The last time Selma James was interviewed by the Guardian was in 1976, by the feminist columnist Jill Tweedie. At that time, James was a household name – in feminist households at least – and this is how Tweedie began: “To many women in the women’s movement, the Wages for Housework campaigners come over like Jehovah’s Witnesses … Selma James and her sister enthusiasts … harangue conferences, shout from soapboxes, gesticulate on television, burn with a strange fever … On the street corner they go down well. Within the movement … they set up a high level of irritation. Eyes roll heavenwards, figures slump in seats as yet another campaigner leaps for the platform.”

Many years have passed, and James has long since been dismissed by many of her feminist contemporaries as an irrelevant, or even ridiculous, figure. Her work has been neglected; her key demand – wages for housework – written off. And yet James herself has neither stopped, nor slowed down for a moment. When we meet, she is fresh from a trip to the US. There to promote the new anthology of her writing, she became embroiled in a row that rocked the presidential race. One of Obama’s team said Mitt Romney’s wife Ann, a mother of five, had “never worked a day in her life”, and in a flash, there was James, gesticulating on television again (the Amy Goodman show this time), explaining, yet again, about the significance of women’s unwaged labour in the home. The gleam is still in her eye, she still burns with a strange fever. She is 82.

The anthology, Sex Race and Class (Merlin) is a collection of speeches, articles – mainly from now defunct leftist newspapers – and essays originally published as campaigning pamphlets. Every piece is rooted not in academic study but in activism: a campaign to defend family allowance (1973); an occupation of a church to defend prostitutes against the police (1983); a speech about Jewish anti-Zionism (2010); an account of her work with death row prisoner and “jailhouse lawyer” Mumia Abu-Jamal (2011). In the first essay, “A Woman’s Place”, James describes the frustrations of women’s lives as housewives, mothers and workers, and ends with the words: “Things can’t go on the way they are. Every woman knows that.” Written in 1952, it is a prescient piece of work.

Her campaigning and her writing – the two are indivisible – spring from one central insight: that “housework” (not just vacuuming, but all the work involved in meeting the physical and emotional needs of others, from cradle to grave) is central to the reproduction of humanity, and therefore to capitalism. By focusing on the unwaged, Wages for Housework revolutionises our idea of what work is, and who the working class are. It allows us to see the potential collective power of those who are most isolated and seem powerless: women stuck at home changing nappies. And it goes straight to the heart of a dilemma that still plagues many women: “I started,” James says now, “as a housewife refusing housework. As a mother, doing this work that is so central to society, I was locked in and impoverished. But this work is not like other work: we hate it, and we want to do it. By demanding payment for housework we attack what is terrible about caring in our capitalist society, while protecting what is great about it, and what it could be. We refuse housework, because we think everyone should be doing it.”

She was born Selma Deitch in Brooklyn in 1930. Hers was one of four working-class Jewish families who lived in a house on the corner of Ralph Avenue and Dean Street, where the Jewish ghetto met the black ghetto: “Our front door faced on to the black street, but our address was on the white street. By the time I was six I understood a lot about racism. I could smell it in the people I knew.” From day one, anti-racism was central to James’s feminism. So, too, was the left. “The movement was everywhere,” she remembers. Her truck-driver father was a trade unionist when that meant beatings from the mafia and regular spells in jail, her mother a housewife who struggled to make ends meet and battled for justice for the welfare mothers on her street. Aged six, James was combing the streets with her sisters, collecting foil cigarette wrappers for the Spanish Republicans: “We’d roll them into these huge bullets. What they used them for, I don’t know.”

When she was still a girl, James joined a splinter group of the Workers party (WP) called the Johnson Forest Tendency. The group’s leader was the Trinidadian historian and anti-colonialist, CLR James. It was a tiny group, at war with the WP leadership. At its height, there were only 70 Johnsonites: “Seventy people scattered across a big country – not a lot. But the leader was a black man, an immigrant from the West Indies and a historian; his two closest colleagues were women, one a Russian immigrant, the other first-generation Chinese-American … We were multiracial. We were confident. We felt we were ‘going somewhere’ … building not a vanguard party so we could one day be the state, but a movement.”

James started attending CLR’s classes in slavery and the civil war and he noticed her: “He said to my sister: ‘When I mention the dialectic, your sister’s eyes light up.'” She was 14 when they first met; he was 44. It was CLR who persuaded her to write, to speak up. “He shaped my mind. But it was the mind I wanted. I always wanted to know how to think, and there was this man who knew.”

