Worth More: Gender Roles In The Home and Their Cost and Value
Presented in partnership with the Friends of UW-Madison Libraries.
Join UW-Madison professors, Emily Callaci and Allison Daminger, along with former UW-Madison professor Pernille Ipsen, as they discuss their respective research and work about the undervalued and overly-gendered role of running a household in society. They'll talk about the mental demands, lack of compensation, and movements to redefine gender roles in the household.
Wages for Housework is the fascinating international story of Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, whose movement demanded wages as a starting point for remaking the world as we know it. Drawing on their campaign’s roots in 1970s America, Italy, and the UK, with original archival research and interviews, historian Emily Callaci explores the revolutionary potential of paying women for their work in the home, and how Wages for Housework reimagined potential futures under capitalism—and beyond—in ways that continue to be relevant today.
What’s on Her Mind provides an illuminating look at the cognitive labor that families depend on and reveals why this essential aspect of family life is disproportionately handled by women—even in couples that aspire to practice equality.
A chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived, My Seven Mothers is an eye-opening account of the challenges and possibilities connected with liberation and radical social change during the 1970s. In this time of fierce struggles over family, sexuality, and child-rearing, it reminds us that new worlds are always possible.
Emily Callaci
Emily Callaci is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison and the author of Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, An Idea, a Promise. Her writing has appeared in Dissent, Boston Review and Public Books. She is editor of "History Unclassified," an historical creative non-fiction series published in the American Historical Review.
Allison Daminger
Allison Daminger is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work has been featured in leading publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Psychology Today, and the Atlantic.
Pernille Ipsen
Pernille Ipsen is an author and historian who splits her time between the U.S. and Denmark. After fifteen years as a professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2009-2025) she now writes full-time. My Seven Mothers is her first trade book in English.