The Home as a Factory: Rethinking the Debate on Housewives’ Wage in Italy, 1929-1980

This chapter is on the Italian debate on housewives’ wages, ideas on the need to pay for housework were not necessarily leftist, revolutionary, or women-friendly ones; proposals of this kind had indeed been suggested (without being realized) during Italian Fascism in the 1930s, within a program aiming to consolidate gender hierarchies, to confi gure mother-hood as a patriotic duty, and to make the most of the resources of domestic work, rationalizing it according to the domestic Taylorism proposed by the American Christine Frederick and encouraging housewives’ hard working. Conversely, from the point of view of the promoters and supporters of the campaign for wages for housework, the worries on the possible negative consequences of granting a payment to housewives might sound paradoxical: promoters and supporters called for wages also to “denaturalize” housework and to contribute to a real revolution and empowering of women. The naturalization of housework was indeed an issue that in the 1960s and 1970s all feminists and women’s and gender historians had to tackle