In 1927, architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, soon to become engaged in communist politics, planned prototypes of an 'Apartment for Working Women':[1] 'Type I' of this apartment consisted of very small living spaces for 'working women' who had to share bathrooms, while 'Type IV' was intended for 'academics, higher officials, teachers', and – as if this was a logical consequence – this latter housing type was a single apartment five times larger than those designed for ordinary workers. As much as the architect strove for proletarian emancipation and agendas we would today call intersectional, namely by bringing women's issues to the foreground, with this prototypical design, she confirmed the immutability of presupposed class attributions; which meant that educationally privileged women, part of the employed middle class, were given more space than working women.

This is comparable to the ambivalence of Schütte-Lihotzky's 'Frankfurt Kitchen', which aims to reduce the workload in the kitchen as much as possible by means of spatial rationalisation while at the same time – if seen from a radical democratic point of view today – questions only to a slight extent why it is only women who work there. However, in both of these projects, Schütte-Lihotzky clearly contradicted one tenet of Red Vienna's Austro-Marxism (as well as of Marxism in general), one in which care work and the 'women's question' were seen as a mere 'secondary contradiction', thus marginalising care work and reproductive work.

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (1929)[2]

Innumerable women* worldwide do not have their own room – due to inequality and the global housing crises. This is also true in the urban reality of today's Vienna – a rich city with a social housing system that has been praised by many around the world.

Already in 1929, Virginia Woolf, however, made it clear: '[A] woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.' It was not a lot of money that Virginia Woolf wrote about (what she had in mind was about 500 pounds a year then) nor was the room she referred to enormous by any standards. What she meant was a private room. Therefore, what she really wrote about was freedom from existential anxiety and a fair share of spatial infrastructure – a room of one's own: for everyone and anyone.

Taking it from there, from Woolf's feminist essay as a fiction writer, we may extrapolate the general demand that everyone is to have money and a room of her* own,

if she* is to write fiction;

If she* is to do architecture;

If she* is to be a cook;

If she* is to be a mother;

If she is to do anything she likes to do…

Silvia Federici: Wages against Housework (1975)

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici: Counter-planning from the Kitchen (1975)

Women's unpaid work in the home has been a factor in keeping wages low; their marginalised labour became an important stabilising factor, while remaining invisible – also to generations of Marxist thinkers. In her pamphlet Wages against Housework Silvia Federici, co-founder of the New York Wages for Housework Committee, clarified that fighting for a wage for housework did not mean fighting for a minimum wage within the capitalist logic.

Rather Federici promoted intersectional alternatives: 'not only is wages for housework a revolutionary perspective, but it is the only revolutionary perspective from a feminist viewpoint and ultimately for the entire working class.'[3] The Wages for Housework discourse criticised not only the capitalist economy, but also socialist politics: it is not about giving women access to cheap jobs, nor about securing minimum wage for housework or making housework easier, but about resisting capitalist exploitation of labour in general, whether in the home or in the factory. 'In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do this work. It means precisely the opposite.' Because it is 'the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it'.

In their pamphlet Counter-planning from the Kitchen (1975) Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici link the way in which the political left marginalises women's reproductive labour with the North-South conflict. Within the practices of the left, they argue, the 'strategy for women', much like the 'strategy for the Third World', has been disposed of among the notorious secondary contradictions. In the name of 'class struggle' and 'the unified interest of the class', the left has always selected certain sectors of the working class as revolutionary agents and condemned others to a merely supportive role in the struggles these sectors waged. The left has thus reproduced, in its organisational and strategic objectives, the same divisions of the class which characterise the capitalist division of labour. Their argument continues:

'In the same way as they want to bring women to the factories, they want to carry factories to the Third World. In both cases, they presume that the 'under-developed'– those of us who are wage-less and work at a lower technological level – are backward with respect to the 'real working class' and can catch up only by obtaining more advanced capitalist exploitation, a bigger share of the work of the factory. In both cases, then, the struggle the left offers to the wageless and the “underdeveloped”, is not a revolutionary struggle, a struggle against capital, but a struggle for capital, in a more rationalised, developed and productive form. In our case they offer us not only the “right to work” (this they offer every worker), but the right to work more, the right to be further exploited.' [4]

Consequently, the two proponents of the larger Wages for Housework Movement combine the feminist perspective with a (post)colonial one: 'both in the “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries, housework and the family on which it is centred are still the pillars of capitalist production.' [5]

bell hooks: Homeplace (a site of resistance) (1990)

„An effective means of white subjugation of black people globally has been the perpetual construction of economic and social structures that deprive many folks of the means to make homeplace. Remembering this should enable us to understand the political value of black women’s resistance in the home.“ In Homeplace (a site of resistance)[6] radical feminist writer bell hooks describes the multiple exhaustion of Black women working in white houses while at the same time caring and maintaining a home for their own; she also describes ­how the domesticity of this Black homeplace is an act of resistance, as it is being maintained despite everything. Not only did Black women such as her grandmother not have a room of their own, but „after traveling in the wee hours of the morning to the white folks house, after working there all day, giving her time and energy, she had „none left for her own.“

Such intersecting degrees of discrimination by race and gender, is addressed by the lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw in coining the term intersectionality“: „Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.“ [7] The homeplace bell hooks describes is the place where such an experience of intersectionality is confronted with empowerment, a safe space where one can prepare to resist:

„Throughout our history, African-Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not directly encounter white racist aggression. Whatever the shape and direction of black liberation struggle (civil rights reform or black power movement), domestic space has been a crucial site for organizing, for forming political solidarity. Homeplace has been a site of resistance. Its structure was defined less by whether or not black women and men were conforming to sexist behavior norms and more by our struggle to uplift ourselves as a people, our struggle to resist racist domination and oppression.“

Referring to the past, bell hooks discusses the presence: „For when people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.“

It is all about the right to such a space - a space, which bell hooks does not describe as a single private room, but as a collective home. As white supremacy is determined by housing, so is subordination: this is true also for the, to say the least, inadequate housing of refugees in island camps on the edge of the European Union, as well as of migrant workers in large cities and industrial areas with high rents for poor housing as part of the hyper-exploitation and the platform curation of homes, which occur there.

Homeplace (a site of resistance) is an implicit reference to Intersectional City House: Intersektionales Stadthaus, which is reacting to discrimination within the communal housing sector of Vienna: Even though the city of Vienna calls one of the highest numbers of communal housing units their own, access to the housing units is being restricted by excluding parameters which make the right to affordable communal housing dependent on the duration of registration on one and the same address in the city of Vienna and on family status.