Alexandra Motiu (practicing under the pseudonym Moatzart) is a Brighton-based printmaker and illustrator. Inspired by printmaking traditions and techniques, she uses printmaking as a method for uncovering hidden stories of past, with a keen interest in labour and labour rights. In this interview, Motiu shares her process in a project translating the material on Wages for Housework held at Bishopgate Archives into illustration, and how it resonates with her experience as an artist today. All original illustrations are by Alexandra Motiu.
Tell us about how you came to this project – what brought you to the Bishopgate Archives?
My thinking started as I started delving deeper into the printmaking processes I am used to. I hold the entire practice very dear, and I am fairly classical in my training and approach. I love the tools and materials involved, as well as the spaces of production, such as larger printmaking studios. I started thinking about what it meant to be a woman in those spaces, and if traditionally, when printing presses were in use, there would have been any women printmakers.
The more I identified with this laborious medium, the more I thought and read about labour rights, and workers’ histories, which brought me to the archive.
The illustrations in this article are based on Wages for Housework material held at the Bishopsgate Archive in London. This dense material includes documents, newspapers, pamphlets, publications and letters related to the activities of the group.
The material was organised in visual notes, as a way of understanding the scope of the fight, as well as the many voices within the archive.One page of notes might include information from up to 20 pages of documents. I also recreated visual pamphlets using monoprinting, a traditional printmaking technique that captures the spirit of the time as if created for a protest.
Tell us about the Wages for Housework campaign.
The Wages for Housework Campaign has been advocating for paid housework since the 1970s. Despite this seemingly unachievable goal, many victories can be attributed to the campaign’s demands, like child benefits and the Marital Rape Law introduced in 1992.
Selma James was a founder of the Wages for Housework campaign, and is still a working activist and writer today (aged 93).
In a recent interview in the Independent, James says “I started as a housewife refusing housework. As a mother, doing this work that is so central to society, I was locked in and impoverished. But this work is not like other work: we hate it, and we want to do it. By demanding payment for housework we attack what is terrible about caring in our capitalist society, while protecting what is great about it, and what it could be. We refuse housework, because we think everyone should be doing it.”
James provoked debates amongst feminists of the time, and was criticised for creating a movement which some thought was meant to keep women in the home. For her, the bigger focus was on the realisation that women’s housework is integral to society, as they care for existing workers and give birth to and raise future ones. She felt that this was the wider institutional issue, that this care work is unpaid and when in an employed context, underpaid. Some scholars call this the ‘social reproduction’ that underpins economic production.
In parallel, women’s movements which advocated for more women to enter the workforce were gaining a lot more traction. On this, James has commented: “Every time we build a movement a few people get jobs, and those who can get the jobs claim this was the objective of the movement.”
The issue of unpaid housework – mostly done by women today, almost singularly done by women in the past – can help to conceptualise other work related issues for women. Service work and nursing are predominantly female sectors which continue to be undervalued and underpaid in our society.
Recognising housework as work also leads to recognition of sex work as work. In the archive, this issue is discussed from multiple angles by different women, that husbands were expecting of sex, just as they expected the housework to be done. Lesbian women identify this as the reason for their economic discrimination, they felt they were punished for not providing this to men. Once the stories of other women made it possible to think of sex as work, the voices and stories of sex workers were taken more seriously, who started protesting and advocating for making their industry safer. They pointed out that a large number of other industries, including the government, flourished due to their work, yet they were being abused in the process.
What aspects of WfH resonated with you most? How does it relate to your experience as an artist in the contemporary landscape of labour?
It takes an inordinate amount of work, organisation, and time to bring about change and it is difficult to organise people who do not share a workplace or boss and who are not unionised. This was one of the main struggles that Wages for Housework faced initially in organising women in the home. In this respect, Wages for Houseworkserves as a good example of a successful international movement, as today workers are more atomised than ever and unions are weaker than they have ever been.
Wages for Housework were very interesting in terms of intersectionality. They were initially criticised for this as it was an international movement started by a group of white women, and many women of colour found it difficult to relate to the main issues, as they felt they faced them in particular, often more violent ways. Ultimately, a lot of smaller autonomous groups were able to make their voices heard as they related to the main campaign and movement, and all worked together: Black Women for Housework, Wages Due Lesbians, Winvisible (Women with Visible and Invisible Disabilities), and more. This shows no one issue can stand on its own, and every issue has repercussions for other groups as well, workers need to stand together.
For example, wherever women are, domestic labour tends to fall on them, be they at work with an unrelated title, or in jail, and there was a higher proportion of jailed black women to white, doing “housework” for free for all other prisoners as punishment.
Reading across the archive of Wages for Housework, there is so much repetition in their asks, year after year. The issue of housework remains unrecognised and unsolved today. Even with the assimilation of the majority of women full time in the workforce, women remain overwhelmingly responsible for physical and emotional labour in the home. I hope we can look to this campaign and others, and keep finding ways of organising, even in a society where the power of organisations such as these and unions has decreased. We have to realise that no progress and no working rights have been gained without campaigning.
Being an artist and cultural worker, there is something in the quality of the artist worker that mirrored all these cases, and allowed me to embody these issues through the work I made. Printmaking is a historical trade and skill. In the arts and charity sector, you are heavily underpaid as it is seen as a job you love or are naturally good at (similar to how women being underpaid in their industries is due to their “natural” abilities).
The arts are also home to the most unregulated type of gig economy, with most workers working freelance, and we can see this model extending way beyond this industry in recent years. This is a dangerous model separating workers even further from each other, and being able to resist harsh decisions which affect them from their employers. Since the industrial revolution, any protection workers had gained, they gained through trade unions. I began to yearn for this type of protection and organisation.
What was your process like in interpreting this history into a visual form? What was the thinking behind some of your artistic decisions?
My process was divided in two parts, one in which I became acquainted with the archive, the stories within and the many voices through my visual note taking. This was very important to me as I wanted to pay attention to the entirety of the struggle presented by the organisations and its participants, and not just what I might relate to my own experience. This allowed me to have a deeper understanding of the issues brought forward in these protests, and how they intersect.
The other part was lending my printmaking practice, and its laborious processes, to making some of these stories visible. I chose etching as a technique as I found a lot of the stories violent, and etching can be quite delicate, as I wanted to handle them with care. The process also has many stages, and many of the stages don’t involve artistic decisions, you are just prepping the plate over and over. I felt this rhythm was similar to the work of the organisations in the archive over the years, and it allowed me to spend time with these issues in mind. The process being slow made it almost as if listening to a friend with a hurtful story, and holding space for them.
As an illustrator, what is significant about the archive/archives? How does it inspire you?
The archive opened my eyes to an exploitative history, where workers have always had to come together and advocate for their rights, for any of the rights we now take for granted, and how the avenues for them to do so have actually decreased in power since the 1980s.
It feels unfair to notice that often, some of these victories are short lived and can be taken back, so workers and women aren’t only fighting for new rights, but to be able to hold existing ones. (Wages for Housework were instrumental in securing Child Benefits, which years later were capped).
As someone who works with visualising stories and often in the realm of fantasy and myth, it was inspiring to work with real stories and lived experiences of such wonderful women. I am inspired by their work and their grit, and by these organisations and activists who have made fighting for people their life’s work. It made me really consider whose stories I want to be telling in the future, and perhaps my job as an illustrator can be imagining these futures of progress.
