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!

@juergen_hubert

Excellent! Thank you for pointing to this discrepancy

My housekeeping aspirations generally take a backseat to my other interests. I like it when they conveniently intersect

@juergen_hubert

I admit I am a terrible housekeeper. But I also know I'm fulfilling the promise of generations of my family.

Getting an education, any education, from vocational skills to academic is important. Keeping that knowledge free and available to everyone is defiance of those who'd lock it away.

There's a certain determination to keep doing this despite those that would hold us back from progress and aiming to help make the world a better place.

https://dotart.blog/cobbles/defiance

Defiance

TW: Rape Clause I am a child of defiance. I'm not talking about a childish feeling of breaking the rules. I'm talking about my very ...

cobbles

Nicole Parsons Nov 21

@juergen_hubert

The Politics of Exhaustion comes in many forms.

Wages so low, it takes two jobs to keep a roof over your head.

Chained to a job you hate just because it has health benefits.

Forced into long & expensive commutes just because Koch Network funds disinformation about public transit.

Forced into less productive "back to the office" because the boss doesn't want to be seen making his own coffee & downtown commercial landlords are afraid of losing money.

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.

@juergen_hubert

Jürgen Hubert Nov 21

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.

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

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.)

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.

Shrimpney Nov 21

@juergen_hubert yes, yes, but *when* are you going to do the washing up?

Dror Bedrack Nov 21

@juergen_hubert I really need to wash my floor, though. There are stains

MarjorieR Nov 21

@juergen_hubert "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".
In those days both the upper, middle and even the lower-middle classes (eg bank clerks or shopkeepers) could still afford to have a servant or servants for the wife to manage, rather than she having to clean or cook, or even dress for the themselves.
The middle class stay home wife who had to actually look after the house and do the chores was largely a 20th century innovation.

Elena ``of Valhalla''Nov 23

@marjolica @juergen_hubert I don't know about the English speaking areas, but at least in Italian speaking Switzerland the expectation was that in (lower, and possibly middle)-middle classes the wife and older daughters would be doing household work, together with a servant or two, at least for the most labour intensive tasks such as deep cleaning and laundry (and yes, the division may not have been perfectly fair, but it was still a significant time requirement)

the 20th century brought new technology that made it possible for just one full-time person (the wife) to do the jobs that previously required multiple people (among other things, not having to deal with wood or coal fire for heating and cooking will save *a lot* of time, between keeping the file lit and at the right level, cleaning the ashes, and additional requirements on cleaning the house because of the soot)

Matilda Love Nov 22

@juergen_hubert

damn right

bonus round: we'd all be able to keep our houses as clean as we'd like if we weren't required to bust our asses 50 hours a week for some jerkhole's profit

Father Enoch Nov 22

@juergen_hubert

Thank you for making me feel less bad about the pigsty.

Wilfried Klaebe Nov 23

I prefer to call it "my man cave".

@FatherEnoch @juergen_hubert

Man, this still bothers me, because I think the slightly meme-y phrasing has tipped over into some weird places. I sure wouldn't say that "Only Westerners expect to live in a clean household" but it's logically equivalent, yesno?

I would agree that consumerism and status competitions encourage us to acquire households we can't maintain with the scant energy capitalism leaves us. And then, because housework is systematically undervalued, we can't "see" why it's hard.

@juergen_hubert

Jürgen Hubert Nov 23

Yeah, I guess I could have phrased that a bit better.

@juergen_hubert I'd like to keep it in enough order I have space to do stuff like baking or sewing...

Martin Rundkvist Nov 23

@juergen_hubert
This can certainly be argued, but I'm still not coming to your game nights unless you clean the bathroom regularly.

Jürgen Hubert Nov 23

Fair.

Wilfried Klaebe Nov 23

"Every evening before game nights" counts as "regularly"? 🥲

@juergen_hubert @mrundkvist

Elena ``of Valhalla''Nov 23

@wonka @mrundkvist @juergen_hubert how often would those game nights be? :D

Wilfried Klaebe Nov 23

@valhalla Haven't had any in this current man cave yet. But if visitors for any such game night found a sufficiently well cleaned bathroom, should they care when it was last cleaned beforehand?

@mrundkvist @juergen_hubert

everton137 Nov 23

@juergen_hubert Out of curiosity, do you think the reason most men don't do their share of the housework is capitalism? Or is it because we want to maintain the power dynamic of women cleaning our toilets?

Carmen Zedler Nov 23

@everton137 @juergen_hubert - One thing leads to another?!

everton137 Nov 23

@rabenmutterschafft @juergen_hubert not always. But it can be used as a good excuse!

Jürgen Hubert Nov 23

I think it probably started before modern Capitalism. Indoor cleaning and housework was seen as low status, and thus foisted upon women as poorly paid or unpaid labor. And women in European civilizations were generally denied lucrative jobs outside of the house for a long time - certainly since antiquity. Men had much more choice when it came to the labor and trade markets, and took all the well-paid jobs. Women had little choice for their professions, and thus had little bargaining power for getting well-paid jobs.

In this perspective, Capitalism merely provides the latest rationalizations for the ingrained sexism of European civilizations.

everton137 Nov 23

@juergen_hubert Well, I work full-time. Yet, I try to share the household responsibilities with my partner.

I know people who work fewer days per week but still expect women to take on most of the household responsibilities.

Do you think this is a result of capitalism?

I understand the point you are raising and it's interesting this historical perspective. I just have to open the possibility that capitalism is not the only to be blamed.

Author-ized L.J.Nov 23

@everton137 On this point, @juergen_hubert has already answered that it's not just capitalism a couple hours before your post https://mementomori.social/@juergen_hubert/115600361188134470

Jürgen Hubert (@[email protected])

@[email protected] I think it probably started before modern Capitalism. Indoor cleaning and housework was seen as low status, and thus foisted upon women as poorly paid or unpaid labor. And women in European civilizations were generally denied lucrative jobs outside of the house for a long time - certainly since antiquity. Men had much more choice when it came to the labor and trade markets, and took all the well-paid jobs. Women had little choice for their professions, and thus had little bargaining power for getting well-paid jobs. In this perspective, Capitalism merely provides the latest rationalizations for the ingrained sexism of European civilizations.

Memento mori

Real Syntactic Nov 23

@juergen_hubert Euro upper classes only, too. Indigenous family, kinship, and social organization works differently, and bourgeois expectations around housewifeism and the division of labour are largely responsible for residential schools and other forms of child seizure by colonial governments—even more than for the seizure of poor children from Euro-descended families.

La Guiri Nov 24

@juergen_hubert The other side of the story is that working class women were only expected to have pretty homes when they no longer had to spin, weave, bake their own bread, etc.