ACFM - ACFM Trip 52: Cleaning

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

In the socialist utopia of our dreams, who exactly is doing the cleaning? Nadia, Jem and Keir confront a tricky topic in this ACFM Trip. With music from X-Ray Spex, The B-52s and more, they offer their weird-left perspective on everything from dirty dishes and bodily secretions to circumcision, pollution and the caste system. Find […]

Hello, and welcome to Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milbin, and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about the very tense issue of cleaning. Why are we talking about cleaning again?

I can't quite remember, Jeremy. Well, yeah, I got an email, we got an email from a listener Azara, who suggested we do an episode about cleaning and had an extremely interesting set of points and issues. She suggested we get into around the topic of cleaning. So we decided to take up this idea. It's really about cleaning as in the sense of house cleaning, like how cleaning and housework,

although obviously the concept of cleanliness raises all kinds of issues that we can get into. But I think most listeners are already going to understand that just housework itself and the notion of keeping the domestic space in a particular state of order obviously has a lot of political and cultural implications that we're thinking about. Yeah, definitely. I mean, what's great about this, and I'm not sure if our listener, Zahra, has any Arabic heritage, but the word Zahra in Arabic also means to shine or to

radiate. So I don't know if this is like a happy coincidence, but definitely that sentiment is in her name as well. Yeah, this is a really, really interesting topic. I'm really excited to talk about Obviously, we always want to politicise these phenomena and kind of historicize. I think the things that I'm interested in is, you know, the class politics around this stuff. Like, who's dirty and who's clean, who's seen to be dirty and unclean. And when that terminology is banded around as a pejorative, I'm also interested in the gender aspects of this. And I'm also interested geographically on how this is perhaps different in different cultures or has. been across the globe. And I guess I'm also interested in, like, things like, you know, our

attitudes and technology and how all of these different things interface with how we have conceptions of what is and who is clean or unclean. So I'm sure we're going to have a really fun discussion. When we were discussing this, my first thought was, I don't know what I'm going to say about cleaning. What would I say about that? But as soon as you get into it and start to think about it, it becomes obvious, there's so much in it. In fact, it's a really, it's a really complicated topic, actually, particularly when you start to thinking, well, what drives our conceptions of cleanliness? What drives the standard of cleanliness that's seen as like respectable or something like that? And that's quite a complex issue. And so when you come to think about

what are the socialist politics around cleaning, beyond just the gendered aspect, of course, actually it's quite difficult to think about, you know, if we could overcome the dynamics of capitalism, for instance, well, what would be left? How would we deal with domestic labour? and cleaning, part of which there are joyful moments too, perhaps not so much cleaning bread like cooking and these sorts of things, but perhaps cleaning as well. And so basically it's a really interesting and chunky topic, I think, and we're going to go get into that in a minute, of course. Before that, we'll do the quick notes that we always do. Before we do an episode, we want to raise our newsletter that comes out monthly, of course. We send that out

with every new trip. So it'll be on a different topic each month. Go to Navarra.media forward slash ACFM newsletter to subscribe to that. Then there's our Spotify playlist with all of the songs we mentioned. Just search for ACFM on your, on Spotify or whatever app you listen to. Of course, like all podcasts, we want five-star reviews. And we'd also like nice comments. And, you know, the comments are perhaps one place where you could leave suggestions

for topics. We've been picking up some topics from listeners quite a lot recently. And the final message, of course, is that you can support ACFM by supporting our hosts, Navarra Media, and just go to navara.media forward slash support for that. We encourage you to do so. We should definitely play our song by, arguably the greatest band ever to come from Athens, Georgia, no matter what fans of REM may think, the B-52s. This is their 1986 track, Housework. Housework, Housework,

Housework. Housework, Housework, Housework. Housework. I am doing my housework. Got no time to fall around. Perhaps let's start on a sort of meta level and say, and somebody telling me what cleanliness is. Like, is cleanliness the same as tidiness?

Are those distincts? I think there's one thing to mention here as we're thinking about what is cleanliness, which is something that came up for me when I was thinking about this episode, which is that there's huge emotions around this. And I think, you know, we'll come to discussing that in detail later. But, you know, this seems to be some sort of. where just even being able to define it is going to vary between, you know, culture and background and also on a very, like, granular level, like people's households

and how they've been brought up. And I actually think, like, there are some aspects of this conversation of trying to define what cleanliness is that I found quite difficult to articulate because I said, oh, God, if I give my opinion on this, then, you know, then I will be shaming somebody, I'll be shaming the listeners who like don't engage in this particular practice. So I just wanted to kind of flag that at the top, which is that like this is a difficult one and one which I think a lot of people will compare themselves to others. So we'll talk about, of course, this as a social phenomenon, but even on the definitional level, it's going to be a hard one to grapple with.

There's obviously a history of, you know, standards of personal cleanliness and domestic cleanliness changing over time and being variable in different contexts. You know, there's a lot of emotional weight, as you say, on concept of cleanliness. There's that proverb, isn't there? I think it's attributed to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Cleanliness is next to godliness. And the same in Islam. We've got one that, which is a nathan al-Iman al-Imen, which is like, cleanliness is part of belief effectively. So like even stronger and like you know it's kind of like really central to I think a lot of belief systems. But it's funny because cleanliness is next to godliness is his quote from John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and it tends to be associated in one's

mind these days with a sort of almost twee kind of you know English respectability and a kind of arguably fairly trivial understanding of what that means. But it is It's actually, you know, it's like an 18th century English iteration of a really ancient idea, which is the idea that, like, cleanliness and purity are associated with the divine. So, like, in Islam and in Judaism, like, ritual purity is, like, a big deal, like, to all kinds of aspects of religious observance and in lots of other traditions as well. I mean, Hinduism as well. So it's a long-standing idea in certain ways.

I mean, one of the things that's raised by the way we're talking about this now, though, is what's the relationship between cleanliness and tidiness, because Zara was mainly talking about housework and house cleaning in that email, and I think that's really interesting, but the relationship between the idea of being clean and the idea of being tidy is sort of interesting. And again, it's an English idiomatic expression, clean and diding, and that means you finish doing the housework to some extent at that point. related but not totally identical things, aren't they? They are related but different, but also just to

embellish what you've just said, Jeremy. I think similar ideas are put upon the body. So your body needs to be in terms of presentability, not just of the house, but of the body. There's both clean and there's tidy. So say you were, you know, you've just had a shower and you're properly scrub behind your ears and we have all of these expressions, you know, in Western culture, but then you're wearing

really creased clothes. Traditionally, that would be seen as like an untidy look, or, you know, your hair is all over the place. And the same goes for the household, which I think we're going to go into, you know, you're expected to be not just clean, but also tidy. I mean, I would say that they are not the same thing. One of them matters way more to me than the other, but maybe, you know, there are different, like, points over history and, you know, political reasons for those to have been brought together and fused. Well, one way into that is perhaps to reverse. the question and say, like, what is dirt or what is dirtiness? The philosopher Mary Douglas has this phrase that dirt is just matter out of place. And so that has a couple

of implications, of course. One of them is that, you know, the idea of dirtiness in some sort of relationship to tidiness, I think, because what's tidiness is just things in its correct place, etc. But like the idea that dirt is just matter out of place means, it implies that there is a set of ordered relations and then something is contravening that order, basically. And behind that is this idea that, like, no, nothing is inherently dirty, basically. It's just that it's not fitted into a particular system of classification at this moment. And so one way to think about that is the food on your plate, basically, you're having your dinner. And that is food, isn't it?

And it's the right, it's in the right place. And once you finish your dinner, they become dirty dishes, basically. And, you know, that whatever the leftovers, perhaps actually you might put the leftovers in a fridge, but like, you know, the scrapes of plates or food on your plate that need to be scraped off and then washed, etc. There is a transformation in its status from clean to, and like, you know, spoiled food is one of these things in which, which is almost a universal sort of indicator of dirtiness. You know, it becomes, it moves from clean food to dirty plates, basically. So that means that, like, you can think about cleaning as trying to reorder the environment and reordering the environment of course to fit with

a system of classification that opens up this huge field of social influences about what is seen as dirty and unclean what fits and what doesn't what matter fits within a system and doesn't fit within a system and you know you can see how certain types of people get classified as as dirty or untidy etc and it fits into all of that shaming that you mentioned earlier nadia yeah and I think there are biological, you know, I think it's worth mentioning, like, there are biological and evolutionary reasons why we have come to some of the conceptions, which is, you know, like universal almost amongst most mammals is that, you know, food and excrement don't go in the same place, because that's, experientially, it's dangerous. So, like, even though we haven't

got the germ theory, which are going to talk about, like, animals won't put those two things in the same place, right? So, like, there are reasons why we get into these systems, but of course, as society and, like, humans and cultures develop, we then put all sorts of kind of, like, labeling and, uh, and embellishments upon that, which have to do with, like, power and class and other things, which is the, the meaty part of the discussion I'm excited to get into. That's why it's so difficult, I think, it's not so difficult. It's why it's such a tricky topic because our conceptions of cleanliness,

