Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Accept Deny

GoGreenNation news

Home Is Where the Unpaid Labor Is

News Feed
Wednesday, March 19, 2025

The first time I taught Silvia Federici’s 1975 manifesto, “Wages Against Housework,” was during the pandemic. Federici proposes that housework—cooking and cleaning, taking care of children, spouses, the sick, and the elderly—should be compensated by the government. Most of my students, who were first-year undergraduates, Zoomed into class from their childhood bedrooms. It was a moment in the pandemic when parents of younger children were with them 24/7, and it seemed as if everyone was either sick or caring for someone who was sick. The time-consuming nature of this work, as well as its physical, emotional, and financial strains, was often in the news.Even so, most of my students had reservations about Federici’s proposal. Housework, both when Federici wrote her manifesto and now, is mostly done by women. Wouldn’t paying for it result in women doing even more housework, and perhaps having more children than they wanted? Wouldn’t it push women out of the workplace?Mostly, though, my students were concerned about how paying people to take care of their children and spouses would change the nature of that care: Wouldn’t it turn relationships into transactions, love into labor? How would children and spouses feel if they knew that every tender gesture or loving word was a job with a price? Perhaps, some of my students suggested, there could be a distinction: yes to wages for cooking and cleaning, no to wages for more intimate forms of care.Federici rejects this distinction. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work,” her manifesto opens. “More smiles? More money.” In other words, sex with your husband is work; smiling when he walks through the door and listening to him talk about his day are work; singing your baby to sleep or cuddling with her on the sofa is work, just as much as washing her onesies or mashing up food for her to eat.Federici was one of the founding members of the Marxist-feminist International Wages for Housework Campaign, which began in the early 1970s. Those who worked inside the home, the campaign argued, were workers exploited by capitalism. Their work is what is sometimes called reproductive labor: work that does not create products that can be bought and sold but, rather, maintains and reproduces the workers who create those products. Housework feeds the worker and makes sure he has clean clothes and a bed to rest in at night; housework likewise feeds and clothes and raises the next generation of workers. Employers profit from this labor without paying the people who do it.The goals of the Wages for Housework campaign went far beyond giving women economic independence. By making the labor of housework visible as labor, wages would enable those who performed it to organize for better working conditions. Wages for housework was a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality: Because women would no longer be reliant on someone else’s paycheck, they would be freer to choose not to marry, to leave their husbands, or to partner with women. Those who had to work outside the home as well as within it could quit their jobs if they wanted to, since housework could become the means by which they supported themselves and their families financially. Perhaps counterintuitively, wages for housework would also enable women to refuse housework: Once housework was regarded as a job, rather than the natural activity of women, women could go on strike or choose to do some other kind of work without being seen, or seeing themselves, as aberrations or failures.Finally, wages for housework would be a crucial tool in establishing solidarity between women, and in bringing down global capitalism. Women with jobs outside the home—especially jobs that involved care work like nursing, cleaning, or sex work—would recognize housewives as fellow workers. Husbands and wives would no longer see one another as worker and helpmeet, but as comrades who could fight together for mutual liberation.Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor is a history of the Wages for Housework campaign and a group biography of five of its leaders: Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod. It is also the first history of the movement that stretches from its beginnings to the present day. All five of Callaci’s central figures are still alive, and of an age to be assembling their archives (the oldest, James, is 94). Wages for Housework draws on these archives, as well as on interviews with James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, and others who organized in the movement.To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.Callaci suggests that today, demanding wages for housework sounds “less strange” than it once did. Thanks to Covid and the aging populations of many countries, conversations about care work are common. (Will working-class men retrain as nurses? Is heterosexual marriage a trap for professional mothers?) Dwindling social mobility has caused many to lose faith that education and workplace productivity will lead to economic stability. “Quiet quitting” is an individual response to this loss of faith; so is self-care, when stripped of its radical origins. To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.The Wages for Housework movement, as an international campaign, began in the summer of 1972, when a group of feminist activists met in Padua, Italy. There, James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, along with French feminist Brigitte Galtier, founded the International Feminist Collective. The Collective’s founding statement set out a vision of a global feminist network based on the recognition that the unwaged worker in the home is as crucial to capitalism as the worker in the factory or the office. “Class struggle and feminism for us are one and the same,” it declared. After Padua, James returned to London and set up the Power of Women Collective. Federici, an Italian graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo, formed the New York Wages for Housework Committee. The Italian campaign started two years later, led by Dalla Costa, and others launched in Germany, Switzerland, and Guyana. Autonomous sister groups included Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework. In numbers, the campaign was always small—Callaci estimates its members never exceeded a few dozen. But it lobbied the United Nations and set up women’s centers in squats; it campaigned for the rights of sex workers and welfare recipients and immigrants. Wages for Housework was featured on the BBC and in the pages of Life magazine. In manifestos and at protests, on pins and pot holders, it offered an array of slogans: “Women of the world are serving notice,” “Every miscarriage is a work accident,” “No cuts, just bucks!”Histories of the campaign tend to focus on its North American and European contexts, even as they acknowledge that the movement always had a global and anti-imperialist component. Callaci, who is a historian of modern Africa, illuminates the time her subjects spent in Africa and the Caribbean, and its influence on their politics. James, born into a radical working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, married the Trinidadian Marxist historian and activist C.L.R. James and lived with him in Trinidad before settling in London. Teaching in Zambia, Wilmette Brown was disturbed to find that the World Bank made aid conditional on population-control measures, and equally disturbed by the social pressure that resulted in women having more children than they wanted. Margaret Prescod grew up in Barbados in the final years of British colonial rule. Her ancestors’ unpaid labor had enriched the United Kingdom and the United States; now, their descendants moved to those countries and worked long hours for low pay—often while their children remained in Barbados, cared for by grandmothers and aunts.Callaci’s initial interest in Wages for Housework, however, was personal rather than academic. As a teenager in the 1990s, she absorbed the idea that “my liberation would come through education, creative expression, and professional success”—in other words, through escaping housework, not identifying with it. But when Callaci had her first child, she realized escape was impossible. Wages for Housework gave her a language to understand her new circumstances, yet she retained some ambivalence about whether she did, actually, want what the campaign demanded. Did she want to think of herself as raising future workers, whose labors would support capitalism? Like my students, she worried about imagining the time she spent with her children as a job, and the expression of her love for them as something that had financial value. (Wages for Housework campaigners would counter that Callaci’s, and my students’, discomfort was discomfort with the workings of capitalism; wages for housework merely makes those workings visible.)Callaci was not the wife of a factory worker imagined in some Wages for Housework material, or the single, Black, or immigrant mother imagined in others. She had a full-time job as a history professor and a male partner with whom she split the housework. Even so, counting the second shift, she was working 18-hour days. Furthermore, she was only able to keep her paid employment through outsourcing childcare—and then only because the women who cared for her children were paid less for their work than she was for hers. This too was part of the Wages for Housework campaign: drawing attention to the fact that the success of some women in the workplace, often touted as a measure of equality, was made possible only through the undervaluing of other women’s work at home and abroad.Each of the five women at the center of Callaci’s book came to the movement from experience of, and often frustration with, organizing in other leftist and feminist circles. James, an anti-racist activist who had worked in a factory in Los Angeles, bridled at the middle-class preoccupations of the mostly white English Women’s Liberation movement. Dalla Costa, a political scientist and labor organizer, was sick of organizing with male Italian Marxists who treated women merely as typists and girlfriends. Wilmette Brown joined the Black Panthers while a student at Berkeley but struggled with the group’s emphasis on masculinity and heterosexuality, which required her to conceal that she had a life outside the Panthers as an out lesbian. She joined a Black women’s consciousness-raising group but found it too passive: “I was fed up with consciousness-raising. I already felt pretty conscious.” When she read Dalla Costa and James’s essay The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, she found her cause: “I knew that my fight as a lesbian was a fight against doing the work that women were supposed to do.” She and Prescod, both in New York, established Black Women for Wages for Housework.Many of the campaign’s auxiliary demands are still made in some form today—free state-provided childcare, a 20-hour workweek, the decriminalization of sex work—but Wages for Housework shows how the movement developed in response to the specific political and economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Wages for Housework pointed out that the austerity of the period was only possible because governments know that, when social services are cut, women take on more unpaid work to fill the gaps. While many feminist campaigners were focused on securing the Equal Rights Amendment that would outlaw sex discrimination, Prescod and Brown fought to protect welfare payments for women, which were under threat—and for those payments to be understood as wages rather than charity.The gas disaster at Bhopal in 1984 and the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl two years later, as well as Brown’s cancer diagnosis, prompted Brown to understand housework as labor that not only sustains capitalism but also repairs its harms. As Callaci writes, Brown in particular pushed the Wages for Housework campaign to look far beyond the nuclear family, into “cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils and scenes of police violence … into the war zones in the aftermath of American imperialism where poor women cared for ravaged bodies and lands.” In Vietnam, housework includes caring for those with cancer or birth defects caused by the toxic defoliant that the U.S. sprayed on the country during the Vietnam War. In the U.S. and around the world, it includes looking after children with asthma caused by inner-city pollution, or with lead poisoning caused by unsafe water or soil.Callaci acknowledges that the Wages for Housework campaign could be off-putting to those outside the movement: its members too dogmatic, its ideas too opaque or abstract. She also admits to feeling frustrated by the movement’s lack of a clear “instruction manual toward liberation” or even an agreement on how the desired wages should be calculated. Perhaps because of this frustration, Wages for Housework focuses more on the campaign’s larger ideas and actions than its day-to-day decision-making and internal debates. Yet Callaci’s brief descriptions of these debates are some of the book’s most interesting moments. Did the campaign really want to get money into the hands of women doing housework (often Brown and Prescod’s focus), or was it more interested in enabling women to refuse housework (Federici and Dalla Costa)? In 2022, James told Callaci, “To be a member of our movement, there is only one requirement: you have to want Wages for Housework for yourself.” But when Callaci asked Dalla Costa, a professor of political science, what the campaign had meant to her, her answer was directly at odds with James’s view: “It wasn’t personal,” she said. She had simply believed that the campaign offered the correct analysis of capitalism.By the end of the 1970s, the Italian Wages for Housework campaign and the New York Committee had disbanded. Dalla Costa and James, longtime collaborators, fell out for reasons both personal and political. Brown left the campaign in 1995. At the beginning of the pandemic, James and others renamed the Wages for Housework movement “Care Income Now”; it now exists under the banner of the Global Women’s Strike.“We were worn out,” Dalla Costa has said, recalling the end of the Italian campaign. “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” In 2022, the value of unpaid domestic and care work across the world, almost three-quarters of it done by women, was estimated at $11 trillion. But that this figure exists at all suggests some kind of transformation: The role of unpaid labor to the global economy is no longer as invisible as it once was. (In 1985, members of the Wages for Housework campaign, led by Prescod, pushed the U.N. to call on governments to quantify the value of women’s work.) On the other hand, simply recognizing the existence of unpaid work is of very limited help to many of those who do it.In her book’s epilogue, Callaci points to the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit as a recent example of the United States giving money to people caring for children. The program, which dramatically reduced poverty levels across the country, was killed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition. Publicly, Manchin said that extending the expanded CTC would discourage women from seeking paid work, as if such work were inherently superior to caring for children. He also reportedly feared that parents would spend the CTC money on drugs—ignoring the fact that people who work outside the home are perfectly able to use their paycheck to buy drugs. Framing the CTC payments as exceptional benefits for children—not as wages for care work—made them all too easy to cancel.There is much about the Wages for Housework campaign, with its squats, slogans, and manifestos, that feels firmly of the twentieth century. Yet its flinty analysis of the political economy of the family offers a valuable alternative to the reformed “care economy” agenda that seems to have died with Kamala Harris’s campaign. When the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is denied, when women without biological children are mocked, a framework that starts with gender and can extend to foreign aid, environmental damage, and welfare cuts is compelling. Beyond that framework, Wages for Housework offers something more powerful still: a vision of a world in which the hard, loving work of reproduction and repair is at once valued and optional.

