Women, Race, & Class

The only significant steps toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken in the existing socialist countries. Working women, therefore, have a special and vital interest in the struggle for socialism. Moreover, under capitalism, campaigns for jobs on an equal basis with men, combined with movements for institutions such as subsidized public child care, contain an explosive revolutionary potential. This strategy calls into question the validity of monopoly capitalism and must ultimately point in the direction of socialism.

Would the housewives who felt they were “going crazy staying at home” welcome the idea of being paid for driving themselves crazy?

Psychological liberation can hardly be achieved simply by paying the housewife a wage.

The psychological consequence is frequently a tragically stunted personality haunted by feelings of inferiority.

As workers, as militant activists in the labor movement, women can generate the real power to fight the mainstay and beneficiary of sexism which is the monopoly capitalist system.

The Wages for Housework Movement discourages women from seeking outside jobs, arguing that “slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to the kitchen sink.”

Like racism, sexism is one of the great justifications for high female unemployment rates.

It would seem that government paychecks for housewives would further legitimize this domestic slavery.

Its function is the maintenance of human existence which is the ultimate purpose of production in all societies

Her role in the cycle of production remained invisible because only the product of her labor, the laborer, was visible.