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.”

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://t.co/SQUjDwY1DU
“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.
When I say Selma has a whole intellect of her own, see her Wikipedia page

https://t.co/PLD1TY3UBr

and also
The first collection of her writings over the years, which she typed herself: https://t.co/Myyjzazeym
And her forthcoming second collection of writings, out in May: https://t.co/4xlgPeLVyf

These works span over 50 years of thought and writing.
Selma turns 91 this year. Maybe she’s earned getting credit for her work? Or not, because casual academic misogyny.

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