Selma James | |
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![]() James in 2012 | |
Born | Selma Deitch August 15, 1930 New York City, US |
Other names | Selma Weinstein |
Occupation(s) | Writer, activist |
Years active | 1952–present |
Known for | Co-founder of International Wages for Housework Campaign |
Notable work | The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972); Sex, Race and Class (1974) |
Spouse | |
Children | 1 son |
Website | globalwomenstrike |
Selma James (born Selma Deitch; formerly Weinstein; August 15, 1930) is an American writer, and feminist and social activist who is co-author of the women's movement book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (with Mariarosa Dalla Costa), co-founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and coordinator of the Global Women's Strike. [1]
Deitch [2] was born in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, in 1930. [3] She was raised in a Jewish household [4] and her father was a truck driver while her mother had been a factory worker prior to having children. [3] As a young woman, Selma worked in factories, and then as a full-time housewife and mother to her son, [5] Sam, with whose father, a fellow factory worker, she was in a short-lived marriage. [2] At the age of 15, she had joined the Johnson–Forest Tendency, one of whose three leaders was C. L. R. James, and she began to attend his classes on slavery and the American civil war. [2]
In 1952, she wrote the book A Woman's Place, [6] first published as a column in Correspondence, a bi-weekly newspaper written and edited by its readers with an audience of mainly working-class people. [7] Unusual at the time, the newspaper had pages dedicated to giving women, young people and Black people an autonomous voice. [8] She was a regular columnist and edited the Women's Page. In 1955, she came to England to marry C. L. R. James, who had been deported from the United States during the McCarthy period. They were together for 25 years, and were close political colleagues. [9]
From 1958 to 1962, she lived in Trinidad and Tobago, where, with her husband, she was active in the movement for West Indian independence and federation. [10] Returning to Britain after independence, she became the first organising secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in 1965, and a founding member of the Black Regional Action Movement and editor of its journal in 1969. [11]
In January 1971, James made a BBC Radio broadcast in the series People for Tomorrow – using her own experience of working in low-paid jobs and being a mother and housewife, as well as interviews with full-time housewives, and other females working outside the home while still doing most of the household chores – to explore the exploitation of women in society in general. [12] In 1972, the publication The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa) launched the "domestic labour debate" by spelling out how housework and other caring work women do outside of the market produces the whole working class, thus the market economy, based on those workers, is built on women's unwaged work.[ citation needed ]
That same year, James founded the International Wages for Housework (WFH) campaign, which demands money from the State for the unwaged work in the home and in the community. [13] A raging debate followed about whether caring full-time was "work" or a "role" — and whether it should be compensated with a wage. James's 1972 paper Women, the Unions and Work was presented at the National Conference of Women on March 25–26, 1972. [14] In a 2002 interview with BBC News 24 she stated that housework counted for "basic work in society", that women are entitled to a wage, and said: "We also want the acknowledgement from society that the work we are doing is fundamental and important." [15] Housework counted for "basic work in society", she added. [15]
James was the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes, [16] which campaigns for decriminalisation as well as viable economic alternatives to prostitution. The 1983 publication of James's Marx and Feminism broke with established Marxist theory by providing a reading of Marx's Capital from the point of view of women and of unwaged work. [17]
Beginning in 1985, she co-ordinated the International Women Count Network, which won the UN decision where governments agreed to measure and value unwaged work in national statistics. [18] Legislation on this has since been introduced in Trinidad and Tobago and Spain, and time-use surveys and other research are under way in many countries. In Venezuela, Article 88 of the Constitution recognises work in the home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces wealth and social welfare, and entitles housewives to social security.[ citation needed ]
James lectures in the UK, the US, and other countries on a wide range of topics, including "Sex, Race, & Class", [19] "What the Marxists Never Told Us About Marx", "The Internationalist Jewish Tradition", "Rediscovering Nyerere's Tanzania", "CLR James as a political organizer", and "Jean Rhys: Jumping to Tia". [20]
Since 2000, James has been international coordinator of the Global Women's Strike, a network of grassroots women, bringing together actions and initiatives in many countries. The strike demands that society "Invest in Caring Not Killing", and that military budgets be returned to the community starting with women. She has been working with the Venezuelan Revolution since 2002. [21] She is a founder of the Crossroads Women's Centre, begun under the WFH auspices in 1975 [22] in a red-light district near London's Euston railway station and now located in Kentish Town, [1] [2] [23] and is general editor of Crossroads Books.
