by Margaret Little, Lynne Marks, and Sarah Nickel
In exploring Indigenous, racialized, immigrant/ethnic, and low-income women’s activism in Canada from the 1960s to the 1980s, we have learned a great deal more about the fascinating role that Wages for Housework (WFH) has played in this activism. An international organization with chapters in various Canadian cities, WFH advocated a politics of valuing and providing state support for unpaid domestic/caring work.
As part of our 5-year SSHRC-supported Alternative Visions project, we have examined archival sources, including those in the Rise Up Feminist Digital Archive, and conducted oral history interviews to explore how WFH activists worked alongside some Indigenous, racialized, immigrant/ethnic, and low-income women in Canada.
Wages for Housework emerged in Europe when Marxist feminists critiqued the failure of traditional Marxism to recognize the value of women’s unpaid household labour. The leaders of the international movement were Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and Selma James. Our interviews with WFH activists based in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Montréal as well as interviews with international WFH activists who visited Canadian locales reveal that Selma James was clearly the mentor for most of the WFH activists based in Canada.
An undated poster from Wages for Housework
advertising a talk with Selma James, the founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, in Toronto.
One of the reasons we are so interested in WFH activism is because of the important alliances WFH activists forged with immigrant, low-income, and Indigenous women activists. Below, we share some of the strategic and dynamic WFH politics that we discovered for Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montréal, and Halifax.
Vancouver – Ellen Woodsworth had been very active in WFH Toronto, including with Cora: The Woman’s Liberation Bookmobile. She maintained her WFH politics in several important alliances she developed in Vancouver. They included a longstanding connection with the India Mahila Association (IMA), a vibrant organization of South Asian immigrant women. A collection of IMA documents are in the Rise Up archive, including those related to its anti-violence work.
Woodsworth also brought her WFH politics to her organizing efforts with other immigrant women’s groups and with welfare rights women’s groups. The alliances and links to WFH politics were most visible in the Mother’s Day events held in East Vancouver in the early 1980s. Co-organized by Woodsworth, these events raised concerns about racism, homophobia, and the exploitation of women’s unpaid and underpaid caring work.
Winnipeg – WFH was central to the creation of the Women’s Building in Winnipeg in 1978, which provided a low-cost meeting space for many women’s groups, including WFH, Wages Due Lesbians, and other lesbian groups and services, as well as low-income, welfare rights, and Indigenous women’s groups. We are still exploring the nature of the relationship between WFH and the other groups that met in the Women’s Building.
Toronto – Toronto Wages for Housework – All Women Are Houseworkers is another focus of our research. An international WFH conference held in Toronto in 1975 sparked a flurry of WFH activism in the city, including a hands off the family allowance campaign.
In 1979, Judith Ramirez, a key leader of WFH Toronto, interviewed here as part of Rise Up’s oral history project (Women Unite), co-founded INTERCEDE , an organization that supported and lobbied for policy reforms to improve the working conditions and lives of immigrant domestic workers. INTERCEDE organizers Martha Ocampo, Cenen Bagon, Anita Fortuno, and Genie Policarpio were interviewed here for Women Unite. Ramirez was also part of the WFH alliance work with Mother Led Union (est. 1974), a group of low-income mothers who demanded that the state support low-income mothers who focus their energies on mothering.
A 1990 photograph by Amy Gottlieb of the INTERCEDE contingent at the Toronto International Women’s Day March.
Deborah Sharpe, one of the co-founders of Low Income Families Together, another anti-poverty group, was also a WFH member. Wages Due Lesbians (WDL), a chapter of WFH, was an important Toronto-based activist group. WDL activists worked closely with WFH women on anti-poverty campaigns. They shed light on the situation of lesbian moms, who faced difficulties in keeping their children, acquiring access to child support, and dealing with the other challenges and experiences of poverty. They were also involved in international campaigns led by lesbian women who fought for the custody of their children.
