In this first-ever international history of the influential feminist movement Wages for Housework, Louise Toupin draws on extensive archival research and interviews with the movement’s founders and activists from Italy, England, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Canada. Featuring previously unpublished conversations with Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the book highlights the power and originality of the movement, detailing its theoretical and organizational innovations around the unrecognized labour performed by women.

Challenging both classic Marxist theory and the mainstream women’s movement, Wages for Housework organized in the 1970s around the idea that domestic or “reproductive” labour is as crucial for the survival of the capitalist system as more typically male “productive” labour. Its activists demanded the wage as a way of ensuring that housework’s value be recognized, an idea still hotly debated today.

Wages for Housework is a major contribution to the history of feminist and anti-capitalist movements and a provocative intervention into contemporary conversations about the changing nature of work and the gendered labour market.

Louise Toupin lives in Montréal, Québec. She has taught political science at Université du Québec à Montréal. She was a member of the Québec Women’s Liberation Front (1969-71) and co-authored numerous anthologies of activist and feminist writings. She is notably the author of Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-77 (Remue-ménage 2014). The book has been translated into English (UBC/Pluto Press, 2018), Spanish (Tiempo Robado, 2022), German (Unrast, 2022), Italian (Ombre Corte, 2023), and Korean, (Nanjang, 2024).

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Kathe Roth was born in Montréal and now lives in Saint-Lazare, Québec. She has been a literary translator and editor for more than twenty-five years. Her work includes over thirty translated books and essays of literary non-fiction on various subjects, including art, architecture, economics, history, and sociology, as well as fiction. She was a finalist for the Governor General Award for literary translation in 1993 for “The Last Cod Fish” by Pol Chantraine. She is a member of the Literary Translators Association of Canada.

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Drawing on feminism, Marxism, and capitalism, Wages for Housework is rooted in academia, but Toupin’s crisp and confident writing make the book accessible to all readers with an interest in gender studies and labour history in Canada and beyond. A huge undertaking and achievement, Wages for Housework is much-needed documentation of a movement that is largely unknown.

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