About

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Selma James is a women’s rights and antiracist campaigner and author. From 1958 to 1962, she worked with C.L.R. James in the movement for Caribbean federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 she helped launch the Global Women’s Strike whose strategy for change is Invest in Caring not Killing. She coined the word “unwaged” to describe the caring work women do, and it has since entered the English language to describe all who work without wages on the land, in the home, and in the community. In 1975, she became the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes. She is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (2008). She coauthored the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community which launched the “domestic labour debate.” She has addressed the power relations within the working class movement, and how to organize across sectors despite divisions of sex, race, and class, South and North.

Her other publications include A Woman’s Place (1952), Women, the Unions and Work, or what is not to be done (1972), Sex, Race and Class (1974), Wageless of the World (1974), The Rapist Who Pays the Rent (1982 coauthor), The Ladies and the Mammies – Jane Austen and Jean Rhys (1983), Marx and Feminism (1983), Hookers in the House of the Lord (1983), Strangers & Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration (1985  Ed & Introduction), The Global Kitchen: The Case for Counting Unwaged work (1985 and 1995), The Milk of Human Kindness: Defending Breastfeeding from the AIDS Industry and the Global Market (coauthor, 2005).