obviously have some elements of like health by, either by experience or by sort of scientific inquiry, but, you know, there is a, a relationship between cleanliness and, and health. And then it's also wrapped up of all sorts of other stuff, you know, such as social prejudice, you know, as soon as you get into like social categorization, you can get, you know, social prejudice can come into it. I think that's why it's an interesting topic to unpick. I think Mary Douglas, you know, this very important, influential British anthropologist, that distinction between, that definition rather of dirt as a matter of place, which is, you know, which he makes in a very, very, very famous study, like the culture,

variability of ideas of cleanliness and purity and partly it's pointing to the way in which there's a kind of variability between cultures. The formulation still works even when you have a situation when there's a logical reason, like a medical, a health reason, an evolutionary reason for a matter to be put out of place. So sometimes matter being put out of place will be for arbitrary reasons and sometimes it will be for less arbitrary reasons, for concrete reasons. If you go, like if you look at people who've tried to study the history of like strict dietary requirements again in things like Judaism and Islam then you get these very interesting of histories where well some of these dietary rules seem to have started off as like pretty

sensible because you know it was a way of maintaining health especially when in an era when people are eating meat but there aren't like state authorities that you know maintaining standards to make where it's healthy. But then these things get mixed up with and become part of the legitimation process for sets of rules, which obviously aren't based on any actual sort of scientific basis. One of the things I was thinking about that is when the question, the answer to what is dirt is matter out of place? It's like, what about shit? I have concept of shit being dirty still, even when it's in its right place, I down the toilet and down the sewage, etc. I think in that sense, out of places is any way you can still smell it or see it, because

So that, because you're still, you know, at risk of bacterial contamination, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, once it's flushed away and we can't see it anymore, we'll just bump into it as it floats down the river as it's been through our sewage. Ask the rats. It's back out of place again. Yeah, yeah, the British state has decided that it's in its place if it's in the rivers. That's fine.

Yeah, because I can just think about, like, pollution and all that sort of stuff. CO2, etc, you know, is carbon dioxide dirty when it's fizzing up our fizzy drinks? Well, the concept of pollution itself is a concept of dirtiness. It's a concept of matter being out of place. Yeah, dirty energy. It's one reason there's sort of a limit to, you know, sort of aesthetic projects which want to entirely reverse, like, establish notions of cleanliness and dirtiness, isn't it? It was some sort of a political turning point for me. although it had been a long time coming. I was at some event in a squatted space,

like sometime in the 2000s in London, where the toilets weren't working. Like, and it was just really disgusting. I remember saying to myself, look, if it's a choice between this or the Tories, people are going to choose the Tories. Like, this isn't like, you can't do this. The all-time classic rock anthem,

a proto-punk song about dirt. This is the Stooges from, their 1970 album, Fun House, Dirt. we could move on from this question of like what is dirtiness to like who is seen as like dirty or unclean because we've already mentioned it's wrapped up with all sorts of stuff you know the idea of being dirty is you know it's a pejorative etc and it's all linked up with shame and theories of respectability or feelings of respectability we should probably put it that way I mean when we were talking about this we were talking about all these issues

about the way in which, you know, indeed, and this is one of the things that Zara was referring to in an email. You know, there's a very important history of ideas of respectability, ideas of social success in a way. I mean, obviously, not just in British culture at all, but in many cultures. And there's a long history of association between, you know, being respectable, even if you're poor and being clean

and having a tidy house and the children going to school looking clean and going to church, neatly tied out, and being somehow below that, being part of the lump and proletariat, as Marx would call them, is, you know, being a vagrant or being, you know, or just being unsuccessful, actually, as someone who can manage the domestic sphere or manage their own personal, physical being in the world. And that all comes to be associated with being dirty, with being literally dirty, which obviously has some, I mean, there's going to be some material basis to this for reasons we're going to get into, just because, Because, well, actually, like, being neat and clean requires a certain level of material resource, which not everybody has.

But then there's also this notion of dirty in English. And I don't know if this works in any other language. There's a whole idea of dirty, basically just meaning illicitly sexual. You know, you talk about a dirty book, a dirty movie. It's a very archaic language now, but that's like mid-20th century colloquialism for, basically for something that, it's a bit pornographic. It's the same in Arabic, dirty thought. It's the same in Arabic.

You have the same usage and also with like dirty thoughts as well. I think the etymology of like sluts and slattern, these words for like sexually least, women has to do with being dirty. Same in Arabic. Same in Arabic, yeah. Yeah, so that and so that, and that absolutely has to do an idea of purity.

And that has to do with an idea that chastity is a form of purity and that sex itself, sexuality itself, when it's not sort of in place is a form of pollution. It pollutes the mind, it pollutes the body. I mean, that is still sort of about matter out of place. It's even, it's about materiality, like corporeality out of place in a way, isn't it? It is, and it is linked to this really ancient idea that, well, what it means to be a successful human is to have your carnal animal urges. The aspects of your being that you share with mere animals, like have to be completely under control,

limited as far as possible, like got out of the way. And then if you, and if you can't do that, if you can't do that, then you're closer to being like a mere animal that just shit on the ground and just has sex, you know, just in the field and, you know, just with any other member of its species. This link between dirty and sex, like it's an interesting one I hadn't thought of before, but in some ways, you're right, Gem, it's like sex is this, is this sort of something that produces bodily odors and secretions because it's a sweaty, carnal, visceral, sort of like bodily experience base. There's no getting away from that bodily experience.

Yeah, so you can see some sort of level of like materiality to this concept, this linking of dirty and sex. But then it also carries on into like the ideas of women's bodies being inherently dirty in some sort of way, leaking in ways which are not, which certainly aren't respectable, and must be hidden away in some sort of manner. This is the point at which like a biological reality does not underscore traditional nations of purity and cleanliness, because I think you'll find scientifically that when women are menstruating, they are not in fact more in danger of demonic possession than at

other times. I'd like to see those studies. Whereas Mr. Stats on this one. think that the women and menstruation piece is really interesting because also because how this relates to blood. So like I was thinking about like doing a little bit of research of like how blood is thought of across cultures like, you know, and across the ages. And in general, like blood in war, which is probably where it's most dangerous because, you know, you're fighting. There's like, there's soil, there's elements where you can get, you know, cut and get infected.

is probably the point at which blood is most dangerous, but of course because war is male, you know, and the default male body in that environment is seen as kind of normative under patriarchy. That is not considered to be unclean, whereas the normal process of, you know, menstruation, which most women experience is seen as unclean, whereas of course that's, and that creates huge psychological problems for like, you know, this is, This is an understudied area of like women seeing themselves as unclean and kind of perpetuating that logic. And again, like we've mentioned various different belief systems like under Islam, you're not allowed to pray or be near a holy sight if you are bleeding, which of course is fucking mental, you know, from a feminist perspective. But, you know, it's really interesting.

Like this is this notion where this is a moment of where blood is, you know, seen as as unclean, which is, yeah. And I know that exists over other belief systems as well. I mean, blood is definitely, like, dirty when it's out of place, isn't it? And I'm not sure I totally agree with you. Well, I mean, like, classic, it depends what we mean by war, isn't it? Because we're probably talking about, like, war films and stuff like that, fiction around war in which, you know, in films around the Second World War, et cetera, and that sort of post-war period, there famously was very little blood.

You know what I mean? And things such as Star Wars, etc, there's no blood, basically, until one of the later films in which blood plays a minor role. If men are fighting, I mean, even if there's a punch-up outside a pub, right, and a man's nose is bleeding or part of his body is bleeding, the conception, the reaction of other people is not going to be one of that unclean. Yeah, maybe. That's what I mean.

I mean, in a physical sense between men, the notion of cleanliness is not one culturally constructed around that biological phenomenon of a man bleeding. It's fundamentally different to how women bleeding is seen. Yeah, maybe. I just think there's a distinction between accounts of actual war and fiction around war and war films, etc. Because accounts of actual war really dwell quite a lot on like the smell and like, you know, people defecating as they die and people, people farting before war because, you know, your bowels loosening, in fear and all that sort of stuff.

Whereas fiction around war basically excludes all of that because it doesn't, it excludes all of that corporeal bodily stuff. Do you know what I mean? Doesn't want it to be, to be recognised. In fact, these are living human beings. And that gets in the way of the Wham-Bam sort of excitement of it all. And obviously, this all has to do with various hierarchies, It's not just gendered hierarchies, doesn't it?

Because, I mean, the classic justification, even in, you know, I'm always going back, you can tell my kind of intellectual trainings, I'm always going back like a French person to Athenian philosophy. And, you know, even like in Aristotle, basically, the basic justification for social hierarchies of various kinds has to do with how far various social groups are understood to be capable of comporting themselves in a way, which differentiates them ultimately from the animals. And so it ends up being implied or stated that there are both, that there are the reasons why the subordination of women is okay and the subordination of various ethnic groups is okay

and the subordination of the poor is okay. It all has to do with their greater carnality, the fact that their minds, their pure minds are not in control of their dirty bodies, to the same extent. And this, you know, this cascades through Western culture and, I mean, and, you know, arguably even through into Islam, actually, via the influence of those kinds of ideas within the Christianity,

you know, becomes really, really important. And then really, you know, the Abrahamic religions have their own version of it from Judaism as well a lot of the time. So these ideas are, they're really important and they're really powerful. And they end up, and, in fact, it's not, And also, I've mentioned all those religions, but we keep saying, I mean, arguably, like, the absolute extreme example of all this is Hinduism, you know, which is a term I'm always a bit wary about using,

because Hinduism is really a concept that gets invented in the late 19th century as part of a kind of nationalist project in India, that is, and which is also a class project, actually, to assert the traditional authority of the Brahmin caste in India. You know, nobody before it was of 80, the late 19th century would have known what Hindu was it, yeah, there was the vague, the huge sprawling, like complex culture of

the religions that could be traced back to the Vedas, you know, the ancient Sanskrit writings. But within the kind of dominant and socially dominant versions of those traditions, of course, you have this rigid caste system, which so many people have tried to campaign against

for decades, like more than a century now, within which there's a whole set of people, there's a whole designated social group of people who are at the bottom of the caste system who are who are literally referred to as untouchable who are understood to be irredeemably ritually impure to the point where if you're at the top of the caste system you cannot have any sort of physical or even much social contact with them because then you will be defiled so these

notions the idea that what justifies your place at the top of a rigid social hierarchy which can be defined in terms of class, in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of caste. The idea that that has something to do with your purity, your cleanliness, and the dirtiness of the people at the bottom, that is a really, that is an idea you are seeing all the way from the Indian subcontinent to Ireland. And that is really, like, important because I think what's happening there is you're basically using, you are using the notion, you know, that comes from evolution, that comes from biology, which comes from, like, the reality of, you know, disease, etc., of, like, disgust, and you're putting a class, you're using it, kind of, for class politics effectively.

Because if you're able to say, you know, from one class to another, or, like, within a class culture, perpetuate this idea that to bring out those kind of instinctive notions, of disgust amongst people, then it's not only that these people being poor, like are bad people because they're bad or they're not deserving or et cetera, but it's also that we're disgusted from them, like, yuck, poor people, you know,

that brings a whole other kind of visceral sense to the discrimination that is perpetuated by those class politics, which I think is like really interesting, but also really powerful and important to understand when you try to understand, you know, why class politics within a certain culture or across the ages it's been perpetuated. Because if you're disgusted from poor people, that adds a whole other element to it. Yeah, that's really important.

And I think this is a really useful analytical frame of reference on a lot of issues, actually, that rather than a really simple social constructionism that says everything is culturally arbitrary, I think more often it's more useful to say, well, like social systems of classification, which are sort of 95% arbitrary, they get a lot of their parents. from like getting on to some bit of human experience, which is corporeal, which is evolutionary, which is biological. I was thinking about this, you know, I was thinking about this when we were talking about the sex thing. It's like it's even, there's this grain of truth in all those ideas about sex, in that, well, you know, you know, we do have these bodies, arguably, that sort of evolved in this context 100,000 years ago

when your opportunities to mate with a, with a member, to mate with somebody or to have sexual relations with somebody, who would be appropriate, we're pretty limited. And, you know, part of being a human in the 21st century is you've sort of got to deal with the fact that your body might have all these impulses inherited from that evolutionary history, which are absolutely not appropriate to actually functioning as a person who's kind of sane and socially competent in the 21st century. And I mean, I think this is something that people were starting to realize in the beginning of urban civilization, like two and a half thousand years ago.

That's partly why you get these religious systems like Buddhism and Christianity and things like this. Partly because people are trying to work out, well, what do you do about the fact that you can't just get around shagging everybody these days? It doesn't really work like that anymore. So what are you going to do about that? And it takes these really mad forms like we've been describing. It takes these completely mad forms in terms of people getting the idea that like sexuality itself is like a pollution. and you get these extreme forms like, you know, certain kinds of Gnostic Christianity where they actually decide that the entire material world is a really, is corrupted and bad.

And actually what it would mean to be a good person spiritually would be to be completely celebrate and not have any children and just maybe then your spirit will be released back into the outer cosmos or whatever. Which has such a strong patriarchal dimension, of course, because childhood birth in itself is inherently like messy. Yes, totally. You know, or very least untidy, right? So the extreme of that is like hyper-masculinist of like trying to, you know, deny those impulses,

but to do them in a way that doesn't involve bringing up children or having children or, you know, perpetuating like the race or like self-cleaning bodies, which of course is what vaginas are, right? And all of these things that perhaps men don't experience in the same way that women do on a biological, I mean, on a male and female biological level. Yeah. But I think that's, like, this is a really good way into thinking about how, why hierarchies are so hard to unpick, basically. If you think about stuff like discussed, you know, it's, like, an effective or pre-conscious sort of reaction before you sort of like consciously, you know, incorporate it into your understanding of the world, you know what I mean? But it's like socially informed, obviously, because it's changed what we find disgusting that, you know, there are certain constants in it, but like it changes over time, basically, have different attitudes to.

towards like bodily odors, etc. These sorts of things change, basically. But that's why it's so hard to unpick, because you know, you've got this pre-conscious thing and then you've got like the, that you have conscious political strategies consciously trying to root themselves in these sorts of pre-conscious, effective sort of reactions.

It's incredibly hard to overcome those. Do you know what I mean? It's not just a case of presenting rational arguments. Of course, probably that's all we've got, isn't it? But, yeah, we can't, Can you have a socialist politics rooted in feelings of this guest? Probably not, I don't think. Yeah, but if you brand, you know, like left-wing activists as all kind of like crusties or all this terminology that we have, like it helps oppressive forces like the police, like justify their violence against them,

because it's like these are dirty people. So, you know, we've got to get rid of them. We've got to clear the squares. We've got to all of these things. It's operating, like you say, on another, like, libidinal level because it's then used as a justification for your actions, because you need to move dirt away, right? Because it's out of place. So therefore, these squatters or these occupiers or, you know, these people,

get them out of our nice, clean, organized, you know, mowed, lawn squares. Yeah, are these immigrants who smell differently because they eat slightly different food, etc., that sort of thing. I think, like, when we bring it back to, like, class, You can see a sort of interesting way in which people respond to that. The term the Great Unwashed, sort of like a Victorian era, phrase to refer to the working class, the working classes.

You know, it sort of survived. It survived for a long, long time. But one of the reactions to that was like a huge valuation on cleanliness and tidiness, particularly in the post-war period probably is probably that period of like the peaks of housewives. house pride proud in their housekeeping etc you know that that idea that like a working class house would be you know really really really tidy and clean and that housewise would go and like they'd be cleaning their front step to make sure it's not any dirtier than the than the step then next door's step etc you know there's that there's that sort of reaction and then you know

we probably say that like peak cleanliness has faded perhaps partly because the housewife has not ceased to exist, but like, you know, many more women go out to work and so there's less time for domestic labour, etc., that sort of idea. But you can see that there's a response to like being categorised at the Great Unwashed, which is almost a take on and then over-identified perhaps with like what we might have thought of in the 19th century as like bourgeois standards of respectability and cleanliness. Yeah, this is a good point, isn't it? I think if you're talking about British culture specifically, and this is probably true of a lot of other places, what you're talking about here is a reaction to the experience of urbanisation.

Because again, I'm thinking about what I know about sort of medieval ideas, for example, or even very early modern ideas. And I don't remember there being much about, like, peasants being dirty. I don't remember this being a particular sort of preoccupations, partly because nobody really talks about them at all, because the only people writing stuff are like, you know, monks or aristocrats. But it's not really, I mean, there's this sort of joke now in like things like Monty Python films or whatever about like medieval peasants being covered in shit. But I don't, it's, I don't, I don't, I might just have missed it or I might not know about it, but I don't remember it being a big deal. But it really, and cleanliness becomes a

massive, massive issue. Once you have people living together in cities and you have notoriously, you have rich people having to spend at least some of their time within, in the basically the same urban locations as this growing urban proletariat, this growing over the working class. And this urban working class, whereas their immediate ancestors would have been peasants in the countryside, they wouldn't have had like running water or anything like this, but mostly they would have lived in places where they had immediate access to various sources of fresh water. So they would have been able to clean themselves. And they wouldn't have been experiencing the same health risks that you get from living in unsanitized, close proximity in an urban context.