The first time I taught Silvia Federici’s 1975 manifesto, “Wages Against Housework,” was during the pandemic. Federici proposes that housework—cooking and cleaning, taking care of children, spouses, the sick, and the elderly—should be compensated by the government. Most of my students, who were first-year undergraduates, Zoomed into class from their childhood bedrooms. It was a moment in the pandemic when parents of younger children were with them 24/7, and it seemed as if everyone was either sick or caring for someone who was sick. The time-consuming nature of this work, as well as its physical, emotional, and financial strains, was often in the news.Even so, most of my students had reservations about Federici’s proposal. Housework, both when Federici wrote her manifesto and now, is mostly done by women. Wouldn’t paying for it result in women doing even more housework, and perhaps having more children than they wanted? Wouldn’t it push women out of the workplace?Mostly, though, my students were concerned about how paying people to take care of their children and spouses would change the nature of that care: Wouldn’t it turn relationships into transactions, love into labor? How would children and spouses feel if they knew that every tender gesture or loving word was a job with a price? Perhaps, some of my students suggested, there could be a distinction: yes to wages for cooking and cleaning, no to wages for more intimate forms of care.Federici rejects this distinction. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work,” her manifesto opens. “More smiles? More money.” In other words, sex with your husband is work; smiling when he walks through the door and listening to him talk about his day are work; singing your baby to sleep or cuddling with her on the sofa is work, just as much as washing her onesies or mashing up food for her to eat.Federici was one of the founding members of the Marxist-feminist International Wages for Housework Campaign, which began in the early 1970s. Those who worked inside the home, the campaign argued, were workers exploited by capitalism. Their work is what is sometimes called reproductive labor: work that does not create products that can be bought and sold but, rather, maintains and reproduces the workers who create those products. Housework feeds the worker and makes sure he has clean clothes and a bed to rest in at night; housework likewise feeds and clothes and raises the next generation of workers. Employers profit from this labor without paying the people who do it.The goals of the Wages for Housework campaign went far beyond giving women economic independence. By making the labor of housework visible as labor, wages would enable those who performed it to organize for better working conditions. Wages for housework was a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality: Because women would no longer be reliant on someone else’s paycheck, they would be freer to choose not to marry, to leave their husbands, or to partner with women. Those who had to work outside the home as well as within it could quit their jobs if they wanted to, since housework could become the means by which they supported themselves and their families financially. Perhaps counterintuitively, wages for housework would also enable women to refuse housework: Once housework was regarded as a job, rather than the natural activity of women, women could go on strike or choose to do some other kind of work without being seen, or seeing themselves, as aberrations or failures.Finally, wages for housework would be a crucial tool in establishing solidarity between women, and in bringing down global capitalism. Women with jobs outside the home—especially jobs that involved care work like nursing, cleaning, or sex work—would recognize housewives as fellow workers. Husbands and wives would no longer see one another as worker and helpmeet, but as comrades who could fight together for mutual liberation.Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor is a history of the Wages for Housework campaign and a group biography of five of its leaders: Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod. It is also the first history of the movement that stretches from its beginnings to the present day. All five of Callaci’s central figures are still alive, and of an age to be assembling their archives (the oldest, James, is 94). Wages for Housework draws on these archives, as well as on interviews with James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, and others who organized in the movement.To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.Callaci suggests that today, demanding wages for housework sounds “less strange” than it once did. Thanks to Covid and the aging populations of many countries, conversations about care work are common. (Will working-class men retrain as nurses? Is heterosexual marriage a trap for professional mothers?) Dwindling social mobility has caused many to lose faith that education and workplace productivity will lead to economic stability. “Quiet quitting” is an individual response to this loss of faith; so is self-care, when stripped of its radical origins. To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.The Wages for Housework movement, as an international campaign, began in the summer of 1972, when a group of feminist activists met in Padua, Italy. There, James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, along with French feminist Brigitte Galtier, founded the International Feminist Collective. The Collective’s founding statement set out a vision of a global feminist network based on the recognition that the unwaged worker in the home is as crucial to capitalism as the worker in the factory or the office. “Class struggle and feminism for us are one and the same,” it declared. After Padua, James returned to London and set up the Power of Women Collective. Federici, an Italian graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo, formed the New York Wages for Housework Committee. The Italian campaign started two years later, led by Dalla Costa, and others launched in Germany, Switzerland, and Guyana. Autonomous sister groups included Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework. In numbers, the campaign was always small—Callaci estimates its members never exceeded a few dozen. But it lobbied the United Nations and set up women’s centers in squats; it campaigned for the rights of sex workers and welfare recipients and immigrants. Wages for Housework was featured on the BBC and in the pages of Life magazine. In manifestos and at protests, on pins and pot holders, it offered an array of slogans: “Women of the world are serving notice,” “Every miscarriage is a work accident,” “No cuts, just bucks!”Histories of the campaign tend to focus on its North American and European contexts, even as they acknowledge that the movement always had a global and anti-imperialist component. Callaci, who is a historian of modern Africa, illuminates the time her subjects spent in Africa and the Caribbean, and its influence on their politics. James, born into a radical working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, married the Trinidadian Marxist historian and activist C.L.R. James and lived with him in Trinidad before settling in London. Teaching in Zambia, Wilmette Brown was disturbed to find that the World Bank made aid conditional on population-control measures, and equally disturbed by the social pressure that resulted in women having more children than they wanted. Margaret Prescod grew up in Barbados in the final years of British colonial rule. Her ancestors’ unpaid labor had enriched the United Kingdom and the United States; now, their descendants moved to those countries and worked long hours for low pay—often while their children remained in Barbados, cared for by grandmothers and aunts.Callaci’s initial interest in Wages for Housework, however, was personal rather than academic. As a teenager in the 1990s, she absorbed the idea that “my liberation would come through education, creative expression, and professional success”—in other words, through escaping housework, not identifying with it. But when Callaci had her first child, she realized escape was impossible. Wages for Housework gave her a language to understand her new circumstances, yet she retained some ambivalence about whether she did, actually, want what the campaign demanded. Did she want to think of herself as raising future workers, whose labors would support capitalism? Like my students, she worried about imagining the time she spent with her children as a job, and the expression of her love for them as something that had financial value. (Wages for Housework campaigners would counter that Callaci’s, and my students’, discomfort was discomfort with the workings of capitalism; wages for housework merely makes those workings visible.)Callaci was not the wife of a factory worker imagined in some Wages for Housework material, or the single, Black, or immigrant mother imagined in others. She had a full-time job as a history professor and a male partner with whom she split the housework. Even so, counting the second shift, she was working 18-hour days. Furthermore, she was only able to keep her paid employment through outsourcing childcare—and then only because the women who cared for her children were paid less for their work than she was for hers. This too was part of the Wages for Housework campaign: drawing attention to the fact that the success of some women in the workplace, often touted as a measure of equality, was made possible only through the undervaluing of other women’s work at home and abroad.Each of the five women at the center of Callaci’s book came to the movement from experience of, and often frustration with, organizing in other leftist and feminist circles. James, an anti-racist activist who had worked in a factory in Los Angeles, bridled at the middle-class preoccupations of the mostly white English Women’s Liberation movement. Dalla Costa, a political scientist and labor organizer, was sick of organizing with male Italian Marxists who treated women merely as typists and girlfriends. Wilmette Brown joined the Black Panthers while a student at Berkeley but struggled with the group’s emphasis on masculinity and heterosexuality, which required her to conceal that she had a life outside the Panthers as an out lesbian. She joined a Black women’s consciousness-raising group but found it too passive: “I was fed up with consciousness-raising. I already felt pretty conscious.” When she read Dalla Costa and James’s essay The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, she found her cause: “I knew that my fight as a lesbian was a fight against doing the work that women were supposed to do.” She and Prescod, both in New York, established Black Women for Wages for Housework.Many of the campaign’s auxiliary demands are still made in some form today—free state-provided childcare, a 20-hour workweek, the decriminalization of sex work—but Wages for Housework shows how the movement developed in response to the specific political and economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Wages for Housework pointed out that the austerity of the period was only possible because governments know that, when social services are cut, women take on more unpaid work to fill the gaps. While many feminist campaigners were focused on securing the Equal Rights Amendment that would outlaw sex discrimination, Prescod and Brown fought to protect welfare payments for women, which were under threat—and for those payments to be understood as wages rather than charity.The gas disaster at Bhopal in 1984 and the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl two years later, as well as Brown’s cancer diagnosis, prompted Brown to understand housework as labor that not only sustains capitalism but also repairs its harms. As Callaci writes, Brown in particular pushed the Wages for Housework campaign to look far beyond the nuclear family, into “cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils and scenes of police violence … into the war zones in the aftermath of American imperialism where poor women cared for ravaged bodies and lands.” In Vietnam, housework includes caring for those with cancer or birth defects caused by the toxic defoliant that the U.S. sprayed on the country during the Vietnam War. In the U.S. and around the world, it includes looking after children with asthma caused by inner-city pollution, or with lead poisoning caused by unsafe water or soil.Callaci acknowledges that the Wages for Housework campaign could be off-putting to those outside the movement: its members too dogmatic, its ideas too opaque or abstract. She also admits to feeling frustrated by the movement’s lack of a clear “instruction manual toward liberation” or even an agreement on how the desired wages should be calculated. Perhaps because of this frustration, Wages for Housework focuses more on the campaign’s larger ideas and actions than its day-to-day decision-making and internal debates. Yet Callaci’s brief descriptions of these debates are some of the book’s most interesting moments. Did the campaign really want to get money into the hands of women doing housework (often Brown and Prescod’s focus), or was it more interested in enabling women to refuse housework (Federici and Dalla Costa)? In 2022, James told Callaci, “To be a member of our movement, there is only one requirement: you have to want Wages for Housework for yourself.” But when Callaci asked Dalla Costa, a professor of political science, what the campaign had meant to her, her answer was directly at odds with James’s view: “It wasn’t personal,” she said. She had simply believed that the campaign offered the correct analysis of capitalism.By the end of the 1970s, the Italian Wages for Housework campaign and the New York Committee had disbanded. Dalla Costa and James, longtime collaborators, fell out for reasons both personal and political. Brown left the campaign in 1995. At the beginning of the pandemic, James and others renamed the Wages for Housework movement “Care Income Now”; it now exists under the banner of the Global Women’s Strike.“We were worn out,” Dalla Costa has said, recalling the end of the Italian campaign. “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” In 2022, the value of unpaid domestic and care work across the world, almost three-quarters of it done by women, was estimated at $11 trillion. But that this figure exists at all suggests some kind of transformation: The role of unpaid labor to the global economy is no longer as invisible as it once was. (In 1985, members of the Wages for Housework campaign, led by Prescod, pushed the U.N. to call on governments to quantify the value of women’s work.) On the other hand, simply recognizing the existence of unpaid work is of very limited help to many of those who do it.In her book’s epilogue, Callaci points to the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit as a recent example of the United States giving money to people caring for children. The program, which dramatically reduced poverty levels across the country, was killed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition. Publicly, Manchin said that extending the expanded CTC would discourage women from seeking paid work, as if such work were inherently superior to caring for children. He also reportedly feared that parents would spend the CTC money on drugs—ignoring the fact that people who work outside the home are perfectly able to use their paycheck to buy drugs. Framing the CTC payments as exceptional benefits for children—not as wages for care work—made them all too easy to cancel.There is much about the Wages for Housework campaign, with its squats, slogans, and manifestos, that feels firmly of the twentieth century. Yet its flinty analysis of the political economy of the family offers a valuable alternative to the reformed “care economy” agenda that seems to have died with Kamala Harris’s campaign. When the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is denied, when women without biological children are mocked, a framework that starts with gender and can extend to foreign aid, environmental damage, and welfare cuts is compelling. Beyond that framework, Wages for Housework offers something more powerful still: a vision of a world in which the hard, loving work of reproduction and repair is at once valued and optional.

