Wages for Housework Community Archives

Thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Women in Dialogue is building and re-housing the Wages for Housework Campaign (WFH) Community archives at the new Crossroads Women’s Center 5011/5013 Wayne Avenue in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.  The archives was launched on March 27, 2022 — the 50th anniversary of WFH!! —  at an event Moving Forward by Looking Back at the new Center. Stay tuned for the news of the launch of our online archives and the Grand Opening of our community archives in Spring 2023.  Many thanks to Mellon Foundation for making this possible. 

Phoebe Jones addresses the crowd gathered for the launch of the Wages for Housework Community Archives on March 27, 2022.

Coming soon! Link to the Online archives! 

UCLA Graduate Student Thalia Ertman helping archive at 33 Maplewood Mall where the archives is currently based (Dec 2022)

Video of 50th Anniversary Wages for Housework Campaign event and the launch of Wages for Housework Community Archives at Crossroads Women Center, Philadelphia.

Our Archives project is also promoting intergenerational exchange. As part of our Lessons from the Archives series, the Women in Dialogue Archives Speakers Bureau provided two speakers for this intergenerational event at the University of Toronto.

We also sponsored Selma James in another exchange with her granddaughter Chanda Prescod-Weinstein at an event at Princeton University.

Join us for a conversation with Professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Black feminist theorist and theoretical physicist and author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (2021), and her grandmother Selma James, long-time feminist activist and ‘Wages for Housework’ co-founder, on Wednesday, April 6th, 12:15-1:15pm. In keeping with this spring’s Organizing Stories theme, Feminism’s Archives, Prescod-Weinstein and James will be in conversation about James’ new book, Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet (2021), and the legacies of inter-generational feminism.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. In her capacity as a physicist, she is a particle and cosmology theorist, with a focus on understanding dark matter. She also holds expertise in Black feminist science, technology, and society studies, with a particular interest in how race and gender shape knowledge and practice in physics. She is one of under 100 Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred came out on March 9, 2021.

Selma James is a women’s rights and antiracist campaigner and author. From 1958 to 1962 she worked with C.L.R. James in the movement for West Indian federation and independence. In 1972 she cofounded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 helped launch the Global Women’s Strike whose strategy for change is “Invest in Caring, Not Killing.” She coined the word “unwaged,” which has since entered the English language. In the 1970s she was the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes. She is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. She coauthored the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which launched the “domestic labour debate.”

Information Center

The Center also receives call for information and documentation about our work and the issues we address.  We have shelves of resource information on issues such as housing and domestic violence that women come to view.  Women contribute to the resource files by adding their experiences of accessing those resources.