At 17, she married a fellow factory worker; by 18 she’d given birth to their son, Sam. The marriage, she says, was over before it began, and they eventually separated four years later. By then, McCarthyism was in full swing: “phones tapped, mail interfered with, visits from the FBI. Some of us lost our jobs (I lost mine), some were blacklisted”. CLR James was sent to Ellis Island, where Selma wrote to him regularly; slowly, they fell in love. On his release, and fearing deportation, CLR left for London. Selma and her son went with him and shortly afterwards, they married. What was it like, being in a mixed-race marriage then? Finding a flat was difficult, she admits, but London in the mid-50s was not as racist as it later became: “You’d see mixed marriages all the time. Working-class people found their way to each other, and there was not a problem.”

They were together for almost 30 years. Ostensibly, he was the intellectual, she his audiotypist (she typed Beyond a Boundary so many times, she says, that she could recite the entire book from memory) but she always held her own. Journalist and activist Darcus Howe, CLR James’s nephew, remembers “this tiny white woman” working alongside black people, and “always asking so many profound and serious questions”. She was formidable, he says: “That finger-pointing, those eyes flashing!” Was he intimidated? “Oh, no. I liked her very much.”

In 1958 James went with CLR to Trinidad, where he edited the pro-independence party’s newspaper. She fell in love with the West Indies. “What the people did with the language was Shakespearean! They opened the language, transformed it.” Even now, her Brooklyn accent is softened by a West Indian lilt, as if she absorbed the essence of the place. But she was not impressed by those who led the independence movement: “I saw the state close up. It was an enormous education. Almost all of them were awful. It is the ambition, it makes people awful.” By the time she left, she had “had enough of the middle class, of the intelligentsia. I thought, I am going to be with working-class people from now on.”

She arrived back in London in 1969, just as the women’s liberation movement invented itself. The British feminist, Bea Campbell – no friend of James – remembers it as “a torrid, marvellous time, with groups being formed suddenly, and everywhere”. Campbell was 22, and recalls a movement as “full of women in their 20s”. Enter James: “She was 40, fully-formed, fortified,” says Campbell. “She knew how to do battle. A small Trotskyist sect formed her, and she has remained schismatic ever since. Schismatic, sectarian, polarising: Selma got on women’s nerves.”

That’s not how James remembers it. The schism was not about age, she insists, but class: “I brought a reality to the movement they didn’t want to acknowledge: that there is a struggle going on, and we have to decide whose side we’re on.” And all that talk of liberation through work! James had spent years working a double day in a factory and as a housewife: she knew what working-class women felt about factory work: “They walk in, they run out.” Too many women in the movement simply “didn’t know anything about the world”.

And it was about race, too. James was living “a double life” at that time. Her best friends were not white feminists, but the West Indian nurses she knew though her anti-racist activism. Selma remembers the time her great friend, Earla Campbell met Juliet Mitchell, the eminent feminist psychologist: “It was one of these early women’s liberation demos, and I took Earla along. Afterwards, she said to me: ‘Do you know how much Juliet’s shoes cost? Fifteen pounds!’ Earla was making £15 a week. She said, what are you doingwith these people?” James is on a roll now, finger pointing, eyes flashing: “When Michael [Rabiger, a BBC producer] asked me to make a film about the women’s movement, Juliet Mitchell was horrified. She said to him: ‘Not Selma! She’ll make a film about black power!’ The idea that, because I was part of the black movement, I could not at the same time have as my focus women is beyond belief stupid. But that’s who [the leading 70s feminists] were. They objected to me because I was standing in the way of what they wanted their political direction to be.”

The 70s was a productive period for James, albeit one punctuated by fighting. A collaboration with the Italian feminist, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, produced The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community in 1972, published first under Dalla Costa’s name alone, but claimed by James in the anthology as a joint work. The two later fell out, for reasons that are unclear. The same year James wrote Women, the Unions and Work, Or …What Is Not to Be Done. This pamphlet, written in four hours, Xeroxed, and distributed on the coach up to the 1972 Women’s Liberation conference, contains six demands, beginning with “We demand the right to work less,” and including, for the first time, “We demand wages for housework.”