The first time I taught Silvia Federici’s 1975 manifesto, “Wages Against Housework,” was during the pandemic. Federici proposes that housework—cooking and cleaning, taking care of children, spouses, the sick, and the elderly—should be compensated by the government. Most of my students, who were first-year undergraduates, Zoomed into class from their childhood bedrooms. It was a moment in the pandemic when parents of younger children were with them 24/7, and it seemed as if everyone was either sick or caring for someone who was sick. The time-consuming nature of this work, as well as its physical, emotional, and financial strains, was often in the news.

Even so, most of my students had reservations about Federici’s proposal. Housework, both when Federici wrote her manifesto and now, is mostly done by women. Wouldn’t paying for it result in women doing even more housework, and perhaps having more children than they wanted? Wouldn’t it push women out of the workplace?

Mostly, though, my students were concerned about how paying people to take care of their children and spouses would change the nature of that care: Wouldn’t it turn relationships into transactions, love into labor? How would children and spouses feel if they knew that every tender gesture or loving word was a job with a price? Perhaps, some of my students suggested, there could be a distinction: yes to wages for cooking and cleaning, no to wages for more intimate forms of care.

Federici rejects this distinction. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work,” her manifesto opens. “More smiles? More money.” In other words, sex with your husband is work; smiling when he walks through the door and listening to him talk about his day are work; singing your baby to sleep or cuddling with her on the sofa is work, just as much as washing her onesies or mashing up food for her to eat.

Federici was one of the founding members of the Marxist-feminist International Wages for Housework Campaign, which began in the early 1970s. Those who worked inside the home, the campaign argued, were workers exploited by capitalism. Their work is what is sometimes called reproductive labor: work that does not create products that can be bought and sold but, rather, maintains and reproduces the workers who create those products. Housework feeds the worker and makes sure he has clean clothes and a bed to rest in at night; housework likewise feeds and clothes and raises the next generation of workers. Employers profit from this labor without paying the people who do it.

The goals of the Wages for Housework campaign went far beyond giving women economic independence. By making the labor of housework visible as labor, wages would enable those who performed it to organize for better working conditions. Wages for housework was a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality: Because women would no longer be reliant on someone else’s paycheck, they would be freer to choose not to marry, to leave their husbands, or to partner with women. Those who had to work outside the home as well as within it could quit their jobs if they wanted to, since housework could become the means by which they supported themselves and their families financially. Perhaps counterintuitively, wages for housework would also enable women to refuse housework: Once housework was regarded as a job, rather than the natural activity of women, women could go on strike or choose to do some other kind of work without being seen, or seeing themselves, as aberrations or failures.

Finally, wages for housework would be a crucial tool in establishing solidarity between women, and in bringing down global capitalism. Women with jobs outside the home—especially jobs that involved care work like nursing, cleaning, or sex work—would recognize housewives as fellow workers. Husbands and wives would no longer see one another as worker and helpmeet, but as comrades who could fight together for mutual liberation.


Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor is a history of the Wages for Housework campaign and a group biography of five of its leaders: Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod. It is also the first history of the movement that stretches from its beginnings to the present day. All five of Callaci’s central figures are still alive, and of an age to be assembling their archives (the oldest, James, is 94). Wages for Housework draws on these archives, as well as on interviews with James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, and others who organized in the movement.

