By Valerie Andrews
Housekeeping is a tricky subject. No woman feels she’s mastered it. All those glossy magazines about simple living feel like a reproach—and order seems an impossible goal when home has to double as school or workplace. The two words we rarely use to describe housework? One is “sexy,” the other, “fun.”
For generations, women have had a deep resentment of cleaning and tidying up. Housework has long been linked to concepts like perfectionism, subservience, self-judgment, and self-worth. In Western fairytales, it has stripped many of us of our independence and staunched our youthful hopes. Recall those backbreaking, hand-chapping, nail-splitting chores that kept Cinderella from going to the ball—her dreams of love and liberation dashed by an endless rendezvous with a bucket and a mop!
Today, these folk tales offer a Marxist critique of housework and the endless struggle between the haves and the have-nots. They are a stark reminder that the most loathsome tasks go to those on the last rung of the social ladder, that the poorest lads clean the chimneys and the lowliest maids empty the chamber pots. With all its class implications, housework remains the dirty little thing we’re loath to talk about.
Equating Cleanliness and Virtue
Religion has a role to play, as well, with its insistence on pairing cleanliness with godliness—and female virtue.
In the 1500s, the word slut referred to an untidy person. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer used the term to describe an unkempt lord but, by the 18th century, it was used to denote a slovenly or salacious female. Hussy, short for huswife, was similarly transformed. Originally referring to a serving wench, the word came to mean “a woman of casual and improper behavior.” About this time, the Church linked lax housekeeping with loose morals.
Fallen women were put to work in convent laundries—as if years of scrubbing might remove a stain on their souls. From the 18th century until the mid 1950s, wayward girls in England and Ireland were shipped off to the Magdalene Sisters Home where they labored for 10 hours a day, 365 days a year, for no pay—standing over large vats of lye and scalding water. Some of these “inmates” had committed minor crimes, like stealing a train ticket, while others had the bad luck of being orphaned or pregnant out of wedlock.
The First Martha Stewart
While poor women were indentured, those in the middle class were mercilessly judged by how well they kept the home. In the Victorian era, wives were tasked with running an establishment that rivaled a posh men’s club while also managing the garden, the canning, and the nursery.
They turned for advice to a young Londoner named Isabella Beeton who had raised 11 siblings and studied pastry-making at a finishing school in France. The Martha Stewart of her age, Isabella had a popular magazine column, and her Book of Household Management, first published in 1861, eventually ballooned to some 2,000 pages, covering every aspect of homemaking from selecting wallpaper to caring for the silver and curing a bad case of the croup.
At the turn of the last century, home was a dangerous place. There were no antibiotics, disease was rampant, and the bedroom was often turned into “the dying room.” Electricity was hazardous and faulty wiring responsible for many burns and fatalities. Arsenic, evident in certain popular Victorian wallpaper, was poisonous to touch, and cleansers were severely caustic, causing lasting injury to the eyes and hands.
Mrs. Beeton guided her followers through all these hazards and was ultimately defeated by a form of dirt she couldn’t see and few understood—the microbe. When she died at the age of 28, after delivering her fourth child. the official cause was septicemia, an infection thought at the time to be linked to unsanitary conditions in the home. But I’m sure her doctors unwashed hands and her husband’s longstanding case of syphilis didn’t help.
Slavery and Domestic Service
Any moral discussion of housework must consider the African women brought in slave ships to work on American plantations. Southern households were run by black women for two centuries and the job of maid was still filled by women of color even after emancipation.
“Work as a maid or (in a) private household was woven into my family’s history,” writes Julianne Malvaux, a labor economist and author of Black Women in the Labor Force (MIT Press 1980). “Not only did my great-grandmother Addie Hawkins work as a maid, but my grandmother Rose Elizabeth Nelson majored in home economics in Tuskegee. She migrated to San Francisco from Mississippi during World War II to work in the shipyard, an African American ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ After she retired, she was the housekeeper for a wealthy family in Marin County. She was a phenomenal cook and one of those housecleaners who would run the white glove over a surface that should have been dusted before sniffing, disdainfully, at a job poorly done.”
The assumption that Black women should be in domestic service is deeply embedded in American culture. Not long ago, Malvaux offered to help a frail white traveler disembark from a plane. For her kindness, she was handed a $2 tip and asked whether she did “day work.”
The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval
When American soldiers came back from World War II, the women who had worked in factories and run the farms were once again restricted to the home. And, at the start of the Cold War, when the whole nation was feeling unsafe, they were expected to make that place feel like both a fortress and a sanctuary.
In the 1950s, a government campaign glorified “domestic science,” producing pamphlets on the proper way to clean the refrigerator and the oven, wash the dishes, and care for the carpet using “special vacuum strokes.” As Madison Avenue hawked all the latest gadgets and appliances, Amana, Maytag, and G.E. touted the virtues of an efficient household.
