‘Wages for Housework’ in Australia: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Australian governments have provided some form of social welfare to parents since the Maternity Allowance was introduced federally by the Labor government in 1912. This was eventually replaced by a national child endowment scheme in 1941—which provided a universal weekly payment paid directly to mothers. These payments were landmark policies that reflected changing ideas about the state’s role in supporting families, but they were the product of decades of advocacy and negotiation amidst broader tensions between conservatism and socialist reform. While most public arguments for child endowment stressed the inherent vulnerability of children, feminist advocates—including members of the Communist Party of Australia, the Australian Labor Party, the National Council of Women, and the Union of Australian Women—originally called for motherhood endowment. They framed motherhood payments not only as an anti-poverty measure in the interests of children but as a way of alleviating women’s financial dependence on their husbands and providing remuneration for the necessary and valuable work and care done overwhelmingly by mothers in the home. In this way, feminist arguments for motherhood endowment in Australia followed the logic of the now popularly recognised Marxist-feminist Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, preceding it by several decades. In this presentation, I will draw on historical examples of feminist advocacy for motherhood endowment to contextualise contemporary advocacy for family policy reform, which is dominated by calls for universal childcare. I question how calls for universal childcare, which are arguably motivated by the (short-term) economic gain of women’s increased workforce participation rather than a genuine interest in care and wellbeing, ‘background’ maternal wellbeing and render reproductive labour and care in the body and home largely invisible.