Callaci suggests that today, demanding wages for housework sounds “less strange” than it once did. Thanks to Covid and the aging populations of many countries, conversations about care work are common. (Will working-class men retrain as nurses? Is heterosexual marriage a trap for professional mothers?) Dwindling social mobility has caused many to lose faith that education and workplace productivity will lead to economic stability. “Quiet quitting” is an individual response to this loss of faith; so is self-care, when stripped of its radical origins. To revisit Wages for Housework in this moment is to encounter a collective response to many of today’s problems—albeit one that requires the complete transformation of society.

The Wages for Housework movement, as an international campaign, began in the summer of 1972, when a group of feminist activists met in Padua, Italy. There, James, Dalla Costa, and Federici, along with French feminist Brigitte Galtier, founded the International Feminist Collective. The Collective’s founding statement set out a vision of a global feminist network based on the recognition that the unwaged worker in the home is as crucial to capitalism as the worker in the factory or the office. “Class struggle and feminism for us are one and the same,” it declared.

After Padua, James returned to London and set up the Power of Women Collective. Federici, an Italian graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo, formed the New York Wages for Housework Committee. The Italian campaign started two years later, led by Dalla Costa, and others launched in Germany, Switzerland, and Guyana. Autonomous sister groups included Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework. In numbers, the campaign was always small—Callaci estimates its members never exceeded a few dozen. But it lobbied the United Nations and set up women’s centers in squats; it campaigned for the rights of sex workers and welfare recipients and immigrants. Wages for Housework was featured on the BBC and in the pages of Life magazine. In manifestos and at protests, on pins and pot holders, it offered an array of slogans: “Women of the world are serving notice,” “Every miscarriage is a work accident,” “No cuts, just bucks!”

Histories of the campaign tend to focus on its North American and European contexts, even as they acknowledge that the movement always had a global and anti-imperialist component. Callaci, who is a historian of modern Africa, illuminates the time her subjects spent in Africa and the Caribbean, and its influence on their politics. James, born into a radical working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, married the Trinidadian Marxist historian and activist C.L.R. James and lived with him in Trinidad before settling in London. Teaching in Zambia, Wilmette Brown was disturbed to find that the World Bank made aid conditional on population-control measures, and equally disturbed by the social pressure that resulted in women having more children than they wanted. Margaret Prescod grew up in Barbados in the final years of British colonial rule. Her ancestors’ unpaid labor had enriched the United Kingdom and the United States; now, their descendants moved to those countries and worked long hours for low pay—often while their children remained in Barbados, cared for by grandmothers and aunts.

Callaci’s initial interest in Wages for Housework, however, was personal rather than academic. As a teenager in the 1990s, she absorbed the idea that “my liberation would come through education, creative expression, and professional success”—in other words, through escaping housework, not identifying with it. But when Callaci had her first child, she realized escape was impossible. Wages for Housework gave her a language to understand her new circumstances, yet she retained some ambivalence about whether she did, actually, want what the campaign demanded. Did she want to think of herself as raising future workers, whose labors would support capitalism? Like my students, she worried about imagining the time she spent with her children as a job, and the expression of her love for them as something that had financial value. (Wages for Housework campaigners would counter that Callaci’s, and my students’, discomfort was discomfort with the workings of capitalism; wages for housework merely makes those workings visible.)

Callaci was not the wife of a factory worker imagined in some Wages for Housework material, or the single, Black, or immigrant mother imagined in others. She had a full-time job as a history professor and a male partner with whom she split the housework. Even so, counting the second shift, she was working 18-hour days. Furthermore, she was only able to keep her paid employment through outsourcing childcare—and then only because the women who cared for her children were paid less for their work than she was for hers. This too was part of the Wages for Housework campaign: drawing attention to the fact that the success of some women in the workplace, often touted as a measure of equality, was made possible only through the undervaluing of other women’s work at home and abroad.


Each of the five women at the center of Callaci’s book came to the movement from experience of, and often frustration with, organizing in other leftist and feminist circles. James, an anti-racist activist who had worked in a factory in Los Angeles, bridled at the middle-class preoccupations of the mostly white English Women’s Liberation movement. Dalla Costa, a political scientist and labor organizer, was sick of organizing with male Italian Marxists who treated women merely as typists and girlfriends. Wilmette Brown joined the Black Panthers while a student at Berkeley but struggled with the group’s emphasis on masculinity and heterosexuality, which required her to conceal that she had a life outside the Panthers as an out lesbian. She joined a Black women’s consciousness-raising group but found it too passive: “I was fed up with consciousness-raising. I already felt pretty conscious.” When she read Dalla Costa and James’s essay The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, she found her cause: “I knew that my fight as a lesbian was a fight against doing the work that women were supposed to do.” She and Prescod, both in New York, established Black Women for Wages for Housework.

Many of the campaign’s auxiliary demands are still made in some form today—free state-provided childcare, a 20-hour workweek, the decriminalization of sex work—but Wages for Housework shows how the movement developed in response to the specific political and economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Wages for Housework pointed out that the austerity of the period was only possible because governments know that, when social services are cut, women take on more unpaid work to fill the gaps. While many feminist campaigners were focused on securing the Equal Rights Amendment that would outlaw sex discrimination, Prescod and Brown fought to protect welfare payments for women, which were under threat—and for those payments to be understood as wages rather than charity.

The gas disaster at Bhopal in 1984 and the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl two years later, as well as Brown’s cancer diagnosis, prompted Brown to understand housework as labor that not only sustains capitalism but also repairs its harms. As Callaci writes, Brown in particular pushed the Wages for Housework campaign to look far beyond the nuclear family, into “cancer wards and urban ghettos with toxic soils and scenes of police violence … into the war zones in the aftermath of American imperialism where poor women cared for ravaged bodies and lands.” In Vietnam, housework includes caring for those with cancer or birth defects caused by the toxic defoliant that the U.S. sprayed on the country during the Vietnam War. In the U.S. and around the world, it includes looking after children with asthma caused by inner-city pollution, or with lead poisoning caused by unsafe water or soil.

Callaci acknowledges that the Wages for Housework campaign could be off-putting to those outside the movement: its members too dogmatic, its ideas too opaque or abstract. She also admits to feeling frustrated by the movement’s lack of a clear “instruction manual toward liberation” or even an agreement on how the desired wages should be calculated. Perhaps because of this frustration, Wages for Housework focuses more on the campaign’s larger ideas and actions than its day-to-day decision-making and internal debates. Yet Callaci’s brief descriptions of these debates are some of the book’s most interesting moments. Did the campaign really want to get money into the hands of women doing housework (often Brown and Prescod’s focus), or was it more interested in enabling women to refuse housework (Federici and Dalla Costa)? In 2022, James told Callaci, “To be a member of our movement, there is only one requirement: you have to want Wages for Housework for yourself.” But when Callaci asked Dalla Costa, a professor of political science, what the campaign had meant to her, her answer was directly at odds with James’s view: “It wasn’t personal,” she said. She had simply believed that the campaign offered the correct analysis of capitalism.


