This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 36, Winter 1997/98.
More than any other activity, cleaning is traditionally seen as women’s work, whether at home or for derisory wages in the casual labour market. How do we feel about cleaning then, whether for ourselves or others, and what do we think about the politics of employing someone else to do our cleaning? Is this a major issue for feminism or is it merely a storm in a tea-cup? In this roundtable discussion, Dianne Butterworth, Debbie Cameron, Jill Radford and Joan Scanlon wash their dirty linen in public and risk having a dust-up about the economics and ethics of cleaning.
Debbie: I could never pay anybody to clean and I’m always really taken aback when I come across people who I think have a similar politics and they do or have paid somebody to clean, and they’re not sick or disabled — they just don’t have time. It’s not that I want to go around condemning people it’s just that I can’t reconcile it.
Jill: I feel I should respond as someone who does pay someone to do my cleaning. The young woman who cleans for me is 14 or 15 and if she wasn’t cleaning for me she’d have jobs which her mum and herself would feel are less safe, like paper rounds or jobs that stretch over several days like her school friends who work in a shop for an hour every day — whereas she earns £10 doing a couple of hours at mine on a Sunday and it saves me having to do. Having said that I do have to clean up before she comes otherwise it would be too awful; it forces me to have a real tidy and clean up so I don’t leave any real shit work for her to do — I wouldn’t leave all the dishes in the sink or a scummy bath.
Debbie: There’s a political argument that you’re right and I’m wrong; since I’ve got enough money to pay someone to clean I could be creating work for another woman who needs paid work. So I’m wondering what’s behind my feeling that its unconscionable for me to do that. I don’t feel that way about cleaning institutions at all; I used to clean in a hospital and obviously I feel they need to be cleaned. My concern there would be about the working conditions and the pay and so on. It’s when it’s your own house that I can’t countenance it.
Joan: Would you feel it was OK to pay another woman to do anything for you?
Debbie: Only something I didn’t have the skills to do myself. I don’t feel that I ought to have all the skills on earth, that I ought to be able to rewire my own house. But that’s stupid isn’t it; it’s saying that male skills are worth something and women’s skills are not.
Jill: And obviously if you eat out you are paying someone to cook for you and wait on you. And presumably when you’re on holiday, if you rent a place for instance, they generally have someone to come in and clean up.
Debbie: Yes, though I’ve always found that really uncomfortable, when someone’s in a position of cleaning up after me. I think it may be as much about my privacy as about exploiting someone else. Also, what kind of social relationship is that? I have occasionally stayed with people who have had servants — not in Britain — and found that extremely uncomfortable, and when I was a student and somebody cleaned my room I found that really uncomfortable as well.
Jill: Though sometimes in that context, like the holiday situation, the cleaner is a kind of agent for the property owner and is keeping an eye on the holiday makers — or the students — and will report back if she finds things that she considers untoward.
Debbie: I think it’s basically about class. The working class woman who cleaned the house I lived in that was owned by Oxford University was old enough to be my mother and you wonder what must she feel about spending her life cleaning up after privileged young women like me who could perfectly well do it themselves.
Jill: But if she wasn’t doing that maybe she’d be unemployed. And in terms of women and work, not all of us enjoy everything about the work that we do. We often work because we need the money more than for job satisfaction.
Debbie: Sure, but it’s the particular relationship between the cleaner and the cleaned up after which I think becomes totally different when you are talking about a school or a hospital rather than someone’s domestic living space.
Joan: I agree that these issues don’t arise in quite the same way when you are talking about institutional cleaning. Although, like Debbie, I don’t think I could pay someone to clean up after me, I would pay someone for other work that I do have the skills to do myself, for instance painting and decorating. I think it’s about the nature of the work itself. I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone who cleans routinely as their main or only paid work could get any satisfaction or sense of self-worth from it, and I haven’t met anyone who’s said that they do. It’s compounded by issue of class, age and race. And then, within the cleaning itself, it gets worse depending on the kind of work involved; whether you’re dealing with shit and mess that’s generated by people, or things like dust which are largely out of their control.
An (un)familiar relationship
Debbie: I don’t think it’s the activity; I think it’s the social relationship. I do know people who have cleaners. I’m thinking of two people in particular whose houses I often visit. They’re not feminists. There’s this sense that the cleaner’s part of the family; they sit down to lunch together or an evening meal before they take her home. But that just strikes me as a feudal relic of the old relationship with the domestic servant and I’m not able to cope with that, partly because of a theoretical analysis of what that’s all about, and partly because three generations ago I would have been the domestic servant and not the employer. I wasn’t raised to be as ease with that kind of relationship and I find it cringe-making.