Many women were hostile. “One woman asked, will it institutionalise women in the home? I said, I don’t know. It hadn’t crossed my mind. But I said to myself: ‘Maybe it will. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!’ I thought, if it did, I could stop typing and listen to my music! Some said women must go out to work to raise their consciousness. But others said: ‘No, my mother’s been out working for 20 years and she wants to come home.’ And I said, this is it! This is Wages for Housework.”

These arguments are rehearsed by Tweedie in her 1976 Guardian article, in which she questions, with great honesty, her own irritable reaction to Wages for Housework. “What do I feel?” Tweedie asks: “The horrid resentment of the mind bred to slavery and faced with freedom.”

In the wider women’s movement, though, James lost the argument. Womencoalesced around other demands, the first of which was “equal pay for equal work”. Middle-class women began to enter male professions. A wrong turn, according to James: “Every time we build a movement a few people get jobs, and those who can get the jobs claim this was the objective of the movement.”

James, meanwhile, spent the first few years of the 70s living on grants, benefits and typing, and talking about Wages for Housework: “Increasingly I found out what Wages for Housework was.” It was not simply a demand at all, but “a political perspective, a class perspective that began with the unwaged rather than the waged. There was no section of the working class that was left out of this perspective, neither in the third world nor in the industrial world. I thought: look what was in it! I never knew! By 1975 the debate was over for us; it was time to put the perspective into practice.”

Her Crossroads Women’s Centre began as a squat in a red-light area near Euston station in 1975; in May this year it moved to smart new premises. In the years between they have faced eviction several times, but the centre was always saved – on one occasion by squatters, including Bengali families, who had received support from the women there. It is, as far as James knows, the oldest surviving women’s centre in London, if not the UK, and it is currently home to more than 15 groups, including the English Collective of Prostitutes, Legal Action for Women, Women Against Rape and – naturally – the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Links have been made with domestic workers in Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, rural women in India and Uganda, and sex workers in the Philippines.

There have been struggles, and triumphs, some of which are documented in Sex, Race and Class. “The UN Decade for Women — An Offer We Couldn’t Refuse” tells the story of a painstaking 10-year struggle to force the UN to recognise women’s unpaid work. “Hookers in the House of Lords”, an account of a prostitutes’ occupation of a church in 1982, is a hoot, and has clear parallels with contemporary occupations: “We were very sorry to leave … We were physically exhausted and we craved a bath and bed. Yet we were loath to re-enter the flat atmosphere of daily life. In masks [worn by the occupiers to protect the prostitute women’s anonymity] we had glimpsed what could happen: we created change. Taking off the masks, our collective power was as hidden as the reality it had penetrated … It was hard to remember we had won.”

A new generation of feminists is discovering James’s work. Academic Nina Power and writer and blogger Laurie Penny, for example, both cite her as an influence. In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Jenny Turner launched a serious reappraisal of James’s campaign. Meanwhile, James’s call for a guaranteed income, her insistence that a post-work world might be possible, finds echoes in contemporary movements, from Occupy to the Pirates party. None of this is lost on James. The Occupy movement delights her, and she was an enthusiastic participant in last year’s feminist Slutwalk, where she strung a placard around her neck with the words “Pensioner Slut” scrawled above a little red heart.

Today she seems happy. She lives with her fellow campaigner and partner of 19 years, Nina Lopez, in a modest flat in London. A bronze head of CLR James looks down from the mantelpiece, surrounded by photos of James, Nina and their collie dogs. Her son, Sam Weinstein, is a radical trade unionist in America, and she is fiercely proud of him. She remains actively involved in the Crossroads Women’s Centre and is busy, always. The movement, as she would say, is everywhere.

The final essay in Sex, Race and Class is called “Striving for Clarity and Influence”. It is a fierce defence of CLR James’s political legacy against those who would see his achievements in purely literary terms. In it she writes: “Politics, if it is fuelled by a great will to change the world, rather than by personal ambition, offers a chance to know the world, and to be more self-conscious of the actual life you are living rather than being taken over by what you are told you should feel: a chance to live, in other words, an authentic life. Such politics are a unique enrichment, not a sacrifice.”

For anyone interested in CLR James, the essay is fascinating. But when I read it, I think of Selma.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/life-in-writing-selma-james

Hi Selma,
You were probably as surprised as I was to see recent reports that Michael Howard’s new model Tories are floating the idea, borrowed from Finland, that mothers should be paid a substantial amount to stay at home when their children are young. That is, if we consider £150 a month, with an extra £50 per child, a substantial amount in today’s world.Thinking back to the 1980s when Wages for Housework campaigned so militantly for just such a proposal, and were opposed just as passionately by virtually all feminists, including my younger self, I just wondered whether you feel: victory at last? Or do you have just a few sneaking worries that the right has taken up your ideological cudgels? We await the fine print of these proposals, but could this just be top up fees for Worcester Woman or whatever we call her these days?

