Housecleaning Confessions of Neat Freaks, Slobs

On the dust jacket of “Biting the Dust” (St. Martin’s Press), a smiling, perfectly coiffed homemaker in an organdy apron skips merrily over the gleaming linoleum floor of her spotless ‘50s kitchen.

Which gives you an idea of author Margaret Horsfield’s take on “women’s work.”

Horsfield, a former reporter for the BBC and London’s Guardian--who helped earn her way through school cleaning houses--has persuaded women (and a few men) to come clean about how they feel about what she labels “the Cinderella skills.”

There is the woman who told her, “I have no problem about the oven. I just don’t ever look in with the light on.” At the other extreme is the woman who cleans her toilets twice daily with baking soda.

Horsfield, a somewhat nonchalant housecleaner who admits to going into a frenzy of scrubbing before her mother visits, found that “our mothers’ voices make themselves heard for the rest of our days,” even as we ignore those dust balls lurking under the beds.

In these pages we meet both dedicated cleaners and those with fuzzy stuff mucking up their good china. We learn about “heartbreak cleaners,” who clean feverishly when love goes wrong, and obsessive-compulsive cleaners bent on washing away imagined dirt.

Most cleaners, though, fall into two categories identified by Horsfield--flappers and scrubbers. Flappers (who dominate) are given to “short-lived bursts of manic energy, often at odd moments, like getting cobwebs off the ceiling by jumping up and down waving a pair of jeans while you are dressing.” The scrubber “not only does battle with dirt but truly believes that, for a few brief shining moments at least, it is possible to win.”

Weaving in enticing literary snippets, Horsfield traces the history of housecleaning through the years--the “idle wife” with servants as the late 19th century ideal, the mid-20th century crusaders promoting domestic science as a fulfilling pursuit and, in 1963, Betty Friedan’s declaration in “The Feminine Mystique” that “no politically correct woman in her right mind would dare show much enthusiasm” for domestic science.

Perhaps. Yet, Horsfield acknowledges, few feminists want to be seen as having dirty houses, and the concept of a married couple sharing housework continues to be “a minefield.” The author tells of one fed-up bride who took to piling his dishes on one side of the sink, leaving them there until he did them.

To Horsfield, “labor-saving device” is an oxymoron; the more appliances a woman has, the more cleaning she’s expected to do. Still, she writes, “Over the years, women with improbable hairstyles, wearing good dresses and high heels, have been routinely photographed smiling alongside their various appliances.” And homemakers bought into it.

Just as they bought into the notion that their homes were infested with mites and germs and bugs, all of which would succumb to a good spray of yet another toxic household product.

In reality, Horsfield concludes, today’s woman has two options: lowering her standards or hiring help. “The luxury of the era in which we live is that most of us can clean as we please--sporadically, intensely or indifferently--without risking life-threatening disease, without being reported to social services, without being ostracized by our neighbors.”

Maybe noncleaner Quentin Crisp got it right: “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”