Rise Up includes many important WDL documents, including a crucial interview conducted by Rachel Epstein with the late WDL leader Francie Wyland who went on to found the Lesbian Mothers Defence Fund.
The cover of a 1977 pamphlet written by Francie Wyland on the struggle for child custody for lesbian women. Published by Wages Due Lesbians Toronto and Falling Wall Press.
WFH in Toronto also allied with sex workers. Ramirez went on a speaking tour in the US with Margo St. James, founder of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). For International Women’s Day in 1978, WFH Toronto organized a visit by Black Women for WFH from the US which included public talks by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown (author of the speech “Money for Prostitutes is Money for Black Women”).
WFH had a strong cultural politics, one that included media and music. Boo Watson, a member of Wages Due Lesbians Toronto, was a musician who created a number of WFH songs. She also went on a WFH tour of locales in Canada and the United States. To this day, former WFH members can still sing all the words to Watson’s WFH anthem.
An excerpt from The Wages Due Song, included in an undated manifesto.
Montréal – Montréal had a small but active group of WFH activists. Anna Thompson (female, anglophone) and Benoit Martin (male, francophone) were key members of the Montréal WFH. They organized an international WFH conference in 1975. And in 1990, they organized a speaking tour in Canada for Selma James. Years earlier, in 1973, James had been the keynote speaker at The Feminist Symposium in Montréal, where she spoke on “Revolutionary Feminism and the Kitchen.”
Photo taken at the 1973 Feminist Symposium Féministe in Montréal. Anne Cools (right), an organizer of the symposium, chaired the opening night session where Selma James (left) spoke about “Revolutionary Feminism and the Kitchen.”
Halifax – In the 1970s, Halifax held an international WFH conference that focussed on sex worker issues, and invited Nina Lopez of English Collective of Prostitutes, and WFH UK, to speak.
Wages For Housework carried out a remarkable degree of allyship activism across Canada but also experienced a serious schism with the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC). To learn more about the purge of WFH members from NAC in 1979, please see “Researching Alternative Visions: A project on Indigenous, racialized, immigrant, and low-income women’s activism in Canada, 1960s-1980s”.
In 1979, the NAC Executive, which included prominent socialist and liberal feminists, declared a purge of WFH members and their allies on the grounds that WFH’s call to provide pay for unpaid domestic work ran counter to NAC’s feminist politics of the time. As a result, any organization that was in any way affiliated with WFH could neither be members of NAC nor attend their 1979 annual conference.
This created a public outcry, prompting a number of national news stories. There was also a letter writing campaign in which many non-WFH feminists recognized the positive work of WFH members. In response, NAC compromised by permitting WFH members and their allies to attend the keynote speech being delivered at their 1979 conference. The subject was women and poverty. NAC continued to ban WFH members and allies after the 1979 event, and former and current WFH activists interviewed said they continue to feel a certain chill from prominent Canadian socialist and liberal feminists.
WFH changed its name to Global Women’s Strike in 2000. It continues to be an international activist organization with numerous chapters, including ones in Peru, India, Myanmar, the U.K., and the U.S.
The article above is the third installment in a series of articles written by the Alternative Visions research team. Alternative Visions is a 5-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project to explore Indigenous, racialized, immigrant/ethnic, and low-income women’s activism through archival sources and oral history interviews. The subject of this article is Wages for Housework and related political organizing.
Margaret Little is an anti-poverty activist and academic who works in the areas of single mothers on welfare, neo-liberal welfare reform, and retraining for women on welfare. She is jointly appointed as a Professor of Gender Studies and Political Studies at Queen’s University.
Lynne Marks is a Professor of History at the University of Victoria. She teaches Canadian history, and women’s and gender history, as well as the social history of religion. She is the author of Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia (UBC Press, 2017).
Sarah Nickel is Tk’emlupsemc (Kamloops Secwépemc), French Canadian, and Ukrainian. She is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. Her research examines twentieth-century Indigenous politics through community-engaged oral history and archival methods, with a particular focus on the gendered nature of activism and resistance.