Materialism, autonomy, intersectionality: revisiting Virginia Woolf through the Wages for Housework perspective

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay Three Guineas contends that the material basis is indispensable for women not only to survive but also to voice their political opinions. Woolf proposes three strategies for women to take. First, women should assert their right to have access to independent income, and for this purpose they should demand that the state pay for their reproductive work that often limits their opportunity to do waged work. Second, they must object to the very wage system which is indeed in complicity with patriarchy, and through which women are doubly exploited as unwaged or under-waged workers. And third, women must remain outside male-dominated movements and must organise an autonomous group even if they share the same cause with male workers; intersectional association will be possible only when each exploited group empowers itself and regains its own voice. This article examines how this highly materialist aspect of Woolf's feminism was revisited by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. By so doing, it argues that despite its facade of literary modernism and alleged elitism, Woolf's text contributes to real-life movements and continues to inspire people of different class backgrounds in different times. Discovering the connection between Woolf and Marxist feminism alters our way of seeing the history of feminist theory: the history is never a linear progress from one wave to another but a complex and interwoven narrative, in which once-forgotten ideas can travel across time and space, resurging as new ideas in different contexts.

Rereading the Wages for Housework Campaign: Feminist Degrowth Reflections on Social Reproduction, Commons, and a Care Income

“…6 The debate certainly had precedents. For example, the British suffragette Eleanor Rathbone demanded wages for mothers in the mid-1920s, a demand also taken up by Virginia Woolf in her 1938 essay Three guineas (Nakai 2022). 7 Though often structurally forgotten, women have been involved in labor strikes since the industrial revolution.…”

Wages for Housework: The Marxist-Feminist Case for Basic Income

“…Both the WfH demand and the idea of a basic income have seen a resurgence of interest in recent years. With some notable exceptions (Weeks, 2011;Macdonald, 2018;Nakai, 2022), the two are generally analyzed independently. The phrasing of the WfH demand made it particularly vulnerable to fears that it would entrench gendered disparities in responsibility for care work.…”