Curious to hear your views,
Melissa

Dear Melissa,
No, I’m not surprised that the Tories are thinking of paying women. Politicians of both right and left (whatever that means now) are opportunistic, and women in all kinds of jobs have made clear they’re exhausted and still underpaid. They’re demanding the right to have a life, including with their children, rather than a daily marathon. Wages – for housework, caring work, women’s unwaged work generally – is definitely on the agenda.

You’re right: in 1972 when we began, most feminists did oppose women getting wages for unwaged work. But working-class women who were unlikely to identify as feminists never did. We were told that to be liberated, a woman had to “go to work”: why couldn’t a woman be more like a man, or at least his equal? Many working-class women were already struggling with a low-paid jobs on top of caring work, which hadn’t liberated them one inch. We argued that this caring work, which produced all the workers of the world, had to be recognised: measured, valued and paid for.

Many feminists pointed to Margaret Thatcher as a role model, and this role model pushed single mothers off benefits and “into work”. Socialist feminists who hated Thatcher were keen to tell us that women’s consciousness would be raised at the magical “point of production”, and Labour has used this to push single mothers off benefits and “into work”. We argued: why can’t a man be more like a woman?

About time we had this discussion again,
Selma

Dear Selma,
The debate has moved on quite a bit since those early feminist discussions, in lots of interesting ways. Motherhood, not surprisingly, remains central to feminist thinking but the whole debate about work and power is much more sophisticated than it was. Modern feminists, many like myself who have had children, recognise that the parent-child bond is an immensely deep, complex and important one that relies on closeness, especially, but by no means exclusively, in those early years. Any public policy that recognises the value of caring must be an advance.

But if we’re not careful, socio-biology will tell us very quickly that we’re hard-wired for caring and men for earning, and now that nice Michael Howard wants to pay us for our trouble in rearing the next generations’ citizens. This, as I remember, was the major worry about Wages for Housework all those years ago, and for me, it remains. Forget Margaret Thatcher. Modern feminists have insisted, rightly I think, on the importance of mothers remaining part of the work world with their hard-earned talents to contribute, their desire to matter undiminished.

Isn’t this a key question for our times?
Melissa

Dear Melissa,
As I remember, motherhood became a feminist concern as young feminists had children themselves. But now, it’s true, many feminist mothers are rethinking their priorities. Many are aware that we endanger our children’s health and our own if we don’t breastfeed (that precious piece of socio-biology) for at least six months. And that leaving our infants puts their emotions and ours under severe and maybe lasting strain.

I don’t dig this life-balance talk. What’s so enriching about working in call centres? The only other choice: to scrimp on benefits or depend on a man, with no money of your own – a major source of domestic violence, including rape in marriage. I don’t think most jobs men do are more important than raising children. Nor do I think women should be institutionalised as carers or men deprived of their kids. Time for a change!

In Norway and Finland parents use the money from governments to pay others or do the caring themselves. This gives women bargaining power, to accept or reject what employers offer in wages and conditions. Power at home too: men either share the work or move on. For lesbian women, and in fact all women, the money makes it easier to be sexually independent and be mothers too.

So why glorify work outside the home. How many women are professionals? How many men? Most of us go out, get exploited, grab the dosh and run.

Doesn’t balance begin with all of us working less?
Selma

Dear Selma,
In many ways, you are and I share the same gut politics; if feminism is only about the bankers and the broadcasters, not the carers and the cleaners, forget it.

But I just don’t think that old crude divide – beloved of some earlier feminists – between a few career babes and the mass of toiling women holds true anymore. Work-life balance may sound like a ghastly new shampoo, but a lot of modern mothers, and a few dads, mix an interesting enough job – which they may, in part, enjoy just because it gets them out of the home and family, for a while – with spending time with their children.

So how can government policy help them do more of that? Yes, extra money at the point of care will increase women’s bargaining power. But it might just mean more dosh for consumer durables for your average middle England family, which already has a high earning spouse, and lower benefits for poorer women or single parents. Call me cynical, but I suspect that’s the real Tory agenda here.

