Wages for Housework

Monica Sjöö painted Wages for Housework, at the height of second-wave feminism, in 1975. Second-wave feminism began in the early 1960s and ended with the feminist sex wars (with intra-feminism disputes over issues such as sexuality and pornography) in the early 1980s, eventually to be replaced by third-wave feminism in the early 1990s. The movement (that occurred throughout the Western world) aimed to increase women’s equality by building on the feminist gains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whilst also being fought alongside the civil rights, Black power, Chicano and gay liberation movements (where many feminists were active participants).

Second-wave feminism broadened the scope of debate to include a wider range of issues: sexuality, family, domesticity, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities. It was a movement focused on critiquing patriarchal, or male-dominated, institutions and cultural practices throughout society. Second-wave feminism also brought attention to issues of domestic violence and marital rape, created rape crisis centers and women’s shelters, and brought about changes in custody law and divorce law.

Art flourished during second-wave feminism. Known as the Feminist art movement, these artists fought to give themselves representation in a field dominated by white men. Their works aimed to end oppression, challenge gender norms and highlight the fraught art industry rooted in white patriarchy. Linda Nochlin’s (1931 – 2017, American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts) essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists’ (1971), one of the movement’s most influential literary works, paved the way by posing questions about gender stereotypes for women in the art field as well as the definition of art itself. The 1960s and 1970s was a period when women artists wanted to gain equal rights with men within the established art world, and to create feminist art, often in non-traditional ways, to help ‘change the world’. The movement, which started in America and Britain (where Sjöö was, more or less, based since 1957) in the late 1960s, included artists like Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) who began to practice art that showed their own reality in their works. The artists at the time realized that it was wrong for art historians and museums to pay more attention to male artists, and that women should further integrate topics such as the social treatment of women, and the frequent discrimination against women into their work.

Wages for Housework deals with the discontent felt by many women (especially housewives) in the mid-1970s. Throughout history, the notion of women’s place within the domestic sphere has been a defining aspect of societal expectations. Rooted in the ‘cult of domesticity’ and the ‘cult of true womanhood,’ these ideals imposed upon women during the late 19th century encapsulated prescribed roles that predominantly encompassed white upper-class women. This concept, introduced by Barbara Welter (? – 2022, intellectual historian and longtime professor at Hunter College, widely credited with launching the field of Women’s Studies, whose 1966 article ‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820 – 1860’ influenced generations of feminist scholars) in 1966 created a rigid framework that relegated women to a confined space of domestic responsibilities. However, this narrative was far from universal, as Black women and working women remained marginalized, excluded from these prescribed norms while still grappling with the confines of domesticity. As pointed out by Amy Tobin however (in ‘Monica Sjöö’s Cosmic Feminism’, article in [Eds.] Jo Widoff & Amy Budd, Monica Sjöö. The Great Cosmic Mother, exhibition catalogue, Moderna Museet, Stockholm/Malmö, Sweden & Modern Art, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2023), Sjöö made sure to include women from all over the world in her art: ‘Many of the figural paintings of the 1970s represent “universal kinship” between women of Asian, African, Caribbean, and indigenous descent, and Caucasian women. These are imagined figures, not portraits but archetypes.’

The second wave of feminism, and the feminist art that it inspired, came as a delayed reaction against the renewed domesticity of women after World War II, in the wake of the late 1940s post-war boom (an era characterized by an unprecedented economic growth, a baby boom, a move to family-oriented suburbs and the ideal of companionate marriages). During this time, women did not tend to seek employment due to their engagement with domestic and household duties, which was seen as their primary duty but often left them isolated within the home and estranged from politics, economics, and law making. In 1963, Betty Friedan (1921 – 2006, American feminist writer and activist), influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s ground-breaking feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949), wrote the bestselling book The Feminine Mystique (often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century). Discussing primarily white women, she explicitly objected to how women were depicted in the mainstream media, and how placing them at home (as ‘housewives’) limited their possibilities and wasted potential. Her survey revealed that women belonging to the workforce, while also playing a role in the home, were more satisfied with their life compared with the women who stayed home. The women who stayed home also showed feelings of agitation and sadness. Friedan concluded that many of these unhappy women had immersed themselves in the idea that they should not have any ambitions outside their home. Friedan described this as ‘The Problem That Has No Name’. The perfect, and heteronormative, nuclear family image depicted (and strongly marketed at the time as a strategy to sell goods within a capitalist driven society), she wrote, did not reflect happiness and was rather degrading for women.

The 1970s saw the launch of Wages for Housework, a grassroots campaign that Sjöö participated in. It was initiated by radical feminists in Italy and gained great popularity in Europe and the United States. They questioned the capitalist system, social conventions, stereotypical gender roles, and unwaged housework. A common slogan at their protest marches was: ‘Tremble, tremble, the witches are returning − not to be burned, but to get paid.’ Working at odds with contemporary artistic ideals, Sjöö made figurative, representative paintings to communicate her message. She viewed it as a revolutionary act, since it showed the real situation for women − their life, work, and struggle – in works like Wages for Housework and House-Wives (1973, oil on Masonite, 122 x 100 cm, The Estate of Monica Sjöö).

Provenance

The Estate of Monica Sjöö.

Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation