Saturday, January 22, 2011

The mystery and science of huswiferie

I am not a good housekeeper. Between the two of us, my husband and I make one fairly bad housekeeper. We regularly have to throw food in the bin, the advent of guests has us frantically hoovering and chucking things in the spare room, and though we sometimes buy seeds and potted herbs, the seeds lie in miscellaneous drawers and the potted herbs wither and die. The only things that seem to grow are the potatoes in the cupboard.

I love cooking and will happily spend an entire day shopping for ingredients and concocting various mélanges - cooking is, to me, a nobler cousin of alchemy - but afterwards my teeny kitchen looks like it should have a war-correspondent standing in it, describing the debris in a grim-tinged-compassionate tone.

But what of it? As a feminist, surely I should revel in my ignorance of laundry symbols and my inability to sew a straight line. My lowest grade in my school exams was Home Economics, and I remember being vaguely proud of this. For centuries, housework was not an optional interest for women, it was a prescription for their entire drudge-filled, unpaid lives. So I still sympathise with my teenage distaste for it.

But now I've come to see it from a different angle. Early last year I visited the Geffrye Museum, in London. The museum's exhibits consist of drawing rooms through the 16th to 20th centuries. In the first room, there are excerpts from 16th & 17th century books on housekeeping. Gervase Markham's 'The English Hus-wife' (1615) spoke of 'the mystery and science of huswiferie'; other books - Thomas Tusser's 1580 book, '500 Points of Good Husbandry', Hannah Woolley's 'Accomplisht Lady's Delight' (1675) - listed the skills and branches of knowledge called upon by the task of running a household. Of course you can see this in modern books too - in one of my bids to tame my apartment, I bought 'The House-cleaning Bible' by Kim & Aggie, and flicking through it I can see many an esoteric fact concerning the strange properties of stains - but I think as a society, we forget that housekeeping is a formidable talent.

When these same tasks are removed into the commercial sphere, many are respected professions, a perfect example being cooking. But at this point they tend to be appropriated by men. There are female chefs, it's true, but aren't most of the famous ones men? Clothing - again, dominated by men who seem never to have seen an actual woman, only X-rays of them. And then the other disciplines cited in housekeeping books - accounting, gardening, practical chemistry (I don't see what else you could call cleaning, before the advent of Cillit Bang), interior design, management - none of these are ignominious. In his book, 'How Brains Think', William H Calvin proposes, as a definition of intelligence, 'what the brain does when you don't know what to do next'. Housekeeping, with its varying tasks, its open-endedness, seems to me a perfect example of intelligence in action. In fact, he even gives the specific instance of a person figuring out what to make for dinner from the available food in a fridge.
So why did housekeeping come to be seen as a no-brainer?

It was a belief I grew up with, that as long as a woman was a house-wife, she would never achieve equality with her husband. She was, in effect, his servant. The 1963 book by Helen Andelin, 'Fascinating Womanhood', bears out this notion:
"Revere your husband and honor his right to rule you and your children"
- the implication is, that the wife owes her husband, the bread-winner, a kind of fealty. The phrase 'lord and master' is eerily appropriate; the suggestion of feudalism is impossible to escape.
But now I think that the woman wasn't degraded by the work she did; I think that the work was degraded by the woman. Women held the second position in society, and so the work they did was viewed as being not as worthy as men's work, not because it was easier, or less essential, but because it could be done by them. Of course, this is only a theory, but consider the following, from the EU Commission on Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion:
"Jobs requiring similar skills, qualifications or experience tend to be poorly paid and undervalued when they are dominated by women rather than by men. For example, the (mainly female) cashiers in a supermarket usually earn less than the (mainly male) employees involved in stacking shelves and other more physical tasks."
(http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=682&langId=en)

Now, in sociological matters, I don't really believe in clean unidirectional cause and effect; humans are way too messy for that. Housework may have been devalued by its association with women, but then women may have been kept in a subordinate position by housework. Certainly when women pursue education and have an independent income, they are better placed to claim equality.

But to return to housework, and why it should be valued:
Apparently, the UK throws away 30% of its food every year. The US throws away 50%. When you work outside the home, it is difficult to plan meals & manage food efficiently. With the waste of food comes the waste of packaging, much of it plastic (glass is detrimental too due to its weight and the emissions given out in its recycling). Properly cared-for clothes, carpets and furniture last longer, and when you have time to clean properly you don't have to rely on harsh cleaning products.
(UK's food waste: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1460183,00.html ;
US: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20041024002637data_trunc_sys.shtml )

For many people, it's not a straight swap between housework and a job, anyway; most people end up doing both. You get home, often after an hour's commute, and then you begin cooking or cleaning. Or you eat a ready-made meal, heavily packaged, expensive, and usually fairly unhealthy. A society where housekeeping is properly valued, is one with less waste and a better quality of life. Of course most couples can't afford to live on one salary but if I even start on how nonsensical I find our current economic system, I will be straying very much from the topic.

It's encouraging to see books appearing which celebrate domestic skills, and it seems that things like baking and knitting are fashionable these days. Could it possibly be that the elevation of the humble role of houskeeper has been effected by the corresponding emancipation of women? Are we taking it with us? I don't regret that low grade in Home Economics, because Home Economics was something at which I never wished to excel. But my resolution, this year, is to become an adept at the mystery and science of huswiferie.