So that idea of the Great Unwashed and those ideas around those massive anxieties around cleanliness, they partly are a function of that experience of urbanisation. And then the great project of urban reform in the 19th century and also, and in other cities, I think in places like France and North America, for example. The great project of urban reform is sanitation, and it's the process by which you clean up. You get the shit off the streets, you know, house of people's houses, into the sewers. You give people fresh water,

you give people fresh water, so they don't have to get cholera from contaminated water supplies, and so they can wash themselves. So all that stuff is really important. And yeah, and it's in that context then, of course, it becomes the case that as you get these growing class differentiations, particularly within the urban working class, one of the key markers of class differentiation within the urban working class

and also between the urban working class and the middle classes is the idea that the more respectable you are, the higher up the social hierarchy you are, the cleaner you will be and the cleaner your house will be and the more presentable it will be. And I think that stuff I think is all pretty, well established by the late 19th century actually is. I mean, by the late 19th century

in Britain, you've got the building societies, making home ownership available to the sort of elite sections of the urban working class. You've got very strong motivations for those more economically successful layers of the working class

to differentiate themselves from people below them in the social strata. And you've got the fact that the ideal that the woman a woman of a household should not go out to work is well established because that's the bourgeois norm and that is the hegemony norm to which people aspire and that is becoming more and more possible again for these kind of elite sections of the working class I mean when I say elite sections

of working like you're basically talking about people working in industry where you know the man in the house is doing some relatively skilled job in engineering or building or what have you and he's able to command a sufficient and was probably a member of a craft union able to command a sufficient salary and also get access to enough credit through building societies, they can probably become a homeowner. And there's a fair number of these people around by the late 19th century. If we take a step back in the context of what you're talking about, Jeremy, and just think about the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Revolution creates a problem, which almost is a problem of social reproduction, which perhaps was not thought about until it became a problem, which is

what happens when you cram loads of bodies who you need to be workers, like in a space, and then those workers start dying because of the sanitized conditions. So I think, you know, if we think about even as late as like, you know, the great smog of London, I think that was 1952 or something, but also like previously, you know, in Manchester, Liverpool and, of course, also in London, like, with, you know, the creation of the mills and the industrialisation and, you know, other, other super urban jobs. Like, the reason why those sanitising projects were created was not necessarily because, I mean, I'm sure there were some philanthropists who are thinking, like, we don't want to live like this, you know, in proximity to these people, but it's also because if you are going

to produce workers who are going to produce the labour, which are going to allow you to accumulate capital, they have to be alive. You know, you have to sustain them for a certain period of time. So the discovery of, well, actually, we do need to have some kind of processes that will keep these bodies, you know, alive or well enough. at least to be able to work, even if not alive, you know, as in have a long, a longevity span, but while they are workers for five, ten years or whatever, we need to have some kind of processes so that they're living in not so much of a close proximity that they are going to die and kill us along the way because we're sharing the same streets or whatever.

Yeah, totally. And it's not an accident. The key period for this stuff is sort of 1840 to 1880. That's because this is exactly the period when the emptying out of the countryside is basically finished, in England at least. I mean, it's still going on everywhere else in the world, but you've basically kicked all the peasants off the land by now. So there isn't a reserve army of labour out in the countryside anymore to be drawn into the cities. And what there is, actually, of the rural workforce is being employed more and more as domestic servants, which is something we'll get onto in the houses of the growing middle class. So, and you don't yet have the solution, which the capitalist class will start to turn to later in the 20th century, which is mass immigration. So you have got a problem. Indeed, you have to reproduce your workforce. So you can't just have them all die of cholera at the age of 25 and then bring in more people from the countryside, which is what was happening a generation or two earlier. So you're absolutely right about that. But of course, the other thing you've got to do by the second half of the 19th century, as indicated by people like Marx and Engels, is you've also got to persuade this massive working class, like not to do revolution. And one of the key ways you persuade them not to do revolution is

you find the best organized, the best educated sections of that working class and you say to them, all right, you can even have a vote, some of you, like by the late 19th century, but what you can have is you can have houses, you can have higher wages, you can have salaries, and you can feel respectable, you can start to feel like you are living your life according, sort of according to the template, which has been set by the urban working, the urban middle class, the bourgeoisie, both the bourgeoisie proper, the capitalist class, but also, you know, the petty bourgeoisie, the intermediary classes, kind of smaller business people or the professional, like the doctors and the lawyers, all these people have established for themselves

over several hundred years a particular way of life. And again, within their class traditions, going right back to the 16th century, actually, part of their idea of themselves as a class is shaped by, indeed, ideas of cleanliness and purity, the idea of the idea that they are more morally upstanding and morally superior, both to the degenerate aristocracy and to the lower social orders, has been important to them since the days of Puritanism

and radical Protestantism. So all that is there. And really the sort of hegemonic authority, the capacity to set the terms for the rest of the culture, which is invested in those social groups really, like the bourgeoisie proper, the capitalist class and those sections of the middle class that are highly privileged and are very close to them, socially and culturally. The fact that they can do that means that then the kind of people just below them in the social order, the elite of the working class become completely invested. in this idea of respectability and those ideas of respectability are there are these several features of them that we've mentioned like one is it has to do with home ownership and this probably the second most important feature is the ability to feed the whole family off the wage of the father so that the wife doesn't have to go out to work and that is the context in which indeed you get the emergence of the idea of the housewife and the idea that what it means to be successful as a housewife housewife, is above all to maintain the respectability of the domestic space and of the whole and of the family when they're out in public as well. One of the other ways to think about that is that when we talk about respectability, we're sort of saying that you're going to be

included in society, you know, as a full member of society or something approaching that. What makes it so attractive is, you know, is that like that is a path to a sense of dignity, basically, do you know what I mean? By thinking about it in that way and is that like, you know, that being drawn into this sort of like bourgeois conception of respectability, therefore you get, you know, you're treated with a certain level of dignity, although you're still subservient to your betters, etc. One of the ways of the thinking about that is that through the latter half of the 19th century and into the early 20th century,

the workers movement sort of started to develop alternative conceptions of dignity. Lots of it tied up in the dignity of work, but like, you know, there was the beginnings of a project of building a, a working class dignified life. And you can think about that as in, you know, the building of reading rooms and libraries and workers institutes and these sorts of things by the workers movement, you know. In some ways, that was a path through which you could delink a conception of dignity

and respectability from your position within a hierarchical system, basically. You would say, no, we're going to break with that and have our own conceptions of what a dignified and respectable life is. But that is also the point at which, you know, basically the idea that you would, you know, wear your Sunday best on a demonstration, you would be, you know, clean and respectable, and that sort of thing was also tied in at that point. Do you know what I mean? It's an incredibly difficult thing to pick a part without falling into cleanliness equals bourgeois respectability.

Therefore, we should all, you know, live in dirty squats, etc. Obviously, there are elements of what gets to be classified. as working class respectability, which most people are going to want, like even in a socialist utopia, that most people probably are going to want to live in a clean house. And I'm going to want their children to, you know, look like they're well cared for if they're out in public. So, so some of that is real. I think in a way, actually, I mean, I think you have sort of touched on it. The question is, you know, what is the route that is off of people to achieving those objectives. I mean, if you want a really extreme example, you could look a post-revolutionary

Soviet Union. I mean, those ideas are not absent there. The idea that what the worker state is going to make possible for people is they're going to leave dignified lives, which include health. They do include health and cleanliness, health and efficiency, but that stuff is going to be made possible through entirely collectivized provision and collective struggle. But the promise of respectability within the context of European and North American capitalist culture, the promise of respectability is that actually that stuff will be made available to you to the extent that you are a fully complicit, a fully compliant member of the working class who will not actually go too far in forming relations to solidarity with other members of your class, particularly

those who are below you in the economic hierarchy. And that you will fundamentally, you will fundamentally conceive of yourself in individualist terms, even at the level of religion, you know, because institutionalized Protestantism is massively important to all this. There are, obviously, there's Catholic respectability culture as well,

but certainly in the English-speaking world, you know, chapel, going to chapel, is a really important part of this as well. We should play this amazing track by Joshua Idahen that was suggested by Nadia, and it's called Mum Does the Wash Joshua Haydhend's a Nigerian British poet and this spoken with pieces set to music

and it's really funny and effective and illuminating male feminism that one time I did the washing I told everybody I did the washing I blogged about it bragged about it took a selfie insta story went on TV won an Oscar went on Fortnite did a dance I am an ally hashtag me too egalitarianism that one time you did the washing is proof it's all equal and no one needs feminism anymore hip-hop every day i'm hustling every day i'm hustling when i bring the basket mama puts the washing in narcissism you look good in the clothes your mom washed surrealism the washing does your mom let's play get a little dirt on your hands by the the american country music singer bill anderson from

because we don't have a lot of country music on this show. And it's an interesting one because dirt in this song stands in for hard work and being sort of like down to earth. It's one of the lyrics. If you want to grow up to be a big, big man, get a little dirt in your hands. So you could think about it as like just this patriarchal song about linking dirt to masculinity, et cetera, and hard work.

But in fact, the song is like a story of this guy who is always told to get a little dirt on your hand. He's told it by his dad. he's told it by some friends he falls into persuading him to rob a bank. Then he's told to get a little dirt on your hands by the prison warden in his jail. So, you know, if you want to be a moral man, you need to get a little dirt in your hands, go and dig in the garden, etc. So it's quite a nice story. When I was a little boy, my daddy used to say to me, son.