Joan: I think it’s also true about staying in houses that other people clean that it’s difficult to negotiate those relationships. When I lived in university accommodation, the women who cleaned the residences had a particular relationship with some of the ex-public school male students who lived there, who they saw as their ‘boys’, creatures who couldn’t fend for themselves, and who they’d do all sorts of things for, including waking them up — and they really resented those of us who asked them not to bother to clean our rooms or empty our rubbish, as if we were denying them their rights of access to our rooms somehow, and were being disrespectful or dismissive of their role. They also clearly made judgements about us on the basis of what time we got up etc., which we were acutely aware of.
Debbie: That’s bringing up something else, about how maybe women feel from the employers end. Something most of us have socialised anxieties about is: are we dirty? We are afraid that someone we get to clean up after us will think: ‘Yuck, she’s disgustingly filthy’. I’ve often wondered how cleaners can not have contempt for the people they clean for.
Mixed feelings
Dianne: I don’t think I could ever employ someone else to clean, but I wonder how much of what we are saying comes out of our feelings ourselves about cleaning. Sometimes I get into it, and sometimes I get a lot of satisfaction from it.
Joan: Do you get satisfaction out of the activity or out of the result?
Dianne: Sometimes both. It depends on what I’m doing and what kind of mood I’m in. You put loud music on and have some time out.
Debbie: It depends on the circumstances. I think sometimes it can be enjoyable, and that’s where I disagree with what Joan was saying earlier about not being able to imagine anyone getting anything out of it. When I was a hospital cleaner I did get considerable satisfaction from it, and that’s partly because you have so much better tools than you have at home. You had this BIG dry mop, and this endless supply of buckets of hot water, and an overall. It sounds mad, but even though some of the cleaning I did was much worse than just cleaning shit off toilets, I still felt a great deal of satisfaction, and I didn’t feel contaminated or disgusted, because there was a whole protocol around it, it being a hospital, and you felt you were doing a worthwhile job — and there was no sense of blaming these really sick patients for their own shit. It’s different even in your own home, let alone someone else’s — I hate hoovering, for instance, since no one has invented a hoover without a cord and which weighs nothing.
Jill: I think you’re right about the tools. When I was really poor and had the kids, and we didn’t have vacuum cleaners, I remember at one point living at the top of a Victorian house with stairs that seemed to go on for ever and they were your responsibility even though you only went up and down them, you didn’t live in them. I used to spend hours sweeping the stair carpet with a dustpan and brush and it would be in your hair and eyes, and you’d be coughing… Whereas now I’ve got a state of the art hoover and that sort of cleaning doesn’t seem quite as bad. In fact I quite enjoy playing with this hoover as it’s one of those with no bag that you an see into, and it hasn’t broken down.
Joan: I mind doing it less if you’ve got the tools, but the only time I ever actively enjoy doing it with a vengeance is when the alternative is marking essays, and then cleaning seems like a positive pleasure.
A matter of judgement
Debbie: All the women I’ve ever known use cleaning as a displacement activity, whereas very few men I know of do that. We have this automatic set of activities that we’re supposed almost genetically to know how to do that we can always put in place of something even worse. But the flip side of that — the bad side of that — is that it’s very difficult as a woman to let the cleaning go, isn’t it? Because you have this paranoia about people judging you to be a slut. It is something that women, including feminists, feel entitled to be quite judgmental about.
Joan: We have different thresholds. I wouldn’t judge someone for having layers of dust on everything, and plants dropping their leaves everywhere, and cat fluff floating about, but I wouldn’t be happy about being invited to sleep in a bed with dirty sheets, or having to use a really scuzzy bathroom.
Debbie: And we would take it as a reflection almost on the morality of the person concerned. It’s a really ingrained thing about cleanliness having to do with respectability being the dividing line in the working class between the absolutely feckless and worthless and those who are poor but honest. Of course standards have changed, and who the hell cares about their front door step now, and nobody black leads the grate and all of that, but we always had standards of cleanliness that were set for people who had a domestic workforce to achieve it, didn’t we. When all those fine so-called labour saving devices came in they didn’t actually save women any labour they just upped the standard of expected hygiene.
Joan: There are all those wonderful extracts from Nella Last’s War Diary where finding productive and significant activity or employment outside of the home suddenly make those previously oh-so-important domestic tasks seem far less important. There seemed to be this massive shift in the value system of women which wasn’t about accepting a lowering of standards, it was about questioning those standards and reassessing which tasks were essential in the house.
Dianne: And there are others who can’t let go of these bizarre standards of cleanliness. A woman I worked with not only cleaned her loo every day… she disinfected her carpet once a week, and she thought she was being slack because her mother disinfected the carpet every day.
