Wages for housework: my grandmother did all of the typing for decades and this is how people talk about her

“James would have documents typed, annotate them, and then dispatch them to comrades around the world for political discussion and feedback.” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/cljr-james-haitian-revolution-black-jacobins

I ran out of characters but her name is Selma James.

“Have the letters typed” like the typists and their don’t matter. In a Marxist discussion. Good god.

Anyway you can see in this milieu of watching her husband be vaunted as a theorist while she was his main intellectual partner and making his work possible while also not being acknowledged that she first formulated the need for a Wages for Housework campaign.

Their labor*

I’m so annoyed!! https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1346448926661107714

“But he wrote the Black Jacobins when she was still a kid” yes but as the interview notes, he came back to it for multiple editions and *someone* was typing his documents

Selma James was the someone. The typist had a name, a life, and an intellect of her own.

And Selma and my dad probably disagree with me about this but I think Nello’s own sexism is why she gets erased from his story a lot. He never made a point of crediting her.

I feel like since I just publicly thrashed my grandfather a bit I should say that he’s why I love collecting art books. He gave me my first ones, Picasso, when I was about six.

People are complicated.