介紹 DESCRIPTION //

In line with the wave of globalisation in the last half-century, housework has already become commodified. The development of Chinese regions and households are relative to that of developed nations, where enormous quantities of the female labour force are output as reproductive labour. Commodification has become household labour’s form of ‘wage’.

Along with the transition to middle and upper-class, the majority of full-time housewives leave their homes to join the workforce only faced with the double responsibility of both wage work and household labour. At the same time, in China this has sparked a shift in the social group engaged in care labour. Much reproductive and care-based labour is now undertaken by grandparents and retired seniors. Under the climate of an aging population, mothering has become an ever more admirable position. After the dissolution of the one-child policy, working women are expected to have more children, pressuring females to continue nurturing the next generation of productive workers.

Though the Wages for Housework campaign once mobilised European and American women, it seems that it may no longer spark the sympathies of today’s Chinese women. The Marxist feminist analysis at the core of the movement is however still very much valid. As long as gender-based divisions of labour are still in play and as long as reproductive labour in society is still primarily taken up in the home by women (whether mothers, senior women or hired domestic labourers), the question of household labour will continue to be a crucial issue for the contemporary feminist movement.  (WU Bilian)

English version of this influential pamphlet can be downloaded for free at libcom.org.

– – – – – – – – – –

瑪利亞羅莎·達拉·科斯特（Mariarosa Dalla COSTA），1943年生，意大利20世紀女權主義運動的重要人物，《婦女與社會翻轉》的作者。

謝爾瑪·詹姆斯（Selma JAMES），1930年生，美國20世紀女權主義運動的重要人物，《婦女的位置》的作者。

兩人同是國際運動『家務有償化』（Wages for Housework）的發起人，後來，也發起和參與多種社會運動。

Mariarosa Dalla COSTA (born 1943 in Treviso) is an Italian autonomist feminist and co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, an organisation formed in Padua in 1972 to promote political debate and action around the issue of housework that gave rise to the International Wages for Housework Campaign.

Selma JAMES (born 1930 in Brooklyn, NY) is co-founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and in addition to co-author of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, has also authored Sex, Race & Class: the Perspective of Winning. Since 2000, she has served as international coordinator of Global Women’s Strike, a network of grassroots women bringing together actions and initiatives in many countries.