We got a lot of big land and a lot of hard work to be done. Go get your marbles, put them in the house, tear down your castles in the sand Come with your papy to the cotton patch And get a little dirt on your hands Get a little dirt on your hands, boy Perhaps we could, one way to get into like, you know, what is capitalist bourgeois conceptions of cleanliness and how do we break from those and erect our own?

Perhaps one way into that is to talk about, you know, not just historical variations in conceptions of what cleanliness consists of, but like geographical variations and attitudes to cleanliness. I know this is something you wanted to bring up, Nadia. Yeah, I mean, there's this thing that I really grapple with, which is, I mean, at the top level, which is also like the politics of like, bad smells so it's not just about like bodies but I have this this this ongoing question which is if the concept doesn't exist in the culture then can people experience it basically like we've got

this word in Arabic which is Zafara which is very difficult to explain in English it's kind of the smell of eggs in the pan when you drop hot water on it which is like or if you like boil a duck or something, or like, you boil a ham. There's a kind of smell. But nobody I know who's not an Arab can smell this smell. And I've been testing this for about 20 years. And that's seen as like an unclean smell. And you have to mitigate for it by using certain, you know, practices or like herbs or spices so that when you cook this thing or you clean this thing, it doesn't create this kind of unclean smell. So that's kind of like the example that I always use about like cultural differences.

But then, and I still don't know what the solution to that is, it's something that I discuss with people all of the time. But then I was thinking about, you know, different like cultural obsessions with certain body parts. So, you know, in the same way that, you know, I perceive as a non-North American, non-white North American, this obsession with kind of having bizarrely white white, gleaming teeth and you're brushing your teeth three times a day or whatever, which is something that people do. I don't have a problem with it individually, but I observe it on a cultural level

as from my perspective, you know, as a, as a, I guess like half British, half Egyptian person as like quite obsessive. I guess in the way that Marie Antoinette, and we can come to that, would think about like bathing at all maybe, you know, as like quite, quite obsessive. You know, like Arabs have a concern any Arab, like any Arabs listening to this will probably laugh at this, have a concern, you know, with clean anises. Like, it's something that all Arabs will talk about. How do you live in the West? You know, you don't have a B-Day, like, this is a huge problem. Like, how can you even, like, have sexual relations with people who, like, don't, are not part of this practice? So that is, you know, definitely something that, you know, Arabs in the 21st century are very concerned with,

you know, with living in the West and occupying, like, Western spaces. But then I was also thinking about circumcision in this space, which is something, you know, like an African practice. It's something that's practiced under Islam and Judaism as like also like conceptions of, you know, having to cut off part of the body that you're born with, you know, in terms of male circumcision. Female circumcision, I think, has a completely different and much more like problematic, in my view, a set of conceptions which aren't necessarily to do with cleanliness because it's more complex than that.

but in the male situation, like, that's also, like, you know, really bizarre, if you look at it from a scientific, not from a scientific, sorry, but like, from a culturally analytic perspective, like, what is going on there? Like, why do you have to cut off one bit of body that you're born with in order to be clean? And of course, there are all sorts of rituals around circumcision there as well. So, like, that's all culturally tied. I mean, and if I'm thinking about it and researching this, I'm thinking, like, how is this, again, related. to like the environment, like how we got to the fact that, you know, these practices still very much exist in the 21st century and are very much linked to notions of cleanliness. So that is like super interesting as well. I mean, the one, if we're going to bring it back to the household that I think is maybe most experienced by many of us today, and which definitely roots back to, you know, maybe individual households, but I think there's a lot of like cultural background in there as is, you know, shoes. So I still, you know, even though I've been brought up in, you know, a fairly secular

household, like I cannot deal with an upturned shoe because bringing up being brought up in Egypt, like shoes belong to the street. And if a shoe is turned up, you know, even if it's in its proper place and it's facing God and you can't have a shoe facing God, so you've got to turn the shoe over. It's still very difficult for me to leave a shoe not turned because that's the way that I was brought up. But, you know, we will go into people's households, like all of us, where you're allowed to wear shoes in the house. And there are other households, which the shoes, you know, firmly stay at the door. So again, like, there are huge differences. And these

are going back to, you know, the clean bodies, dirty bodies and like the class aspects there, but also in the way that we're used, as you mentioned before, I think, used to discriminate against immigrants, like this idea of like what is okay and what isn't okay is also just really interesting. I think it's important to be mindful of that because I think a lot of this can be banded around subconsciously because, again, like we said, this links to like notions of both the disgust and appropriate behaviour which, you know, materialise in different ways, you know, across cultures. So the idea of like shoes on the bed is wrong in my head. Shoes on the settee is wrong as well. but like shoes on a table,

now that would be the wrongest thing it could ever happen. And there's obvious reasons for that because, you know, you pick up dirt on the street, etc. But it's obvious that like, you know, that that sort of like commonsensical conception of, you know, don't bring the dirt of this street into the house

obviously has, it's tied up with all sorts of social history because it varies across geographical regions, do you know? The other way into that, I suppose, to thinking through this is to think about how attitudes to cleanliness has changed through history. I know there's

like, I know that there's not an agreement on this, you know, about how clean were people in the Middle Ages and how Jim thinks that people in the Middle Ages were much cleaner than than we imagine. When you were talking about peasants earlier though, Jim, I was thinking, yeah, hang on a minute, their houses

though, they're going to have like dirt floors, aren't they? Yeah, and you've got animals in the house. We've got animals in the house. By our standards, they'd be pretty fucking grimy, basically. Yeah, you have animals in the house, you have sex in the house, in one room in front of the children. You absolutely don't have private bathrooms. But I think the historically contested element of all this is like, well, just because of all that, does that mean you can't go down to the well or the water pump and wash your body and you're not going to do this fairly regularly, otherwise you're going to get itchy and uncomfortable?

and so I know there I mean there's certainly a view at least among some historians because we don't really know because it's like you don't have like mass observation or personal diaries or even ethnographic accounts done by elite

member society of the way poor people lived I mean basically before the 19th century you've got sort of literary descriptions maybe in the 18th century sort of illusions in like Elizabethan times but we just don't we really don't know for sure like the archaeological evidence can't prove it

so we just don't really know, basically. But yeah, I know there is a view at least among some medieval historians that it's just that it's not really true. And if you look at how, you know, if you look at how people live in very low, relatively low technological environments around the world, you know, people will use, will use freshwater sources to wash themselves pretty regularly, basically. So, but indeed, of course, and partly what we're talking about in this episode is the domestic space. And the conceptions of domestic cleanliness were, of course, were totally different. You need a huge amount of surplus as a society, and you need quite a lot of it to be available to even to relatively poor people, to even start thinking in terms of things like having a private bathroom.

So, I mean, you have private bedrooms before you have private bathrooms, and you don't even have those, like, in the Middle Ages, so no. We know for a fact, through the archaeological evidence that, like, bathing and public bathing was really, really central to, like, Roman society, etc. You know, and we have this idea of the Roman baths as, like, absolute, like, hubs of communities. But that would be, they would still be quite unusual places for 21st century people, I think, because, you know, in public Roman baths, the sexes would bathe together or wash together. And it wasn't a, you know, water didn't play that bigger role. In fact, it would be about, you know, there would be some sort of steam, and then it would be all about, like, scraping your sweat off your bodies, etc.

It wouldn't be the use of soap or anything like that. And then you'd be rubbing yourselves with oil and all these sorts of things, basically. Which does show like quite a different conception of bathing to the one that we have now. And then in the sort of like history of attitudes towards cleanliness, like I was reading about the Crusades being an important point in which that Roman practice of bathing, although like changed actually quite a bit because it had been. because it had been imported into like, well, Turkish baths was how they were called at the time. But like the experience of crusaders going over to the Middle East

and discovering these sort of like collective bathing situations, you know, it's like almost like a rediscovery of Roman bathing, although with more water and soap involved, I think. But they bring that back to Europe. And you have this development of what called stew houses where people would stew in hot water, etc. which is something in a sort of public context, et cetera, that sort of idea. And the stew houses were, and Roman bars, actually,

as far as I know, were sort of linked to prostitution as well. That would be somewhere where sex would take place in perhaps the darker corners. But of course, there's still some of that going on in male queer spaces, as far as I know.

And another sort of key moment. moment in changing attitude seems to be the experience of the black death in the mid-14th century where something, is it like a third of the population of Europe die? Something like that, basically. Which seemed to have led to the closing of bathhouses of that public bath houses.

And that's tied up with various things. One of them is that the plagues were seen as not being caused by bad hygiene, but being caused by God's angrieness with the population, basically. And so things such as public bathing, seen as a luxury, were sort of frowned on at that sort of moment. Although there's also this idea of like the conceptions of health that are taking place at this time,

where this is before the germ theory of health, you know, we now know it was fleas on rats biting humans, read in a black death, but that wasn't known at the time. The theories, the dominant theories in Europe around health were theories of the humours basically, which needed to be kept in so that you can see the different things that could play into

different conceptions of bathing and cleanliness. We have to play germ-free adolescence by X-ray X-R-R-Spex. So X-Rae Spex is that a ban from the, I think it's from like 70, 76 to, no, 77 to something like 1980 when they sort of break up. Germ-free adolescence is 1978.