By the end of the 1970s, the Italian Wages for Housework campaign and the New York Committee had disbanded. Dalla Costa and James, longtime collaborators, fell out for reasons both personal and political. Brown left the campaign in 1995. At the beginning of the pandemic, James and others renamed the Wages for Housework movement “Care Income Now”; it now exists under the banner of the Global Women’s Strike.

“We were worn out,” Dalla Costa has said, recalling the end of the Italian campaign. “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” In 2022, the value of unpaid domestic and care work across the world, almost three-quarters of it done by women, was estimated at $11 trillion. But that this figure exists at all suggests some kind of transformation: The role of unpaid labor to the global economy is no longer as invisible as it once was. (In 1985, members of the Wages for Housework campaign, led by Prescod, pushed the U.N. to call on governments to quantify the value of women’s work.) On the other hand, simply recognizing the existence of unpaid work is of very limited help to many of those who do it.

In her book’s epilogue, Callaci points to the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit as a recent example of the United States giving money to people caring for children. The program, which dramatically reduced poverty levels across the country, was killed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition. Publicly, Manchin said that extending the expanded CTC would discourage women from seeking paid work, as if such work were inherently superior to caring for children. He also reportedly feared that parents would spend the CTC money on drugs—ignoring the fact that people who work outside the home are perfectly able to use their paycheck to buy drugs. Framing the CTC payments as exceptional benefits for children—not as wages for care work—made them all too easy to cancel.

There is much about the Wages for Housework campaign, with its squats, slogans, and manifestos, that feels firmly of the twentieth century. Yet its flinty analysis of the political economy of the family offers a valuable alternative to the reformed “care economy” agenda that seems to have died with Kamala Harris’s campaign. When the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is denied, when women without biological children are mocked, a framework that starts with gender and can extend to foreign aid, environmental damage, and welfare cuts is compelling. Beyond that framework, Wages for Housework offers something more powerful still: a vision of a world in which the hard, loving work of reproduction and repair is at once valued and optional.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Related News

Chronicling nature activism in a coastal corner of India

Intertidal is Yuvan Aves's extraordinary, personal exploration of the rich wildlife offsetting the urbanity of Chennai, India. While its focus is a small strip of Indian coast, its issues are global

An egret takes off at Pallikaranai marsh in Chennai, IndiaMuralidharan Alagar Arts and Photography/Getty Images IntertidalYuvan Aves (Ithaka) When Yuvan Aves was a boy, a search party had to be sent out after he went missing. It turned out he had been so enthralled, sitting by a pond, watching a small bird of prey leap across the water to catch hovering dragonflies that he had lost track of time. Decades later, the adult Aves is a naturalist, author, educator and environmental activist. He still spends hours watching wild creatures, and his observations of the natural world and the…

Activism
Water

Measles Misinformation Is on the Rise – and Americans Are Hearing It, Survey Finds

Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely as Democrats to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease.

By Arthur Allen | KFF Health NewsWhile the most serious measles epidemic in a decade has led to the deaths of two children and spread to nearly 30 states with no signs of letting up, beliefs about the safety of the measles vaccine and the threat of the disease are sharply polarized, fed by the anti-vaccine views of the country’s seniormost health official.About two-thirds of Republican-leaning parents are unaware of an uptick in measles cases this year while about two-thirds of Democratic ones knew about it, according to a KFF survey released Wednesday.Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely (1 in 5) as Democrats (1 in 10) to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease, according to the survey of 1,380 U.S. adults.Some 35% of Republicans answering the survey, which was conducted April 8-15 online and by telephone, said the discredited theory linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism was definitely or probably true – compared with just 10% of Democrats.Get Midday Must-Reads in Your InboxFive essential stories, expertly curated, to keep you informed on your lunch break.Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S. News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy.The trends are roughly the same as KFF reported in a June 2023 survey. But in the new poll, 3 in 10 parents erroneously believed that vitamin A can prevent measles infections, a theory Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought into play since taking office during the measles outbreak.“The most alarming thing about the survey is that we’re seeing an uptick in the share of people who have heard these claims,” said co-author Ashley Kirzinger, associate director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.“It’s not that more people are believing the autism theory, but more and more people are hearing about it,” Kirzinger said. Since doubts about vaccine safety directly reduce parents’ vaccination of their children, “that shows how important it is for actual information to be part of the media landscape,” she said.“This is what one would expect when people are confused by conflicting messages coming from people in positions of authority,” said Kelly Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.org, a vaccination advocacy group.Numerous scientific studies have established no link between any vaccine and autism. But Kennedy has ordered HHS to undertake an investigation of possible environmental contributors to autism, promising to have “some of the answers” behind an increase in the incidence of the condition by September.The deepening Republican skepticism toward vaccines makes it hard for accurate information to break through in many parts of the nation, said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer at The Immunization Partnership, in Houston.Lakshmanan on April 23 was to present a paper on countering anti-vaccine activism to the World Vaccine Congress in Washington. It was based on a survey that found that in the Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma state assemblies, lawmakers with medical professions were among those least likely to support public health measures.“There is a political layer that influences these lawmakers,” she said. When lawmakers invite vaccine opponents to testify at legislative hearings, for example, it feeds a deluge of misinformation that is difficult to counter, she said.Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Ladera Ranch, California, which was hit by a 2014-15 measles outbreak that started in Disneyland, said fear of measles and tighter California state restrictions on vaccine exemptions had staved off new infections in his Orange County community.“The biggest downside of measles vaccines is that they work really well. Everyone gets vaccinated, no one gets measles, everyone forgets about measles,” he said. “But when it comes back, they realize there are kids getting really sick and potentially dying in my community, and everyone says, ‘Holy crap; we better vaccinate!’”Ball treated three very sick children with measles in 2015. Afterward his practice stopped seeing unvaccinated patients. “We had had babies exposed in our waiting room,” he said. “We had disease spreading in our office, which was not cool.”Although two otherwise healthy young girls died of measles during the Texas outbreak, “people still aren’t scared of the disease,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has seen a few cases.But the deaths “have created more angst, based on the number of calls I’m getting from parents trying to vaccinate their 4-month-old and 6-month-old babies,” Offit said. Children generally get their first measles shot at age 1, because it tends not to produce full immunity if given at a younger age.KFF Health News’ Jackie Fortiér contributed to this report.This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF. It was originally published on April 23, 2025, and has been republished with permission.

