To argue for a wage means forcibly r emoving ideas of love from
the home-based aspects of production. It means putting pressure
on governments to provide good ser vices. It means treating men and
women as equals.If we assume that housewo1·k is not 1·eal wo1·k... then no one is
entitled to any institutional suppoTt jo1· Taising a family. Then the
state is co17ect when it claims that Taising ou1· child1·en is a peTsonal
Tesponsibility and if we want daycaTe centTes~ joT instance~ we have
to pay joT them.BELOW See Red Women's
w ·orkshop, fotmded in 1974,
worked out of its London
premises until its closure in
1990. The 'Capitalism Also
Depends on Domestic
Labour' poster was first
printed in 1975
Architecture has had all sorts of collisions with
exploitative labour and with the heralding of the family
as some kind of emancipatory balm to the alienation
of capital. Federici writes that 'in the course of the 20th
century, the working-class family has become more and
more isolated from t he rest of t he community. Housing
politics, with t he creation of suburbia, have accelerated
this process'. The family- friendly Unite in :Marseille was built
to encourage the production of more families to permit successive
generations a retirement. In Sweden, Sven Markelius and Alva ~lyrdal
thought the family home could help both parents work through
collectivising cleaning, cooking and childcare.
Their kollektivhus employed staff to provide
these services, echoing the 'al dente' feminism
of the radical housing project of Red Vienna,
in which appliances like washing machines and
irons were made collective (although it was
still women who did the work).
If housework is understood as somehow
beneath some people then no architecture can
undo this hierarchy. More's Utopia had a serving
class of foreigners and criminals - the maid's
miniature room, from Hong Kong to Beirut,
where workers live in the homes they clean, are
one more expression of this ancient distinction between those
whose time, and lives, are valued and those who are not.
vVe can spot a glimmer of Federici's utopia in the comedoT populaT
in Lima, urban communal kitchens in which the work and pleasure
of cooking is shared by groups of volunteers during times of economic
hardship. H ere, alternative patterns of vulnerability and strength are
found in non-familial kitchens. Emerging from national strikes and
economic hardship, the kitchens were organised by changing groups
of women pooling ski11s, time and leftover r esources.
To read Federici is to encounter a call to arms in urgent,
persuasive prose. She will make you a utopian too, looking for little
shards of hope and huge shifts in perspective. By identifying as and
with the housewife, architects can begin to unpick the histor y of
their profession.UnjoTtunatel~ many women - paTticula1·ly single women - aTe aft·aid
of the peTspective of wages jo1· housewoTk because they a1·e afT aid of
identifying even joT a second with the housewife. They know that this
is the most poweTless position in society and they do not want to
Tealise they a1·e housewives too. This is pTecisely ou1· weakness, as ouT
enslavement is maintained and peTpetuated th1·ough this lack of
self-identification. We want and must say that we aTe all housewives~
we aTe all prostitutes and we aTe all gay, because as long as we acceptWages Against Housewo1·k
Silvia Federici
Falling Wall Press, 1975
these divisions, and think that we aTe something better,
something different than a housewife, then we accept
the logic of the master.0... 0
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