The singer of X-ray Spex polystyrene. Polystyrene. The immortal polystyrene. Yeah. Great performer, you know, sort of would have braces on their teeth, look totally wearing sort of day glow colors, etc. And one of the things that made X-ray specs stand out as well was that they had a saxophonist in the band, originally more logic. I think the song is sort of like a sort of anti-consumerous song. And in fact, there's a couple of other songs on the album, Germfree Adolesum, also came out in 1978, which you've got that anti-consumerous thing. And so the lyrics go something like,

I know you're antiseptic, your deodorant smells nice. I'd like to get you to know you, but you're deep frozen in ice. The chorus is this. He's a germ-free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession, cleans the teeth ten times a day, scrub away, scrub away, scrub away. How relevant! I know you're antiseptic, your deodorant smells nice. I'd like to get to know you, your dick frozen like the eyes.

He's a germ, free adolescent, cleanliness is a recession. Clean, dirty, tens times a day. Scrab away, scrub away, scrub away, scrub away, the SRO way. Following on on that link between, like, conceptions of health, and the causes of disease and notions of cleanliness, you know, after the theories of the humours, you'd have like this theories of myasmas, which is sort of, you know, sort of, the idea,

I mean, the idea which is not wrong, the disease can be spread by bad air, but like, you know, that was much more, that conception of bad air was tied up with smells, basically. And so that feeds into like conceptions of cleanliness, as in, you know, being clean wasn't necessarily, necessarily the thing that would take away the myasmas. In fact, you could just cover up those bad smells with, like, perfume or oranges with

clothes and it always comes to mind when I think about that idea of posh people wandering around sniffing these things to take away the bad smells. That is quite a strange way of which you're sort of coming towards this idea, perhaps you're edging towards an idea of like the germ theory of disease, basically, and the idea which really does, and we've sort of mentioned it already, you know, the huge outbreaks of cholera in, you know, the mid-19th century, you know, not far from where I'm sat in Leeds now, there was huge outbreaks of cholera in the back-to-backs,

which at least, you know, density-packed together, housing for workers, etc., killed tens of thousands of people, you know. And so it's that and that the discovery of germ theory or the movement towards a germ theory, the understanding of germs and their roles in disease, that leads you into, you know, the big infrastructural changes we mentioned, which have huge effects on, like public sanitation, public sanitation, but also the rest of domestic labour, basically,

because it's not just sewerage infrastructure, water infrastructure, you'd probably put things such as energy infrastructure, gas, go into housing, etc., would massively diminish the sort of work of bathing, perhaps. Before that, you'd have to go and get the water, get the coal or wood, heat up the water, then dispose of that wastewater somewhere. The affordances of that sort of technological setup will mean that you will bathe less. Yeah, this is partly why I like having baths, even though baths these days are considered quite old-fashioned. It's an insult to our ancestors and to the technological achievements of modern society, not to have a hot bath.

I hardly ever have a bath, I've got to say, I'm a shower man. I can't get my head around baths. I think it's, as soon as I started to need, as soon as I started to need glasses, I found that you'd have a hot bath and I used to read in the bath, but with glasses it steams up and you get a self-defeating thing and then your book gets soggy, so I've stopped having baths. Never understood relaxing the bath. I know it is like the ultimate thing that a lot of people still look forward to,

But I think that must be cultural. Last time I was in a bath, I was like, I don't know, four years old or something. I have a really weird bathing practice. Like I don't luxuriating the baths is boring. I have like a really hot bath and I get into it for like 90 seconds, then get out. So it is, it has just become this. It's no sense at all. Well, it does.

It's a bit like a sort of plunge pool, a bit like a sort of sauna thing. But I think the way we do it to have a weird waste in the house is I do this really hot bath at last like 90 seconds, then Joe, like, gets in here and has a proper part. So we're not just wasting water. Really, that is really related to the ancient. So, like, you know, the man gets the best water. Interesting. That's how it was done, families.

Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that's also why I don't, you know, that's also why I'm trying to figure out how many options I can get for my oldest doors. Yeah, exactly, exactly. What is the going auction rate at the minute? In Walthamstow, what is happening in Walthamstow, is there a good rate? Jeremy keeps us oxen in the house, basically, which is why it's so many.

That's true. Anyway, back to domestic technologies. Now, I think, I think you're right, you know, to say to me, but I often think, I have occasion to think about this really regularly. God, it is amazing, amazing this infrastructure that makes it possible, which is bathed in hot water, to do something you could only really do if you had access to hot springs for like tens of thousands of years of human history. It's that, and it's the miracle of frozen,

I often think about it. These are the little technological miracles. But coming back to your main point, though, of course, it's, I mean, the technological changes that have made possible a very different kind of domestic life are obviously really, really important, aren't they? And then, and it's a really important feature of 20th century technological development and domestic life is the development of various technologies to make, to make domestically, and housework easier. So vacuum cleaners, most importantly, washing machines, it is kind of interesting the washing machine

because I think you've got to have some really weird stuff going on in your house to have any other appliance that will use anything like as much power as the washing machine does. Like it's really, they use a lot of electricity. They are basically industrial machinery that we all have in our homes now. Vacuum cleaners, like really sort of miraculous, but also cookers, types of cooking, gas cooking.

etc. Now, you know, conduction hobs are all much, much easier to clean and much easier to use than older kinds of technology. And of course, the 20th century kind of crystallization of the idea of the housewife as a particular kind of social role was the product of some of the history that we've already talked about. But it was also the product of these big social and technological and cultural changes in the early 20th century, which had several features. And one of them was that basically the rates of employment in industry, and especially the rates of employment in light industry, the growth of light industry, things like toy factories, for example, employing growing numbers of working class younger women, meant that, and the fact that domestic service generally

was just not a type of employment that people had enjoyed, even when it had been the main form of employment for young working-class women, as it was for a long time. All that meant that even a very affluent sort of middle-class women were finding themselves in a situation where they were not able to live their lives in the way that people had done, saying, Victorian or even Edwardian times, whereby the head of the respectable middle-class household, not the head, but the woman of the household, was basically the manager of a team of servants. And they weren't able to live like that anymore. So even relatively affluent women were finding themselves having to basically manage the domestic sphere largely unaided. You might have some help coming in

occasionally on a sort of wage basis. But you're having to use all these appliances. They're just set the baseline for this. So at the turn of the 20th century, 40% of all workers in the UK were domestic servants, basically. It's like a huge sector. And it's a really rapid deceleration decline from basically, From World War I to World War II, domestic service just basically disappears as a significant employment sector. But also I think what was important about what you were saying, Jeremy, about like women not enjoying, especially where obviously those were men and women, but for women, there was so much sexual exploitation in that space as well. Yeah, absolutely. There was sexual exploitation and it was generally understood as a condition of unfreedom. Like, you were much freer if you had a job in a factory where you had set hours, you just knew.

knew when your shifts were and the person you answered to was this sort of anonymous foreman rather than when you were you were at the beck and call of a kind of an immediate you know a mistress and master in a household so yeah people didn't like it people don't like having their freedom curtail that's the thing that comes up again and again so what's going on there with the emergence of the housewife it is really interesting because that's happening amongst the middle classes really everyone apart from the real kind of ruling class you can steal a full teams with servants in massive house houses, that they're having this shift in the nature of the domestic space, whereby, you know, the woman who was always traditionally the manager of the household is now having to do that more or less herself, but with the aid of all these appliances as a household. But also, as we said before, amongst the working classes, you've got the fact that it's traditionally been, or it has been for several generations, it's been an aspiration for people in the working classes also to achieve the status of a family where the woman doesn't have to go out to work and can stay at home managing the

household. So there is this sort of cross-class experience, this sort of cross-class identity of the housewife, which really, it only gets really properly crystallised in the 1930s. And it's also already at the point where it gets crystallised in the minds of advertisers, in the minds of people promoting women's magazines and things like this, it's already sort of in decline. Because, for example, like rates of industrial employment for working class women are already creeping back up from the very low point of the early 20th. century. And then you get into the 50s, which we think of the 1950s as like the golden age of the housewife. But that's partly because it was the golden age of the housewife as a feature of

public ideology when state policy, media, so media policy, movies, popular fiction, advertising, like really try to emphasize this idea of the housewife as the social role for an adult woman in that society. But as we've mentioned before, the show, this is partly in the context of the fact that actually the level of consent and the level of participant, the level of consent to and the level of participation in that particular way of organising social life among, especially working class women, but also increasing the educated middle class women, has been in decline by the 1950s and is in decline. And then what happens, as we know, in the 60s is really the conflict between the

