Selma James

Selma James (born Selma Deitch; formerly Weinstein; August 15, 1930), is a co-author of the women's movement classic 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.

Selma Deitch was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. As a young woman she worked in factories and then as a full-time housewife and mother. At the age of 15 she joined the Johnson–Forest Tendency, one of whose three leaders was C. L. R. James.

In 1952 she wrote the classic A Woman’s Place, 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. Unusually at the time, the newspaper had pages dedicated to giving women, young people and Black people an autonomous voice. 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.

From 1958 to 1962, she lived in Trinidad where, with her husband, she was active in the movement for West Indian independence and federation. 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.

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. 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.

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