In this Gatherings Roadshow presentation, Dr. Jimena Ortúzar brings forward a vibrant archive of ephemera from the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s: pamphlets, posters, flyers, songs, postcards, and street-level graphics used to organize and agitate. Emerging in Italy through a group of Marxist feminists—and later taken up internationally, including by the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee—the movement positioned the sexual division of labour as foundational to women’s exploitation within capitalist societies.
These documents reveal a radical anti-work feminist politics. The movement argued that housework is a form of hidden labour essential to the production of surplus value: it keeps workers fed, clothed, and able to return to the wage economy, while reproducing the next generation of workers. “All women, married or not, housework is our common problem. Let’s make it our common struggle,” one leaflet proclaims.
Ortúzar examines this material through the lens of performance. To refuse housework was, in effect, to refuse performance—to disrupt the gendered scripts of domestic labour. The posters and pamphlets become gestures: instructions for action, visible markers of solidarity, and tools for re-staging everyday life as something that could be interrupted, resisted, or reimagined.