In April 2008, James visited Edinburgh (along with Edinburgh-based couple Ralph and Noreen Ibbott, both members of the Britain Tanzania Society in the 1960s) on the anniversary of Tanzania Muungano Day, which falls on April 26. James gave a talk in a session hosted by the Tanzania Edinburgh Community Association (TzECA) on Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa (African socialism) in the 1960s in Tanzania with reference to the subject of Ruvuma Development Association (RDA), [24] and the Tanzania Arusha Declaration. RDA traces its roots to the original Ruvuma Development Association (RDA), which was registered in the early 1960s when, encouraged by Julius Nyerere the first President of Tanzania, following Independence a number of communal villages joined together and organised themselves into what became known as the Ujamaa villages. The driving force behind the Association was Ntimbanjayo Millinga, who was the secretary of the local branch of the Tanzanian African National Union Youth League, and he was supported by Ralph Ibbott, an English quantity surveyor who acted as an advisor and agreed to live and work with his family in the village of Litowa. The session took place at the "Waverley Care Solas" Abbey Mount.[ citation needed ]
In July 2015, James endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. [25]
James is a founder member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network [1] and, in May 2008, signed the Letter of British Jews on 60th anniversary of Israel published in The Guardian , explaining why she would not celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary. [26] In August 2015, she was a signatory to a letter criticising The Jewish Chronicle 's reporting of Jeremy Corbyn's association with alleged antisemites. [27]
![]() | This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(May 2023) |
James appeared briefly in Sir Steve McQueen's 2020 retelling of the Mangrove Nine trial, entitled Mangrove , which formed part of McQueen's Small Axe strand. [29] James was portrayed by actress Jodhi May, with Derek Griffiths featuring as C. L. R. James. [30]
James was a participant in How the Mangrove Nine Won, an hour-long film launched in 2020 giving first-hand accounts of the Mangrove Nine trial, also featuring Ian Macdonald and Altheia Jones-LeCointe. [31]
Julius Kambarage Nyerere was a Tanzanian anti-colonial activist, politician and political theorist. He governed Tanganyika as prime minister from 1961 to 1962 and then as president from 1962 to 1964, after which he led its successor state, Tanzania, as president from 1964 to 1985. He was a founding member and chair of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) party, and of its successor, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, from 1954 to 1990. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he promoted a political philosophy known as Ujamaa.
African socialism or Afrosocialism is a belief in sharing economic resources in a traditional African way, as distinct from classical socialism. Many African politicians of the 1950s and 1960s professed their support for African socialism, although definitions and interpretations of this term varied considerably. These politicians include Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Modibo Keita of Mali, among others.
Barbara-Rose Collins was an American politician from the U.S. state of Michigan and the first black woman from Michigan to be elected to Congress.
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women's labor is uncompensated. Marxist feminists extend traditional Marxist analysis by applying it to unpaid domestic labor and sex relations.
Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.
Silvia Federici is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria from 1984 to 1986. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade. She was also a member of the Academic Association of Africa Scholars (ACAS) and among the voices generating support for the struggles of students across the African continent and in the United States. In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition. From 1979 to 2003, she was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
Ujamaa was a socialist ideology that formed the basis of Julius Nyerere's social and economic development policies in Tanzania after it gained independence from Britain in 1961.
Affective labor is work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. This is in contrast to emotional labor, which is intended to produce or modify one's own emotional experiences. Coming out of Autonomist feminist critiques of marginalized and so-called "invisible" labor, it has been the focus of critical discussions by, e.g., Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Juan Martin Prada, and Michael Betancourt.
Clotil Walcott was a trade unionist in Trinidad and Tobago.
Penina Muhando, also known as Penina Mlama, is a Tanzanian Kiswahili playwright, a theorist and practitioner of Theatre for Development in Tanzania.
The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) is a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. It was started in 1972 by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James who first put forward the demand for wages for housework. At the third National Women's Liberation Conference in Manchester, England, the IWFHC states that they begin with those with least power internationally – unwaged workers in the home (mothers, housewives, domestic workers denied pay), and unwaged subsistence farmers and workers on the land and in the community. They consider the demand for wages for unwaged caring work to be also a perspective and a way of organizing from the bottom up, of autonomous sectors working together to end the power relations among them.
Feminism in Italy originated during the Italian Renaissance period, beginning in the late 13th century. Italian writers such as Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, and others developed the theoretical ideas behind gender equality. In contrast to feminist movements in France and United Kingdom, early women's rights advocates in Italy emphasized women's education and improvement in social conditions.
The Global Women's Strike is a movement that seeks to value all women's work and all women's lives around the world. Many countries actively participate in this campaign in an effort to grant women justice for their unacknowledged contribution in the labor force.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an Italian autonomist feminist and co-author of the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, with Selma James. This text launched the "domestic labour debate" by re-defining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capital, rendered invisible by its removal from the wage-relation.
Immaterial labor is a Marxist framework to describe how value is produced from affective and cognitive activities, which, in various ways, are commodified in capitalist economies. The concept of immaterial labor was coined by Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1996 essay "Immaterial Labor", published as a contribution to Radical Thought in Italy and edited by Virno and Hardt. It was re-published in 1997 as: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività.. Lazzarato was a participant in the Years of Lead (Italy) group as a student in Padua in the 1970s, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. Post-Marxist scholars including Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Judith Revel, and Paolo Virno, among others have also employed the concept.
Reproductive labor or work is often associated with care giving and domestic housework roles including cleaning, cooking, child care, and the unpaid domestic labor force. The term has taken on a role in feminist philosophy and discourse as a way of calling attention to how women in particular are assigned to the domestic sphere, where the labor is reproductive and thus uncompensated and unrecognized in a capitalist system. These theories have evolved as a parallel of histories focusing on the entrance of women into the labor force in the 1970s, providing an intersectionalist approach that recognizes that women have been a part of the labor force since before their incorporation into mainstream industry if reproductive labor is considered.
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Margaret Prescod is an activist, author, journalist and radio host. She was a founder of The Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders and of Black Women for Wages for Housework. Prescod is on the executive board of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health, at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health.
Litowa is a village in Tanzania which served as a testing ground for Julius Nyerere's vision of Ujamaa. Located near Mbeya, Litowa was "the first Ujamaa village", and attracted attention during Nyerere's campaign for achieving "agricultural development within communal forms of production", and was upheld by Nyerere himself "as a practical example of ujamaa where I can send people to see it in practice".