Biting the Dust: The Joys of Housework

When is a house clean? Like politics and religion, it's one of those questions that tends to bring out peoples' hardwired beliefs. Horsfield, a reporter for BBC, CBC, the Guardian and the Independent, uses her journalistic skills to investigate not only how, but why, we clean. Using historical, literary, psychological and personal sources, she traces the long and tangled evolution. From the beginning, cleaning transcended mere physical implications. It was linked to spiritual and moral cleansing--the ancient battle between good and evil played out between grime and elbow grease. The romantic ideal of the housewife was born, and it was her duty to protect her family from dirt. In the late 19th century, the germ theory of disease scared women onto a new plane of anxiety about the cleanliness of their households. With the introduction of soap around the same time, the media turned method to madness by establishing standards of cleanliness that were suffocating, imprisoning and impossible to live up to. Bringing her subject up to the present, Horsfield blames people like Martha Stewart for perpetuating a kind of ""domestic pornography"" that encourages women to fight a losing battle by creating yet another impossible, media-fueled ideal. Horsfield couldn't take a more ordinary subject and make it more interesting. In a thought-provoking, informative, yet endlessly entertaining way, she proves housecleaning to be an intensely personal, irrational and self-defining activity, while giving important insight into why a woman's work is never done. B&w illustrations. (May)