80s and ’90s, policy planners called this “crossing the desert,” a catchall for phenomena like maternal autostarvation (not eating and giving food to children), trekking to faraway water sources, and generally picking up the slack when state services retreat and infrastructure collapses. There’s another side to this sacrificial tendency of women, though, that doesn’t always compromise their health and well-being: during WWI, the British government discovered that income given directly to women, as opposed to men, raised the quality of life of an entire household. Later “experiments” in microfinance revealed the same. If the goal for neoliberal planners was to inflict the least damage on the tightest budget, you’d think this fact — sound enough to justify massive austerity programs — would also be sound enough to make the case for a universal income for women. In other words: wages for housework.