Senseless chores
Debbie: My sister’s boyfriend was in the marines for a while, and he couldn’t stand it, and one of the reasons was that the military used pointless cleaning as a form of discipline. It was basic training, and one of the things they had to do was to endlessly clean these pieces of copper piping. Their training area was actually on land but they pretended it was a ship for some reason, it was called ‘going ashore’ when they let you off the base, and you couldn’t go ashore unless you had cleaned this copper piping, and you had not only to clean it at one in the morning but then on first getting up. Of course nothing had happened to it in the meantime, it hadn’t got dirty, and so he once questioned why they couldn’t just get up and give it a good rub down for the day (ready for whatever use it was put to) and he was branded a trouble maker for that. So it was obvious that pointless cleaning was the army’s first weapon in trying to break men’s spirit and their desire to ask why. I think that’s interesting because it points to a kind of brainwashing function of cleaning that many of us have to some extent imbibed as well.
Jill: Certainly in women’s prisons they use cleaning as a penalty so that if you’d gone and done something incurring disciplinary you might find yourself on the cleaning rota. And what makes it particularly punitive is that in prison they refuse to get the tools or the technology so you’re still cleaning with inadequate or useless equipment.
Joan: One of the things that many women say is that if they get their external world in order, which usually involves cleaning, then they can get their head in order as well. It’s certainly true for me.
Debbie: But there’s an obvious reason for that, which is that men usually have someone else to set their external world in order so they don’t feel the need to comment on it.
Joan: It may come back to what you were saying about the fear women have of being judged, and the way they have internalised that so they feel better about themselves when their domestic space is clean and ordered. Because I think that even where men are responsible for the state of their external world, and live on their own for instance without a woman to clean up after them, they often don’t give a shit about it, and live in filth. Men’s cars for instance are the most sordid and smelly modes of transport available; it’s like being in a travelling dustbin.
Debbie: There’s also the issue of how far your mess impinges on other people if you don’t clean up after yourself. So if you squirt juice on yourself you’re the one with the consequences, whereas if you squirt it on the floor someone else has to deal with it if you don’t.. I used to know this woman in San Francisco and I stayed in her house and she employed someone to clean for her, and she had two girls of about eleven and fourteen; and one morning one of them spilled an entire glass of orange juice and it was about 9 am and we were due to go off to work and I automatically reached for the kitchen towel, and she said to me — honestly — ‘The cleaner’ll be here in a couple of hours. Just leave it.’ And you wondered, since the cleaner came about twice a week: would she have been able to live with that spill of orange juice for three and half days if it had been necessary? It was a good example of how some people can see cleaning as altogether out of their ambit because they employ someone to do it.
Hierarchies of work
Dianne: What about the argument that if a woman is really busy, and she pays another woman the same hourly rate that she earns to clean for her, then it gives her an extra 3 or 4 hours to do work that she needs to do, and is already pushed to find time to do. What about that argument?
Joan: I don’t like the idea of paying someone else to do your shit-work so you can do things you consider more important.
Debbie: It’s true that it rests on a hierarchy of work — you’re saying: ‘I have more important skills whereas this woman has only got the skills to do this’. I can’t for instance imagine saying ‘My house is really dirty so why don’t I clean it and employ a woman to write my lectures’. In other words, you can’t imagine it the other way round.
Joan: I can actually. I would happily pay someone to write a piece for me for Trouble & Strife. In fact I’d do their cleaning as well as my own if I could persuade them to do it.
Jill: But, seriously, we are being encouraged to buy ourselves out of teaching in universities to free us to do other stuff.
Debbie: Precisely. That’s because teaching has become like cleaning in universities. Teaching is the housework of an academic department, compared to research, and those things are always gendered. It’s women who tend to be positioned as the good teachers, dealing with all the pastoral stuff, and men who go grant-hunting and doing all the research. It’s the same with the cleaning: it’s stereotypical bottom-of-the-heap women’s work, although interestingly its the kind of work that if you’re short of money you can always pick up. It’s women’s casual labour par excellence. I don’t recall that I ever got any training.
Unequal relationships
Joan: I think from the cleaner’s point of view, institutional cleaning is probably mostly worse than cleaning for an individual employer. Cleaning up after students for instance must drive you mad; I remember the communal kitchens in one of the student residences I lived in in York. Filthy greasy mess left day after day by male students who cooked nothing but chips. Then there’s the endless suspicion of cleaners — if something goes missing, if something goes wrong, they’re the first to be suspected of stealing. Then there’s the endless moaning, even where I work now, about the standard of cleaning. It’s about the invisibility of the work: nobody sees it when you do it; people only notice when you don’t — which isn’t true of other kinds of work.
Debbie: That would probably be my prime political argument about why even if you can afford to pay you shouldn’t. It’s one of the things we have always said about men that they don’t understand what it takes to reproduce the existence of a person let alone more than one person. They don’t understand how much labour goes into enabling them to go out and do whatever brings in their salaries. I think if you want to keep track of what’s going on with that I think you should do your own housework. You should be aware of how much dirt you make, of how much labour there is in making your living environment liveable and you shouldn’t just shuffle that off onto someone else.
