Margaret Horsfield

A reporter willing to admit that she has some interest in housework? Fascinating. Biting the Dust is a saga of housecleaning including information from interviews and historical sources (there *was* a use for that stack of Woman's Day magazines grandma saved!).

No surprising or groundbreaking thesis, just an expxosition on the love/hate relationship women have with cleaning. Is it drudgery or relaxation? Do we not care or do we care too much? Horsfield tells stories on all sides of the spectrum.… (mais)

Margaret Horsfield looks at modern housework in the USA, Canada and Britain. Most readers can probably recognize themselves and others as she recounts different attitudes towards cleaning. Morsfield is sympathetic to the real pleasure that some people take in housework while arguing that different people have different styles, and that public health measures and environmental changes have greatly reduced the dangers of less than meticulous cleaning. Horsfield is not so much giving us a history of housework as using history to explore why we are as we are today. I really enjoyed the book - the despised nitty gritty is actually what makes up most of our lives.

To understand how our modern situation came to be, Horsfield looks back on inventions, health concerns, the rise of consumerism and social-political arguements. This is not as detailed for earlier periods as More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave by Ruth Schwartz Cowan.

I have a couple of personal reactions. For this purpose, pehaps it matters that I was born in 1953 and I have been a single career-woman for most of my adult life. Among the people I knew, it was assumed that girls grew up to be housewives, but that they needed to be educated to assume a career if something happened to their husband. As I got to the cusp of Junior High-High School, most of the girls that I knew swore that they would never work while they had pre-school children (and a bread-winner husband) but that they might consider working before or after the children. By the time I graduated from college, it was assumed that all young women would pursue a career, maybe taking off some time when they had small children. I imagine that younger women have had a very different experience.

Horsfield cites Betty Friedan without much consideration of the source. Horsfield comments that some attempted to indoctrinate women with the idea that any real woman wanted to stay home and would find housework fulfilling. It seems to me that we eventually got the same sorry line about pursuing a career - it would bring us identity, fulfillment and meaning. And money, of course, but for middle-class women, this was largely a token of esteem, not a needed resource. Apparently, we were to take as a model Charles Darwin, gentleman and scientist, devoted to his research, hard-working, respected in his field, but not vulgarly viewing it a source of funds. The financial needs of women in crises: widows, divorcees, poor women, have been used as arguments for opening jobs to women, but a surprising number of apparently intelligent people, knowing that I am single, have expressed surprise that I worked if I didn't enjoy it, and stared blankly when I mentioned food, clothing and shelter as my reasons. As I have tangled over the years with the fact that a job is not a beloved hobby and housework is by no means inconsequential, I have often felt an intense hatred for Friedan in particular, which turned into complete contempt when I learned that she had a full-time maid. If housework was a simple as she said, why did she need a maid? And for heavens sake, if she needed a FULL-time maid, her argument that the work wasn't time-consuming is self-refuted. I'd like to know what Simone de Beauvoir's domestic arrangments were before I take her too seriously. Horsfield is a little more critical of Beauvoir's claim that housework is insignificant if one has a career.

Outside of that, I have a better opinion of Don Aslett than Horsfield does. All advice has to be taken with a grain of salt and a grain of sense. I don't seem myself washing the walls as Aslett recommends any time soon, but I have to love an advisor who recommends a long-handled brush rather than getting down on one's hands and knees. But, taste cannot be argued.… (mais)