Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn

Wages Due Song revisits the history of the Wages Due Lesbians, a Canadian feminist collective active within the International Wages for Housework Campaign during the 1970s. Emerging from broader women's liberation movements, the group sought to expose the often-invisible labor of housework, childcare, and care work as the foundation upon which all other forms of social and economic production depend. Their activism extended beyond theoretical critique, taking the form of demonstrations, organizing, publications, and protest songs that transformed political demands into collective acts of expression. Among these songs was The Wages Due Song, written by Boo Watson in 1974. Its refrain, “If women were paid for all they do, there’d be a lot of wages due,” articulated a central demand of the movement: recognition of domestic labor as work. While the campaign called for direct economic compensation, it also sought to reveal the broader structures through which capitalist economies depend upon and exploit the unpaid and underpaid affective labor performed primarily by women. The original musical score, believed to be lost, was recovered in archival holdings. The original audio recording, however, has never been located. This installation reactivates the song through a contemporary sound composition based on the recovered score, developed in collaboration with composer Thunder Tillman. For this edition, the work also includes a newly produced linen banner featuring the song’s lyrics embroidered by hand, extending the themes of labor, care, transmission, and collective memory into the material fabric of the installation. As many of the questions raised by the campaign remain unresolved, the song continues to resonate across generations.