So, yes, by all means, let’s increase carers’ payments, as long as men are entitled to the money as well. But I’d still like to see more public child care, not 12-hour a day baby farms but something more flexible and modern along the lines of the government’s long planned Children’s Centres. They’d be good for communities too.

Oh, and while I’m in personal manifesto mood, don’t forget the long term. All forms of caring should earn proper pension credits. The scandal of female pensioner poverty, usually the price of a lifetime of caring for others, has gone on long enough.
Melissa

Dear Melissa,
Going to work to “get out of the home and family” – can we accept living like this? Why deny that caring for people is the very stuff of life? Basic to relationships. Basic to human survival. Yet treated as worthless. Women give their all, but it’s not mutual and it’s not paid.

Class divides are strong as ever, I’m afraid. What’s changed is that our thinking is finally international. Women grow 80% of food consumed in Africa and over 60% in Asia, yet are officially “economically inactive”. Despite slogging all day every day, no work record and no wage. Any wonder that we women are 70% of the world’s poor?

Women in Venezuela point the way. They won Article 88 in their constitution which “recognises work at home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to social security”. This includes the pension you propose for women and men carers. But must we wait till we’re old? It’s not as though there’s no money. Look at the $1trillion in annual military budgets.

As for women wasting carers’ wages on “consumer durables”, it’s theirs, and they can do what they damn well please with it. Men do. But experience tells us they’ll feed their children, educate them, and take their independence.
Selma

Dear Selma,
I’m completely with you over the criminal waste of war and the disgraceful fact that millions of the worlds’ women are designated as “economically inactive”. And no – let’s not wait until we’re old. I’d also like to see far better wages for many of the jobs that women do, often an extension of the caring role. I still can’t figure out why a lawyer can charge up to several hundred an hour for his – or her – services and a care assistant should consider herself lucky to get £6.50.

But I feel we’re in real danger here of forgetting one of feminism’s historic achievements: the recognition of women’s need to do more than take care of the home and husband. Remember the “problem that had no name”: Betty Friedan’s description, over 40 years ago now, of the depressed housewife? Feminism didn’t demand the right for women to go out and be a wage slave. Capitalism has distorted that message. But it did put the crucial idea of fulfillment on the agenda.

Is it so very terrible to want – to need – time away from scuddy sinks and sticky fingers and repetitive routines? Men have walked away from these relentless demands for decades, and things are only slowly changing.

So I still insist on women’s right to create meaning out of their lives beyond the hugely important job of caring. Looking after others can’t be the only value by which we shape our lives: that way lies the potential for exploitation.

And I don’t think it’s just a class thing, a professional woman’s thing. I think it’s a human thing.
Melissa

Dear Melissa,
I’m afraid feminism has to take responsibility for urging women to get exploited in our own right! Housewives (and sex workers) were not sisters but obstacles to liberation. For years my fights with feminism centred on its dismissal of the work women spend our lives doing: for children, relatives with disabilities, neighbours, on the land, in courts of justice defending sons (whom we had spent years cleaning hospital floors to feed) from racist police … Often from Islington or Hampstead homes with daily cleaners, they said it could all be done in a couple of hours!

Friedan’s “problem” not only had no name; it wasn’t “work”. (Like New Labour with over 100 women MPs calling single mothers ‘workless”.) If women got wages for it, would we be institutionalised at home? Not in Norway or Finland. Let’s have a little respect for what women will do with power.

Validating caring work – which we began to do in 1985 in Nairobi and 1995 in Beijing, when we got the UN to agree that it should be measured and valued – is the first step to radically changing the whole division of labour and the economy.

Things have changed. Women now don’t want to be institutionalised in waged work or anywhere. They want their children to be more than “the job at home”. As caring work is recognised, we win leverage, not just for careers for a few, but to create what Venezuelan women call “a caring economy, an economy at the service of human beings rather than human beings at the service of the economy”.

Men in Britain have the longest working week in Europe. This is no basis for fathers’ liberation. We’ve got to stop glorifying the work men do and invite them to take part in caring for other life. If we’re not segregated, demeaned, discriminated and impoverished by it, as is true with women now, it’s the most civilising work of all.
Selma

· Melissa Benn is a writer and journalist whose books include Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood.

· Selma James founded the Wages for Housework campaign in 1972 and now coordinates the Global Women’s Strike; her most recent book is The Milk of Human Kindness.