| Sumario: | The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women's liberation in the 1970s, has provoked vital debates about gender, care work, and the problem of accounting for reproductive labor. Yet such discussions typically ignore the campaign's roots in first-wave feminism. In examining Australian journalist Linda Littlejohn's tenure as chair of Equal Rights International (ERI; 1934–41), a lobby group often cast as the vanguard of legal equality feminism in interwar Geneva, this article explores its surprising role in spreading Antipodean ideas about the "money value" of "home work" through the League of Nations. In doing so, it first historicizes the contentious forty-year struggle to recognize women's domestic labor in Australasia. Shifting from Sydney to Switzerland, it traces the international circulations that allowed Littlejohn and her allies in the United Associations of Women to redirect ERI away from its founders' concern with an equal rights treaty and toward a brand of feminism constructed around the recognition of difference in the home and equality in economic and political life. Reading ERI through the lens of Littlejohn's years as chair, I contend, not only complicates binaries between equality and difference within international interwar feminism, revealing a messier and less centralized history of feminist ideology, it also enriches our understanding of ongoing struggles to illuminate and compensate reproductive labor.
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