Unpaid Work and Feminist Alliances across Difference: Three Local Studies of Wages for Housework Organizing in Canada

This article analyzes Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians organizing in Canada through three local case studies in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Toronto, showing how struggles over unpaid caring labour generated feminist alliances across race, class, sexuality, and immigration status. Using interviews with movement leaders and rank-and-file activists alongside private and public archival collections, it traces both solidarities and conflicts between these Marxist feminist groups, low-income mothers, immigrant women’s organizations, Indigenous women, and mainstream feminist bodies such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. The authors argue that Canadian Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians activism was locally vibrant, transnationally connected, and has left a durable legacy in contemporary organizing around welfare rights, immigrant domestic workers, queer politics, and the recognition of women’s unpaid and underpaid care work.