Activism
Education
Health

Evangelical churches in Indiana turn to solar and sustainability as an expression of faith

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

Activism
Climate
Crisis

Will the next pope be liberal or conservative? Neither.

If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change […]

Pope Francis meets students at Portugal’s Catholic University on August 3, 2023, in Lisbon for World Youth Day, an international Catholic rally inaugurated by St. John Paul II to invigorate young people in their faith. | Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change church doctrine, didn’t dramatically alter the Church’s teachings, and didn’t fundamentally disrupt the bedrock of Catholic belief. Catholics still believe there is one God who exists as three divine persons, that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that sin is still a thing. Only men can serve in the priesthood, life still begins at conception, and faith is lived through both prayer and good works. And yet it still feels like Pope Francis transformed the Church — breathing life into a 2,000-year-old institution by making it a player in current events, updating some of its bureaucracy to better respond to earthly affairs, and recentering the Church’s focus on the principle that it is open to all, but especially concerned with the least well off and marginalized in society. With Francis gone, how should we think of his legacy? Was he really the radical progressive revolutionary some on the American political right cast him as? And will his successor follow in his footsteps?   To try to neatly place Francis on the US political spectrum is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s precisely because Francis and his potential successors defy our ability to categorize their legacies within our worldly, partisan, and tribalistic categories that it’s not very useful to use labels like “liberal” and “conservative.” Those things mean very different things within the Church versus outside of it. Instead, it’s more helpful to realize just how much Francis changed the Church’s tone and posturing toward openness and care for the least well off — and how he set up to Church to continue in that direction after he’s gone. He was neither liberal nor conservative: He was a bridge to the future who made the Church more relevant, without betraying its core teachings. That starting point will be critical for reading and understanding the next few weeks of papal news and speculation — especially as poorly sourced viral charts and infographics that lack context spread on social media in an attempt to explain what comes next. Revisiting Francis’s papacy Francis’s papacy is a prime example of how unhelpful it is to try to think of popes, and the Church, along the right-left political spectrum we’re used to thinking of in Western democracies.  When he was elected in 2013, Francis was a bit of an enigma. Progressives cautioned each other not to get too hopeful, while conservatives were wary about how open he would be to changing the Church’s public presence and social teachings. Before being elected pope, he was described as more traditional — not as activist as some of his Latin American peers who embraced progressive, socialist-adjacent liberation theology and intervened in political developments in Argentina, for example. He was orthodox and “uncompromising” on issues related to the right to life (euthanasia, the death penalty, and abortion) and on the role of women in the church, and advocated for clergy to embrace austerity and humility. And yet he was known to take unorthodox approaches to his ministry: advocating for the poor and the oppressed, and expressing openness to other religions in Argentina. He would bring that mix of views to his papacy. The following decade would see the Church undergo few changes in theological or doctrinal teachings, and yet it still appeared as though it was dramatically breaking with the past. That duality was in part because Francis was essentially both a conservative and a liberal, by American standards, at the same time, as Catholic writer James T. Keane argued in 2021. Francis was anti-abortion, critical of gender theory, opposed to ordaining women, and opposed to marriage for same-sex couples, while also welcoming the LGBTQ community, fiercely criticizing capitalism, unabashedly defending immigrants, opposing the death penalty, and advocating for environmentalism and care for the planet. That was how Francis functioned as a bridge between the traditionalism of his predecessors and a Church able to embrace modernity. And that’s also why he had so many critics: He was both too liberal and radical, and not progressive or bold enough. Francis used the Church’s unchanging foundational teachings and beliefs to respond to the crises of the 21st century and to consistently push for a “both-and” approach to social issues, endorsing “conservative”-coded teachings while adding on more focus to social justice issues that hadn’t been the traditionally associated with the church. That’s the approach he took when critiquing consumerism, modern capitalism, and “throwaway culture,” for example, employing the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life to attack abortion rights, promote environmentalism, and criticize neo-liberal economics. None of those issues required dramatic changes to the Church’s religious or theological teachings. But they did involve moving the church beyond older debates — such as abortion, contraception, and marriage — and into other moral quandaries: economics, immigration, war, and climate change. And he spoke plainly about these debates in public, as when he responded, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about LGBTQ Catholics or said he wishes that hell is “empty.” Still, he reinforced that softer, more inquisitive and humble church tone with restructuring and reforms within the church bureaucracy — essentially setting the church up for a continued march along this path. Nearly 80 percent of the cardinals who are eligible to vote in a papal conclave were appointed by Francis — some 108 of 135 members of the College of Cardinals who can vote, per the Vatican itself. Most don’t align on any consistent ideological spectrum, having vastly different beliefs about the role of the Church, how the Church’s internal workings should operate, and what the Church’s social stances should be — that’s partially why it’s risky to read into and interpret projections about “wings” or ideological “factions” among the cardinal-electors as if they are a parliament or house of Congress. There will naturally be speculation, given who Francis appointed as cardinals, that his successor will be non-European and less traditional. But as Francis himself showed through his papacy, the church has the benefit of time and taking the long view on social issues. He reminded Catholics that concern for the poor and oppressed must be just as central to the Church’s presence in the world as any age-old culture war issue. And to try to apply to popes and the Church the political labels and sets of beliefs we use in America is pointless.

Activism
Climate
Culture

Grassroots activists who took on corruption and corporate power share 2025 Goldman prize

Seven winners of environmental prize include Amazonian river campaigner and Tunisian who fought against organised waste traffickingIndigenous river campaigner from Peru honouredGrassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency. Continue reading...

Grassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency.This year’s recipients include Semia Gharbi, a scientist and environmental educator from Tunisia, who took on an organised waste trafficking network that led to more than 40 arrests, including 26 Tunisian officials and 16 Italians with ties to the illegal trade.Semia Gharbi campaigning in Tunisia. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeGharbi, 57, headed a public campaign demanding accountability after an Italian company was found to have shipped hundreds of containers of household garbage to Tunisia to dump in its overfilled landfill sites, rather than the recyclable plastic it had declared it was shipping.Gharbi lobbied lawmakers, compiled dossiers for UN experts and helped organise media coverage in both countries. Eventually, 6,000 tonnes of illegally exported household waste was shipped back to Italy in February 2022, and the scandal spurred the EU to close some loopholes governing international waste shipping.Not far away in the Canary Islands, Carlos Mallo Molina helped lead another sophisticated effort to prevent the construction of a large recreational boat and ferry terminal on the island of Tenerife that threatened to damage Spain’s most important marine reserve.Carlos Mallo Molina. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe tourism gravy train can seem impossible to derail, but in 2018 Mallo swapped his career as a civil engineer to stop the sprawling Fonsalía port, which threatened the 170,000-acre biodiverse protected area that provides vital habitat for endangered sea turtles, whales, giant squid and blue sharks.As with Gharbi in Tunisia, education played a big role in the campaign’s success and included developing a virtual scuba dive into the threatened marine areas and a children’s book about a sea turtle searching for seagrass in the Canary Islands. After three years of pressure backed by international environmental groups, divers and residents, the government cancelled construction of the port, safeguarding the only whale heritage site in European territorial waters.“It’s been a tough year for both people and the planet,” said Jennifer Goldman Wallis, vice-president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation. “There’s so much that worries us, stresses us, outrages us, and keeps us divided … these environmental leaders and teachers – and the global environmental community that supports them – are the antidote.”For the past 36 years, the Goldman prize has honoured environmental defenders from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions, recognising their commitment and achievements in the face of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. To date, 233 winners from 98 nations have been awarded the prize. Many have gone on to hold positions in governments, as heads of state, nonprofit leaders, and as Nobel prize laureates.Three Goldman recipients have been killed, including the 2015 winner from Honduras, the Indigenous Lenca leader Berta Cáceres, whose death in 2016 was orchestrated by executives of an internationally financed dam company whose project she helped stall.Environmental and land rights defenders often persist in drawn-out efforts to secure clean water and air for their communities and future generations – despite facing threats including online harassment, bogus criminal charges, and sometimes physical violence. More than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed globally between 2012 and 2023, according to an observatory run by the charity Global Witness.Latin America remains the most dangerous place to defend the environment but a range of repressive tactics are increasingly being used to silence activists across Asia, the US, the UK and the EU.In the US, Laurene Allen was recognised for her extraordinary leadership, which culminated in a plastics plant being closed in 2024 after two decades of leaking toxic forever chemicals into the air, soil and water supplies in the small town of Merrimack, New Hampshire. The 62-year-old social worker turned water protector developed the town’s local campaign into a statewide and national network to address Pfas contamination, helping persuade the Biden administration to establish the first federal drinking water standard for forever chemicals.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionLaurene Allen. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThree of this year’s Goldman recipients were involved in battles to save two rivers thousands of miles apart – in Peru and Albania – which both led to landmark victories.Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika not only helped stop construction of a hydroelectric dam on the 167-mile Vjosa River, but their decade-long campaign led to the Albanian government declaring it a wild river national park.Guri, 37, a social worker, and Nika, 39, a biologist and ecologist, garnered support from scientists, lawyers, EU parliamentarians and celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, for the new national park – the first in Europe to protect a wild river. This historic designation protects the Vjosa and its three tributaries, which are among the last remaining free-flowing undammed rivers in Europe.In Peru, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 56, led the Indigenous Kukama women’s association to a landmark court victory that granted the 1,000-mile Marañón River legal personhood, with the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination.Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe Marañón River and its tributaries are the life veins of Peru’s tropical rainforests and support 75% of its tropical wetlands – but also flow through lands containing some of the South American country’s biggest oil and gas fields. The court ordered the Peruvian government to stop violating the rivers’ rights, and take immediate action to prevent future oil spills.The Kukama people, who believe their ancestors reside on the riverbed, were recognised by the court as stewards of the great Marañón.This year’s oldest winner was Batmunkh Luvsandash from Mongolia, an 81-year-old former electrical engineer whose anti-mining activism has led to 200,000 acres of the East Gobi desert being protected from the world’s insatiable appetite for metal minerals.

Activism
Climate
Pollution

Suggested Viewing

Jetty Cats

Jetty Cats explores contemporary animal rights issues through a focus on a feral cat colony that has survived on a rocky, seaside jetty in Southern California for decades. There is an ongoing debate over feral cat colonies involving advocates who support the trap, neuter, and return -- or "TNR" -- model of management, and those who argue that trapping and euthanizing the cats is more humane. This documentary’s point-of-view supports the TNR model and the related “no-kill” animal shelter policy, and features an exclusive interview with Richard Avanzino, the "Father" of the no-kill movement.

Animals
Government
Activism

CHAO CARBÓN DOCUMENTARY

Mr. Aes Gener is a greedy mega-entrepreneur in the energy business. Through his story we get into the dirty business he has done in Chile and the world with coal, while we see, through archival footage, the damage to people and nature of this obsolete and polluting fossil fuel.

Energy
Pollution
Activism

The Whale Guitar: Instrument of Change

Inspired by Herman Melville's epic tale, "Moby-Dick or The Whale", a late-blooming singer/songwriter and former toy designer, Jen Long, acts on a startling vision and commissions the design and build of a remarkable custom electric guitar. It's body is "The Whale" itself as it snags the mad Captain Ahab in the tangled ropes of his own obsession, and prepares to launch a boat of his whalers to their doom. The entire guitar reinterprets Melville's tale as an Anthropocene climate change warning, with the whale representing the seas and storms of climate change arising on this "third day" of late stage capitalism. Hundreds of guitarists, including J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, have played and signed this "Instrument of Change" to amplify the alarm to turn our ship of over-production and over-consumption around while there is still time. As the embroidered strap featuring Starbuck's last words implores: "oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist."

Music
Activism
Climate

A Community, Fighting

This short film marks the 20 year campaign sparked by the news that a waste company had arrived armed with plans to build a large hazardous waste incinerator at the end of a then undeveloped cul-de-sac in Ringaskiddy, the industrial heartland of Cork. As news percolated around Cork Harbour, concern and opposition, evident from the outset, consolidated, galvanised and continued to go from strength to strength over the course of the years that saw a community stuck in a battle that they didn’t invite. The campaign, at the time of completion of this film, is still ongoing. This film is a visual representation of the time that has passed - from protests, to fundraisers, to court battles, at the heart of it a community subject to much struggle. However, they have not let that stop them and have truly shown the strength in numbers and staying power.

Activism
Pollution
Culture

In His Own Home

Heavily armed officers of the University of Florida police department in Gainesville, FL, responding to a 911 call from a neighbor who heard screams, break into the campus apartment of Ghanaian graduate student, Kofi Adu-Brempong. Clad in SWAT gear and ready to attack, they see the disabled doctoral student, sitting with a metal table leg in his hand and within a minute of entry, shoot the unarmed man in the face. Adu-Brempong, who because of childhood polio, needed a cane to walk, and had been suffering from mental illness, now has severe facial injuries, and is charged with resisting arrest. He is guarded outside his hospital door, his legs shackled together when going to the bathroom. The officer who shoots Kofi, and who had previously been caught cruising through town throwing eggs at residents of a Black neighborhood, is not suspended or fired. Student protests lead the administration to drop charges but calls for revoking SWAT-like teams on campus go unheard. Kofi’s shooting is not an isolated incident but part of an ongoing pattern of police brutality against Blacks and a stark reminder of the dangers of increasingly militarized campuses nationwide. In His Own Home came out of outrage by a small group of concerned community members committed to seeing social justice happen on a local level. This documentary is an educational and organizing tool, especially calling for our communities to be safe from violence by racist and over-armed police.

Social Justice
Health
Activism

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.