The 1970s campaign aimed to smash capitalism by recognising the value of childcare and chores. A new book looks back on how it fell apart – and how it’s relevant today

Emily Callaci is at home in Wisconsin, surrounded by the usual debris of family life. The bed behind her is unmade, she confesses, and there’s “a bunch of marbles and blocks on the floor” left by her sons, now seven and three. But on Zoom she has blurred her background so none of this is visible on screen, just as here, on the other side of the Atlantic, I’ve angled my laptop camera away from the mess on my kitchen worktop. We’ve both automatically hidden the domestic for the sake of looking professional, ironically given this interview is about making unseen, unpaid labour in the home visible.

Callaci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book, Wages for Housework, which chronicles the radical 1970s feminist campaign that argued for recognition of the economic value of domestic labour. In truth, she explains, it was a recipe for revolution, designed to smash capitalism and its underpinning myth that women just love keeping house so much they’ll do it for nothing.