Mastodawn

As a reminder, the notion that people should be able to maintain "a clean, well-organized household" came from the 19th century Western "upper classes" where the wife was expected to stay home and do this full time - and this was used as a status symbol and status marker to distinguish the affluent from the working classes, where women almost always had to work in (poorly paid) jobs in order to keep the household budget afloat.

Therefore, this notion is not only #Sexism but also #ClassWarfare . Thus, when someone presents this kind of "lifestyle" as something you should aspire to (whether a tv show, an Influencer, or a glossy magazine), you should really contemplate what kind of political agenda they are trying to sell to you.

Now, if you _enjoy_ keeping a household in a good, clean order, more power to you! Everyone needs their passion projects, after all! But it should not be the _expected_ thing - particularly for people who are already overwhelmed by the demands this late-stage Capitalist hellscape places on us!

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clew Nov 21

Im currently reading a history of women brewing in the UK 1300-1600, commercially or not, and it is absolutely the case that even peasant women wanted to maintain a “clean, well-organized” household. They were *more* ambitious, as their households were also productive; the women’s work included kitchen gardens and the hens, spinning, sewing, brewing, dairying, and helping with whatever the men did.

You’d have to be organized and clean or that would all collapse.

Granted. Although they kept their households clean and orderly for the sake of commerce, and not representation and status, which I feel is an important distinction.

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clew Nov 21

No, that’s still presentism in a couple of directions. First, production far outweighs commerce; no alienation yet. Second, it is bewildering to imagine that peasants weren’t concerned with status and display. For one thing, they were people, and for another take on the same thing, being visibly competent and orderly hugely improved how other people treated them. And pre-industrial women needed that.

Thorstein Veblen recognized this iirc, but it’s been a while.

@juergen_hubert

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Mre. Dartigen [maker mode]Nov 23

@clew @juergen_hubert I feel like the 'clean, orderly and organised' is not really conveying what the middle-class standard was/is. It's not the basics of keeping a good working space, it's an extreme level.

No peasant woman (or anyone, really) with a home workshop would have expected it to look like a showroom, or for everything to be shiny and look brand new at all times - they'd like it if it did, but they would also know that it wasn't realistic. Clean, orderly and tidy, yes, but still lived-in (or worked-in) - as most real working spaces tend to be. They're never completely spotless, the tools don't all look absolutely brand new forever, there may not always be perfect matching sets of everything. They're organised, but in ways that may not always read as perfect (and may not always involve putting everything on display, or hiding it all away either).

The middle-class standard was/is the magazine display with the perfectly matched sets of shiny new everything, either with a clearly curated display of tools and materials or with everything shut out of view (if you had to stoop to having a working space in your home at all, which was bad enough). Completely unrealistic for anyone to maintain for more than the time it takes to snap a few photos.

(It also often means a perfect house with no dings in the walls, no patchy paint or obvious repaints, no dated or old or mismatched fixtures or appliances, etc.)

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Author-ized L.J.Nov 23

@clew The wife of a medieval household wasn't expected to do all this by herself and maybe a few maids, though--she had children, extended kin, staff, and so on to share these duties as a communal effort. Keeping a clean and orderly household may always have been important, but the idea that it's all on the wife who's supposed to devote all her time to this is a more modern invention and that was the second part of @juergen_hubert 's point--you yourself said a medieval home, and therefore the wife and mother of the home, was engaged in active production as well as upkeep of the house.