Feminist Movements Confronting Oligarchy

Feinberg Series Panel with Elisabeth Armstrong and Emily Callaci

Who has value and who doesn’t? In the face of an economic system that considers most of the world’s population disposable, how have some social movements challenged capitalist definitions of value? This panel explores the feminist and anticapitalist Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s. Questions about gender, labor, interdependence, social reproduction, and care work—especially when considered in a global context—challenge key premises of capitalist oligarchy. What can we learn from the history of these social movements? How can they help us confront oligarchy in the present to build a future where all people have value, not only the few?

Panelists

Elisabeth Armstrong is the Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Smith College. She is the author of two books about the Left women's movement in India and across Asia; Gender and Neoliberalism: The All India Democratic Women's Association and its Strategies of Resistance and Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949. Her current project is on anticolonialism and propaganda in the internationalist youth and students movement, the World Federation of Democratic Youth.

Emily Callaci is a feminist historian, writer, and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her recent book is called Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor.

The Feinberg Series: Escape from Oligarchy

For more on this event and the 2026-27 Feinberg Series, including details about the more than a dozen university partners, see the Feinberg Series website.