Joan: I also think its a self-deluding argument that those few hours that someone else does your cleaning are the hours that you spend doing other work. I think that however much you may need the time to rest, see friends, recover from work, it’s more honest to say that you get that time — your time off — by getting someone else to do your cleaning.
Debbie: I think the women who need that most, of whom it could reasonably be said that they spend just about every waking hour working, including childcare, those are exactly the women who can’t afford to take this solution. If a woman does piece homeworking for instance which does take a lot of hours to earn very little money, and have kids with them, they might have a case for saying: ‘I haven’t got time to clean the toilet this week’, but they can’t afford to get someone else to do it. But I do see Jill’s point about the economics of it, and since those of us who could afford to pay a cleaner are not so pure about other areas why are we so neurotic about this issue?
Jill: I simply feel as someone who has brought up two kids and having cleaned up after myself and them for a number of years, I’ve reached the point that I don’t want to do it any more if I don’t need to. It’s not that I don’t understand what’s it’s about and what it involves. It’s only in the last 8 years or so that I’ve had a cleaner, after 40 odd years of doing it myself.
Dianne: Would you feel the same if the person you had cleaning for you was a thirty or forty year old woman rather than a teenager?
Jill: Interestingly, when I first moved up north I found a traditional ‘woman who does’ via one of my colleagues, and she did my house two or three times. Then I when I had unpacked and got the study sorted I asked if she would do that room and she sacked me. She must have taken one look at my bookshelf.
Debbie: Do you mean that she didn’t think you were respectable?
Jill: She didn’t say as much, but everything had been fine until she went into my study, where all my books are, and then suddenly she hadn’t got time to do the job and had to leave.
Dianne: Didn’t you have a man cleaning for you at one time?
Jill: Yes, I had a lad who was the son of some lesbians I knew, who was 15 or so and coming up to GCSEs and again he needed pocket-money, and strangely at that time he had a thing about cleaning and really enjoyed it, which is pretty unusual. With the young woman I have now, I try to keep out of her way when she’s there, but I do interact with her more. When I had a older woman, she used to come in while I was at work, and I didn’t interact with her; she’d just leave a note saying ‘You need to get some more polish’ or whatever, and I’d leave her a note in reply.
Work and identity
Debbie: The bottom line is that you’re kidding yourself if you think you can have an equal relationship with someone who does that kind of personal service for you, whoever it is. If I was ever in a position where I was injured, for instance, and felt I had to employ someone to do my cleaning, then the first person I would look for would be a student or someone like that, who wanted to take on an extra job. So it would be more difficult to stereotype them as a domestic servant.
Joan: And also because by employing a student, for instance, the cleaning does not become their work identity. It a lot easier to deal with a job like cleaning, or any other bum job like being a waitress or an office temp, when you know that it’s temporary and what you really do is different even if you don’t make a living doing it — whether you’re a student, an actor or whatever. And I think people treat you differently if they know you are only doing it as a ‘holiday job’ rather than as your main occupation. Women I know who’ve done cleaning jobs as their only work outside of their own home have often been treated like shit. Some women that they have worked for have so keen to get their money’s worth, and so mistrustful, that they have done things like sprinkle talcum powder on the carpet to check if its been hoovered.
Jill: Also, if you’re cleaning individual women’s houses you’re very much isolated and you may go to two or three different houses a week; whereas in somewhere like a university there’s a gang of you and even if you are working on your own you do at least come together and have a bit of crack at the end of the shift.
Debbie: What interests me is this issue of working for other women. It’s invariably the case that when you’re cleaning for a whole household it’s the woman you are seen to be working for, and who pays you at the end of the day, when most other work involves women working for men. My own experience of hospital working is about the only job I can think of where there was no sexual harassment.
Jill: I was thinking back to my mum, who did a lot a cleaning jobs in her life. She did a lot of casual work when we were children, including cleaning and factory jobs in Nottingham, and then at one point she got a more white collar job and did start to employ a cleaner. Again I think she found she couldn’t fit everything in her day. She would ring home when the cleaner was there, just to say things like: ‘I’ve left the money under the clock’, and she would get really cross if the cleaner had left half an hour early, because it was hard and she was having to struggle to find the money to pay the cleaner although she couldn’t reasonably find the time to do the cleaning herself, being a single mother and all that.
Joan: I’m still very uneasy with the argument about providing employment for other women. Because actually what you are doing by freeing yourself to do other things is maintaining the kind of economy of labour or a job market that depends on women doing shit work to enable others to go out and do other kinds of work — which is what men do.