By the early 1960s, housework was done to perfection by cheerful TV moms like June Cleaver and Donna Reed. Yet women were eager to get back into the workplace and a decade later, there was no stopping them. In the 1970s, feminism was on the rise and the networks focused on career girls like Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore—and that icon of single-motherhood, Murphy Brown. an investigative reporter with no time to wield a bucket and a mop. With new career opportunities, many women turned their backs on home.
A Feminist Rebellion
The boomer generation marched to support the Equal Rights Amendment and staged a sit-in at The Ladies’ Home Journal, demanding that household magazines be edited and produced by women—though of course, no self-respecting feminist would be caught dead reading them. We also grew up reading poets like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich—writers who nursed a serious grudge against the home.
Rich bemoaned the days when housework was the only outlet for her energy. And when Plath put her head in the oven, her colleagues warned, “This is what housekeeping does to women’s creativity!” Sexton compared the house to the interior of a woman’s body–a place that was dark and fierce and not altogether friendly.
Freudians had a field day and a whole generation saw the house as a black hole, ready to consume all life within its walls. Housekeeping itself was viewed as stifling, oppressive.
“No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor,” Betty Friedan declared in The Feminine Mystique, suggesting there were better ways of achieving one. And the unflappable Erma Bombeck noted, “Housework can kill you if done right. Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn’t even in the same neighborhood.”
Still, the old expectations were hard to shake. In the 1970s, talented and ambitious women continued to judge themselves by 1950s standards of perfection. Career women often ended up working twice as hard as their mothers in a vain attempt to balance work and home. And oh, how we judged ourselves, assuming we could do it all!
Bette Midler, who began her singing career in the baths at the Ansonia Hotel, was obsessed with cleanliness. One day she admitted, “My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.”
And there we have it—our age-old ambivalence toward housekeeping.
Our Intergenerational Stories
Each woman has her own legacy of housekeeping and lost hopes. My grandmother Charlotte was a trick horseback rider who could stand up in the saddle and balance on one foot while riding at full gallop. She married at age 20, had five children, and rebelled against all things domestic. On every major holiday, with the extra cooking and the guests, she threatened to run off and join the circus. Over time, Charlotte shifted the tasks of housekeeping and childrearing to her eldest daughter. My mother left home at age 16, and vowed that she would never pass this thankless drudgery on to me.
When I was growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s, my chores were minimal—making the bed, hanging up my clothes, some light tidying up. My mother gave me the one thing she had always longed for—creative solitude. With plenty of time to draw and practice the piano, I came to view the home as a kind of makeshift atelier—a place for music, art, and storytelling. It didn’t matter that dust bunnies nested underneath the sofa, laundry sat sulking in the corner of the bathroom, and socks skittered across my bedroom floor like tumbleweeds. There was something far more important than cleaning, and that was tending the creative spirit of the home.
I didn’t learn to clean until I was my twenties, living in Manhattan and working at Life magazine. On the nights we put an issue to bed, I’d arrive home at 2 AM, too wound up to sleep. Not knowing what to do with all that energy, I began to wash the kitchen floor. Then I dusted, organized the closets, folded my sweaters and t-shirts, and rearranged my drawers. I found this late-night cleaning meditative and profoundly satisfying—it was a way to calm down and listen to the breathing of the house.
Many single women come to homemaking this way—as a kind of happy accident. The key to our domestic idyll is that we have no one else to pick up after and there’s no need to do the laundry or serve the meals on time.
Rediscovering the Eros of the Home
Today housekeeping is a lost art—we no longer teach cooking, sewing, or home repair in our public schools. Instead we rely on digital helpers. Alexa activates the Roomba, orders the paper towels from Amazon, and resets the dishwasher, while Americans, now recognized as the world’s worst homemakers, depend on “life hacks” to make a bed or clean a shower stall.
Yet there are signs the pendulum is swinging back. Witness the slow food movement, our new interest in planting edible gardens, and in repairing and recycling things. As we become more technologically oriented, we are instinctively reaching for the things that balance us and ground us in the senses—and foster a deeper feeling for the home.
During the pandemic, many of us believed that if we faithfully kept the house, the house would keep us as well. We began to clean and organize, recalling the daily rituals performed by our mothers and grandmothers and harkened back to an era when the words earth, hearth, and heart were one.
This is more than mere nostalgia. The act of home-making has a lot to do with intimacy and relationship. Each one of us longs for the home-cooked meal, the tidy office, the fresh sheets, the welcoming living room with books and magazines stacked neatly on the coffee table. House-holding is about more than picking up. It is about creating sanctuary, making each room a sanctuary—-a place of ease and comfort.
Some of us are even starting to talk about the eros of a home. My friend Barb approaches it with abandon, with music blaring, and in a bra and shorts. “It’s a sexy kind of sweaty,” she says, “Like the scene in the film, Working Girl, where Melanie Griffiths vacuums Harrison’s Ford’s apartment topless.” Then there’s Robert Sheckley’s story, “Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?” where a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman demonstrates a model that pleasures the housewife as it strokes the carpet.
When technology combines our household and our personal appliances, we may be sluts and hussies after all.
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Valerie Andrews is the founder and chief storyteller of Reinventing Home.
