What The Hell America!

Margaret Prescod and Black Women for Wages for Housework led a bold fight to recognize and compensate women’s unpaid labor, pushing for economic justice as a core feminist issue.

This article has been excerpted from Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor by Emily Callaci. Copyright © 2025. Available from Seal Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

A photograph taken on the floor of the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston frames a crowd of about a dozen and a half people, almost all of them Black women.

At the center of the photograph is Margaret Prescod, co-founder of Black Women for Wages for Housework, her hair pulled back into a bun at the crown of her head, bag slung over her shoulder, wearing an apron, signifying that she was part of the Wages for Housework campaign. She is grinning and reaching her arm out to shake the hands of two other women. One of them is Johnnie Tillmon and the other is Beulah Sanders, the pioneering Black woman who led the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1960s.

In the background, women hold up signs, including one that reads “Black Women Speak Out: No Cuts, Just Bucks,” one of the slogans of Black Women for Wages for Housework. Other signs read “Welfare is a Wage,” and “Every Mother is a Working Mother.” In the background, over Prescod’s shoulder, Wilmette Brown smiles broadly, holding up a sign that says: “Wages for Housework for All Women from the Government.”

This historic conference to honor the International Women’s Decade marks a critical moment in the history of American feminism. The centerpiece of the conference was the nationwide struggle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Iconic photographs of the event show Gloria Steinem, Coretta Scott King, Betty Friedan and Shirley Chisholm speaking from the stage in front of a massive blue banner emblazoned with the word WOMAN.

In perhaps the most well-known image from the conference, U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug of New York, wearing her signature wide-brimmed hat, marches arm in arm with a multi-racial coalition of women in their pastel blue convention T-shirts that said “Women on the Move,” holding aloft a torch that had been carried to Houston all the way from Seneca Falls, N.Y., symbolically linking the conference to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention that launched the suffragist movement. The ritual passing of the torch tells a story of continuity and progress from one feminist generation to the next: first voting rights, next equality in the workplace.

Meanwhile, across town, a counter-convention led by conservative Phyllis Schlafly made the opposite argument: Stop the ERA and defend the nuclear family and “traditional” gender roles. The ERA subsequently failed to gain the support needed to ratify it.

The story of the struggle for the ERA is often told as a story about two opposed positions: women as equals in the workplace vs. women in the home as housewives. Democrats vs. Republicans.

The photograph of Prescod with the leaders of the welfare rights movement suggests an alternative feminist genealogy. Prescod, present at the conference as a delegate from the state of New York, came with a clear objective: to change the Plan of Action issued by the conference so that the right to welfare be defended, welfare payments be increased, and welfare recognized as a wage.

A proposal by the Carter administration was already underway to reform welfare, adding onerous work requirements as a condition of eligibility. One of the key principles of this proposal was “to ensure that work will always be more profitable than welfare.” In other words, welfare was defined as the opposite of work.

Prescod saw things differently. She knew that raising children is hard work and that women on welfare are among society’s hardest workers. In a newsletter printed up by Prescod and Brown and handed out at the convention, they wrote, “We don’t need more work. We need more money to work less.”

Together, Black Women for Wages for Housework and welfare rights activists lobbied the conference delegates to recognize that women’s unwaged work was a feminist issue. They faced stiff opposition, including from some whose priorities were in national party politics, and who tried to strip away any language critical of the Carter administration.

Yet after several days of lobbying, bolstered by support from delegates from several Southern states, the National Plan of Action ratified by the conference included a plank labeled Women, Welfare, and Poverty, which stated: “We support increased federal funding for income transfer programs. And just as with other workers, homemakers receiving payments should be afforded the dignity of having that payment called a wage, not welfare.”

The conference’s call to recognize and compensate women’s unpaid work has not captured the imagination in the way the failed battle to ratify the ERA has in public memory.

In the years that followed the conference, the mainstream feminist movement did not embrace welfare as a core priority, focusing more on legal rights than on economic justice. Carter’s reforms were only the beginning of what was to come.

Over the next two decades, welfare would be eviscerated, replaced with onerous workfare programs, bolstered in public discourse with the racist stereotype of the welfare queen. The demand encapsulated in the Women, Welfare, and Poverty plank of the Plan of Action—the result of lobbying and organizing by Black, working-class and poor women—was perhaps the most visionary proposal to come out of the conference.

Their aims were far more ambitious than legal equality with men. In their vision, recognizing poor women’s unwaged work as having economic value was a first step in overturning every hierarchy entrenched over centuries of racial capitalism. This feminist path not yet taken is a product of the radically egalitarian imagination of Margaret Prescod.