ideology of the housewife and the lived reality and the lived desires and aspirations of both middle class and working trust women really come into conflict with each other. Part of the effect of all that obviously is that during that period in particular from the 30s really through to the 70s I mean even really through into the 80s like while all these things are changing. For a lot of women like being a housewife is the thing they've been told since they were born like would be their social role in life and you want to be good at your social role in life and one of the key indicators of whether you are good at it or not is how clean and tidy is your house and so the idea of even among relatively poor people even among people living in social housing the idea of

being house proud becomes really important doesn't it which is some i mean that's one of the things zara was talking about to us in her email her experience of growing up on a council estate which if you outside the UK, that means growing up in social housing, municipal social housing, but still having the experience of it being a really important thing for women in particular in that social space to be house proud, to understand their own worth to some extent in terms of their ability to keep the domestic space clean and tidy and presentable. And that remains a really important feature of middle class and, working class life, like almost notoriously so, up until that time. I mean, one of the

consequences of that I think is sort of interesting actually is that, well, also because of that, from the 60s onwards, being house proud and being a housewife, they come to be in a lot of sort of popular fiction, in a lot of people's minds, even in a lot of theory, they come to be sort of metonyms for, they come to represent a sort of stultifying deference to bourgeois ideology and patriarchal ideology, and then the housewife becomes this really sort of denigrated figure. You know, if I think about when I was growing up, I mean, even, you know, when I was starting teaching universities, like the housewife was the thing that sort of everybody wanted to get away from. Or, I mean, in effect, the kind of compromise which neoliberal capitalist society made with

the women's movement was, well, okay, you're not getting socialised childcare, really. and what we're absolutely not going to do and we'll come back to this as why this became a demand for some people we're not going to like socialise housework and pay people for doing it and stuff we're not going to do that but we are going to let everybody go into the labour market and compete with men in the labour market

if they can get through the education system and so that's like the opposite of being a housewife so really across a really broad cultural political spectrum from the kind of radical left and radical wings of women's liberation through to, really through to kind of center-right liberalism.

The housewife becomes this really denigrated figure. The housewife is the thing you do not want to be. I mean, Margaret Thatcher does this weird cosplay of like pretending she's a housewife and everybody knows she obviously isn't. She's a really successful career post. And I sometimes feel like now it is important to acknowledge that, well, like for a long time

people did want to live that way and they wanted to live that way not only because of patriarchal ideology and because of capitalist ideology, but also because unless you're living in a very technologically advanced context, it's a fairly rational division of labour within a nuclear family,

you know, produces the role of the housewife. And people did see it as an important economic demand that workers should be paid enough that the woman shouldn't have to go out to work and should be able to devote herself to looking after the home and the children. You know, so I sometimes feel necessary to acknowledge that because I mean I myself I couldn't really get my head around that until I was sort of in my 30s when I was actually studying this stuff and teaching it to undergraduates because I grew up with the idea that oh the very idea anyone would want to be a housewife is a hideous like prison of oppression we have to break free from also I mean you mentioned children and that's really important in the story because if you are one woman taking care of a household to the standards that are necessary to be seen to have

a quote unquote clean and tidy house according to like whatever class demands were at that time about respectability and you're taking care of one child that is a more than a full time job especially if you have a husband that goes out to work who is not expected to do anything yeah totally right so if there's more than one child like this is you need a community there's no way a woman would be would continue to be sane without some sort of help from the community or technology in this case. Do you know what I mean? Now obviously a lot of people have done it over history but you know you dissolve in that space as a person. I mean that's part of like you know the gambit of feminism which is that women are people like we have intellectual lives that are

that need to be like fed and you know hopes and desires like beyond the drudgery of that work no matter how much pleasure comes with it whether that's about you know keeping your home tidy to a certain extent, like, you know, I'm a feminist, but I do keep my house tidy, not only because I like to live in a tidy environment and a clean environment, but also, like, I do feel the shame if somebody was to come over to my house and it not being clean and tidy. Having said all of that, like, that is work. Like, that is a lot of work. And putting children on top of that, like, you know, it's completely understandable that, you know, and I think it's really important not to, for us to get to a point of not judging women who actually only want to do that.

to do that, because if somebody's going to, if there's only one person that's going to do that, and you're bringing up children, like, you know, that even needs more adults, in my opinion. Like, I don't even know how most people do it. That's a huge amount of work. Yeah, it's a really important point. And also, I mean, it's interesting to note from that point of view, one thing that was already starting to worry, like, sort of leftist sociologists, by the 50s, actually, was the observation that, well, like, back in the 30s, a lot of that domestic drudgery would actually have been carried out more or less collectively. So washing was mainly done sort of collectively.

It was really hard work. The childcare was sort of informally collective because kids would just run around in the street and big gangs all day. And even cooking a lot of the time. You know, people, you know, a woman would be doing it with her neighbours, with her sisters, with her friends. And people and sociologists were becoming aware by the 50s that partly because standards of housing had improved.

more and more people were living not in these dense urban environments like the classic Bethnal Green that was the subject of some sociological studies. They were living on these new housing estates. They were living in these more conventionally sort of middle class types of space where people were living in separated spaces that women were finding that really, really alienating. Despite the technology reducing the labour time, that women were finding it really sort of depressing to have to live like that. And it didn't take that long actually from that being widely being observed by sociologists, women's liberation starting to happen. So, yeah, that is totally true, and that is totally right.

I mean, there's all sorts of stuff that feeds into that. So, like, one of the ways we can think about the technology that was developed, you know, the reason that it became, that that technology, like, it reduced the amount of work to the sort, to the level of work that an individual could take on, basically. From domestic labour being, by necessity a collective project, you know, There's, you know, the washing machine now makes it something that one person can do, for instance. But, of course, like, that wasn't the, the first technologies around washing that came in were, like, collective laundrettes, basically.

Commercial laundries and collective laundrettes. There's this sort of driving to sort of, like, the domestic space. But the other thing to think about with, like, we have all this development of technology around domestic labouring and domestic sphere, primarily in the early part of the 20th century, actually. It's been very little innovation over the last sort of 30, 40 years, some robotics, but they haven't really caught on. But one of the things, one of the paradoxes around that is, you know, you have this invention of stuff like the washing machine,

which dramatically reduces the amount of time it would take and labor it would take to do a task. And yet the average amount of time that people spend on domestic labor basically hasn't gone down, right? So it was something like in 1900, working-age adults would spend on average 26 hours a week on domestic work. In 2005, it was 24 hours. Does that include men? Because it must be highly gendered.

I mean, men still do less housework than women. They do more than they did before. But surely the 24 hours a week, what kind of domestic work are we talking about? Because there's some domestic work that men did not do in 19-100. That's working-age adults. and then the time spent on unpaid housework by sort of full-time housewives, it's very rarely house husbands, remains at 50 hours a week. Like it remains right across the 20th century.

So it's that in 1900 and it's that in 2000. And so like, yeah, so there's obviously like there's a big variation there in like who's going out to work, etc. The gender division of labor. But like in terms of like, that's a paradox in terms of like, We've seen this development of this labour-saving devices which have had huge, huge social impacts. And yet the amount of time we spend on domestic labour hasn't really altered. That's a paradox that needs to account you for.

And there's different reasons for that, right? Partly because, you know, we've already sort of mentioned it. This was domestic labour was something that was done collectively, either because you hire domestic servants or, you know, other members of the household children, men to some extent would have to feed into that. But the other one is that, like, you know, standards of cleaning list just went up, basically. It probably went up to a peak in the post-war years, but like standards of cleanliness sort of expanded to fill the time. Do you know what I mean?

And so I think that is that like the individualized notion or experience of the housewife, that is partly driven by technological affordances, et cetera, but it has this huge social implication. And so one of the things that happened in the 20th century is that women tend to vote for more conservative parties than men. That's completely reverse now. But like June of 20th century, that was like a standard of political science. And you could only understand that by like the isolated experience of the housewife.

A modern conservatism, like both in Britain and the States, at least, really defined it can be defined to some. some extent, as a version of conservatism, which makes it ideological sort of pitch to housewives as a key constituency from the 30s onwards. From the moment, women get the vote, actually, in Britain. The other thing is, like, what's driving this increasing clenolist standards, both, like, bodily and in the household? And there's all sorts of stuff. But one of them is advertising, basically, and the development of mass consumerism. And a lot of that advertising is aimed at women,

but like around moralism, basically. The sort of like morality of, you know, you're the one who's responsible for raising your children to these standards, you know, the mobilisation of social embarrassment, a social shame or something like that. You know, and so part of what's being driven is like it's partly what people want,

but what people want is partly driven by, like, new products come onto the market and they need to be sold, and you need to convince people that, like, bodily odors are suddenly a very big problem and a very big driver of social embarrassment, you know, whereas a certain level of bodily odor was not seen as that way in previous times. You can see all of these different things which are driving our conception of, like, what is clean and what is dirty. I mean, my point that I wanted to bring up was about, like, to what extent a woman in that role of a housewife, like, would have to sacrifice her own cleanliness for the cleanliness of, like, the newborn baby or whatever. Like, I literally don't understand, without the help

of a neighbor or a mother, etc. If the man is going out to work, if you are at home with even just one newborn, like, how do you even, like, wash yourself or even feed yourself, let alone the baby? Like, I cannot see how those standards of what a housewife was were actually upheld, especially with an infant, without there being some sort of, like, family or friend help. Oh, yeah, it is, yeah. I mean, it totally is, it was. It still is. I think it is important to note. I mean, the statistics absolutely do show more domestic labour is still done by women, more cleaning, house cleaning is done by women, etc. But that is not a norm, which most people now think is acceptable.

