What if work was never our liberator? Even the suggestion is confronting to a generation of women – mine – raised in the Girl Power 1990s to be the Girl Bosses of the 2010s. But lately, we've been forced to contend with the possibility.
I know two kinds of Millennial women: those who've already checked out of their corporate careers (Hi, it me, and we're broke) and those who, exhausted and disillusioned but still financially constrained, only dream to.
Squeezed by inflation, terrified of returning to a putrid job market and paralysed by the threat of AI sending us there anyway, we spend our few free hours bedrotting and passing around articles with titles like "Do All Jobs Suck Right Now?" and "Stop Fixing the System" (both great reads by the way, strong recommend). We've long lost faith in employers who called us family and promised we'd change the world, only to turn around and lay off all our friends while signing contracts with ICE.
What's a Millennial woman to do? For a while, the default exit was to turn your burnout into a coaching career and get paid to manage other women's burnout. That's starting to feel a bit like a pyramid scheme. What else? Woodworking with a Youtube channel? A smallholder farm with a Youtube channel? I know! A cat rescue with a Youtube channel! But there's only so many of us the Creator Economy will absorb – someone's gotta make real money to buy those memberships that sustain us.
Our more lefty friends laugh because they knew all along. In the 1970s, radical feminism was not interested in leaning in. The Wages for Housework movement demanded pay for cooking, cleaning, and child care – not because they believed women belonged in the kitchen, but because they were under no illusion that that invisible labor would ever be evenly shared or that adding a 9-to-5 to it would ever be sustainable. We're stuck doing this, they said, we might as well get paid for it and have some financial independence. The rest of our time should be for us, not for a boss. You can see how they had a point.
You know what else is unwaged labour? Giving away free content on the Internet. I'm making a bet here, that enough of you will appreciate this painstaking work and want to contribute so it can continue. Membership is great, but if you fear commitment, you can now also make a one-time donation. Thank you for your support!
I am struck by the similarity with a 2026 trend, unearthed by Bloomberg's Irina Anghel, of young women eschewing traditional careers and monetising their housework on social media. They don't have the Christian conservative baggage of "trad wives" but a very matter-of-fact, realism about them. They call themselves breadmakers.
Wages for Housework based its demands on three insights:
- "All work is sh*t", as we've seen. Intellectually fulfilling work that pays is a rare privilege. The jobs most of humanity does suck. Women don't need jobs; they need pay and time for themselves.
- A boss who pays one worker gets the labor of two – the waged employee, sure, but also the person at home, almost always a woman, who makes his labor possible by doing everything else that sustains human life – feeding him, keeping him and his home clean, even birthing and raising the next generation of workers. Both should receive wages.
- "Every mother is a working mother." Welfare payments aren't charity; they are a due for the work women do to sustain society. Cuts to public services, especially in care, are a tax on women who are expected to step in to pick up the slack.
As you can probably guess, Wages for Housework was a working-class, Marxist analysis of labor. I can't pretend to be either of those things, even if writing about women's history automatically marks me as a radical to some on the Internet. But I explored the ideas with an open mind interviewing Emily Callaci, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wrote a history of Wages for Housework with unprecedented access to its archives and surviving organisers. I discovered a half-century-old political movement that is astonishingly current. Have a listen.
I publish rough cuts of the interviews for the kids on Youtube. On audio, I edit out all filler words and make it sleek. Can't do that on video, the image would jump too much. Audio will save a whole 7 minutes of your life this week! Or go for slow here if that's your jam.
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I've been really enjoying making video explainers of all the topics I explore here. If you'd like to see how I manage to boil down every episode for 3-minute attention spans by pretending I'm in an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk, definitely give it a follow.
Buy the book
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🇬🇧 Buy Emily Callaci's Wages for Housework in the UK
🇺🇸 Buy Emily Callaci's Wages for Housework in the US
All Work and No Pay: Watch the Wages for Housework documentary
The Wages for Housework campaign made a documentary for the BBC in 1976. It's resurfaced on Youtube; the candid interviews with women on British streets are touching and could have been done yesterday.
Hey, you read to the end! Before I give you back your day, let me give you something else. Such thorough readers deserve a treat. Here's a rare discounted membership offer (in GB£, US$ or euros). Thank you for your attention.
