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Spent part of my Mother’s Day call with my mom talking about her work on Wages for Housework in the 1970s, which you’ve probably never heard Silvia Federici mention. Also heard a new story today: the time she debated Phyllis Schlafly on CBS and polls showed my mom won.
Yes I’ve been writing a lot of salty tweets about Silvia Federici recently but frankly I’m really frustrated with the way feminist scholars have allowed her to produce this totally revisionist history of Wages for Housework as an idea and a movement
A few days ago the NYT had an opinion piece in it that just completely makes things up about WFH, including that it died when Federici left it. It also fails to credit Selma James with being a co-founder of the movement.
This book won awards plural and similarly erases Selma with another Mariarosa and Silvia hagiography AND bizarrely doesn’t connect the work of Black Women for WFH even though it’s ... a book about abuses of Black women’s bodies. https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-afterlife-of-reproductive-slavery
My mom (Margaret Prescod if you didn’t know) was a founder of Black women for wages for housework along with Wilmette Brown and Audre Lorde was an early member. As in you’re not getting Lorde’s history right either when this stuff is left out.
My mom can be heard on the radio 4 days a week streaming live on KPFK’s website 7-8 am Tu-Fr or on the radio if you’re in a city with a Pacifica network. You can also see part of her story in Tales of the Grim Sleeper.
This Los Angeles Times profile of my mom from 1986 is — egregiously — the last major profile that was done on her. But it’s still so good that I regularly re-read it to help me get myself going. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-10-16-vw-5852-story.html
My mom is a pretty boss orator and I learned to be fearless on stage from her:
She’s one of the few US-based journalists who has tried to report accurately and with grassroots folks in mind from Haiti: https://therealnews.com/stories/special-report-massacres-in-haiti-pacificas-margaret-prescod
And she’s literally not afraid to grab the microphone right out of thr LAPD chief’s hands:
There are stories about my mom’s personal experiences with Federici that are not mine to tell. But trust I have an intense personal problem with the dishonest hagiographies, on top of my intellectual distaste for them.