Most people now don't think the domestic labour should be mostly carried out by women. If you look at the British Social Attitude Surveys, and that's a really significant shift. The most important predictor of the key predictor in the gender division of labour and household is like the employment status of the woman, basically. It just makes sense. It's like, have you got time to do this, basically? And if you're not, then you have to sort of address that in some sort of way. part of the way it's been addressed is a fall-off in cleanliness standards since the sort of post-war period.

They say they're happier with the level of cleanliness that they are now much more than they did in the post-war period. I think we should play the fantastic song, Filthy Gorgeous by Scissor Sisters, which came out in 2005, which in a way moves or pushes the linguistic overturn window. of acceptable terminology around this issue by calling people disgusting. Oh, that's a nasty. The everything that's gone on is, like, because of that, you know, the fact that two wages are a sort of necessity in contemporary, in a contemporary family, one of the other things that goes on is that, like, we've seen the reemergence of, or we've seen the market go back

into the domestic sphere, put it that way, in all sorts of ways. And, you know, one of those is like, you know, the idea of, like, hiring a cleaner, etc, you know, some of that is delivery services for food, et cetera, go massively off the scale on the platforms and all this sort of stuff, you know, the idea of like the domestic sphere has been, you know, something separated from the harshness of the market, you know, has massively declined, I think, partly because so much of that work is now being re-marketized, you know, if you think about the domestic cleanest, the domestic servant market, of 14% of all workers in in 1900, you know, and then that sort of like fading away and it's all come back again,

basically, and it's to do with the employment status of women. Yeah, it is. I mean, that's, I mean, again, it's become the case that for a lot of people, it's an economically rational decision to not do much of your own housework and have it done for you by someone who's being paid much less than you are for your professional salary. And then this whole issue of hiring cleaners, that is a really interesting. issue because that is something when I was growing up like I never heard of anyone having a cleaner I didn't know it was a thing that could happen honestly I know that's not true of people who grew up in more sort of upper middle class context that um but I just never heard of it and then

you know Joe and you know when Joe and I indeed when when Joe and I first had children I mean at first I think it was like we we didn't want to have a cleaner and Joe was really horrified of the thought of it. And but once, indeed, once we face the reality of having a baby and the fact that eventually Joe is going to have to go back to work, like for exactly the reasons that Nadi has described, actually, it just seemed it was just like material. It was just sort of physically impossible, like to cook and do our jobs

and look after the baby and keep the house clean. So we sort of relented. And like for years and years, we did have a cleaner. And then like a lot of people, we stopped during the pandemic. And then we didn't want to, we didn't start again, partly because I never really, we never, I never really liked it, even though we liked How Cleaner. And Elkina was someone who our kids had sort of had been used to being around from when they were born and was sort of, you know, in that sort of cliche, it was like almost like a member of the family, you know, they only saw it for a few hours each week. But, but I always felt weird about it. I didn't really like it. And also we felt that in terms of the class experience of our own children, growing up in much more. privileged context they re-grew up in you know it was really a bridge too far for us the thought of them like as teenagers still being used to the idea of having a cleaner about the place so but yeah there are lots and but it is this really interesting question that we the dara raised in her

email and that we have talked about ourselves when preparing for the episodes the question of like why why does it feel awkward it doesn't feel awkward for everybody does it like what is what is this sort of a sense of basic ethical functionality, the one ought to sort of clean up one's own space. And then I said, what do you two think about all that? To me, I think it probably does relate to the history of like domestic servants and like the civility that is associated with that. Do you know what I mean?

And so there's some sort of hangover, I think, which makes, you know, a cleaner seem different to like having somebody come around and tidy your garden or something like that, which is not seen in the same way, I think. I think it's that, is that like, the tideness to personal, the domestic space of a house and that history of civility, basically. So what do you think, the idea? Well, I think you've hit on something important there, which is I think part of the discomfort

with it comes back to, again, notions of cleanliness and disgust, which are really kind of visceral and kind of pre-civilised, this idea that you're employing someone not to fix something, not to do, you know, some kind of skilled bit of work, but actually something that, A, you could do yourself, ostensibly, but also you are cleaning somebody else's, quote, unquote, dirt or dust, which is, I think we agree, like, something that most people would see is really important for all the reasons that we discussed, you know, earlier in this episode. But for somebody else to do it, like to put your dishes in the dishmoser, like, this is stuff that is massively time-saving.

Like, I totally get it. Like, I'm completely unjudgmental about people who would want to employ someone for decent wages to do that. But I do get how there are all of these different emotions around it. And I would say that from observing people in the UK over the last 20 years around this, part of the reaction that some people,

not everybody, give around, like, how they can't tolerate the idea of how other people have cleaners or why people are so judgmental about it, I don't think it's coming simply from political analysis. I think there's also this idea in the culture, and it's interesting to think about whether this is relatively new. It is one of the basic indicators of adult personal competence to be able to clean up your shit. Because of course, this is one of Jordan Peterson's like great slogans, like clean up your room. And it's one of the classic sort of, you know, struggles of parenting

adolescents that teenagers typically don't want to clean up their bedrooms and it's really hard to get them to do it. It's not true in all cases, but yeah, we're absolutely going through this in our house at the moment. You know, it's seen as a kind of basic indicator of competence.

I mean, it's interesting to think about it in a way in relation to the fact that there's this history of these basic domestic competences, which, especially in the 20th century, for reasons we've discussed, come to be seen as incredibly gendered for most people to the point where it becomes normal that a man does not know how to do cleaning, doesn't know how to do cooking. And yet, for example, there's

this tradition that in the military, like, you still have to do all that stuff yourself because you don't have women around doing it. And also because for the military unit to be basically functional, like soldiers have to be able to clean up their own shit. So there is this, and there is this sense that, you know, it's something that runs through, you know, the culture of the highly segregated gender division of labour in the mid-20th century that men come to be seen by a lot of people like including men themselves like as kind of over-infantilised by their over-dependence on women to carry out even the most basic domestic labour. So there is this fairly persistent idea which probably probably goes back a long way. You could probably trace this back like a really

long way if you want to. There's fairly persistent idea that to be a fully competent adult you do have to be, like whatever your gender, you have to be basically able to look after yourself and that if you can't, like you're really risking something about your own capacity for autonomy and independence. So, and I think, I think that is also there. And also, I mean, all that stuff is sort of not true. I'm talking about it in terms of its socio-historical specificity, but it's also just sort of true, isn't it? It's true that if you're going to be a properly fully functioning competent adult, you do need to not be dependent on other people, you're paying them or not, like, to cook your dinner and clean your stuff up. So that is also

part of it, isn't it? It's also about, yeah, when the apocalypse, I was going to say, it's just, it's just also about, like, when the apocalypse comes, like, can you do these, these basic things? And, and, like, while what you're saying is true, Jeremy, like, I would argue that still today, it's perfectly possible for you to be considered a competent member of society if you are male and cannot do some of these things. Like, you will be prized for whatever is. And, you will be surprised for whatever it is that your skill is your profession or the thing that you do. And if you still don't know how to boil some pasta, people will laugh it off. That is not the case if you're a woman, you know, even though regardless of what university experiences people had or like what

military experiences people have, like in your domestic sphere, there are still many men who do not how to do, do, know how to do these things. And if we're going to bring the age factor into it, which is why a lot of men suffer when they become widowers, right? If their wife dies and they become, you know, elderly and they do not know how to do this, there are many men for whom, like, this is a massive struggle. Like, how do I do these basic things if they, you know, in a situation of a cost of living crisis, like you cannot afford to pay people to do these things for you. And that can often lead to a psychological decline.

I was just thinking, actually, when you mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier as well, there are really contradictory tensions or pulls on men, young men these days. Because if you think about it, you know, there's a drive, a sort of like neoliberal drive about responsibility where you should be able to look after yourself, you'd not rely on other people, etc. And yet there's that whole trad wife sort of thing where a huge part of the sort of of misogyny driven by people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, etc. Is that like, you know, there's some sort of like natural essence of women

to do housework, et cetera. And, you know, really that in some sorts of ways, that's a return to the sort of ideologies of the sort of post-war period in which, you know, the domestic labour was unwaged and it should be unwaged because, you know, it's done either as an expression of your essence as a woman or because you love the family, etc.,

that sort of stuff. But at the same time, there's another drive on young men is like one of the big, big changes is like a real explosion in male cleanliness and male grooming and emphasis. on male grooming and like products, products for male grooming, etc. Do you know what I mean? That's something that's really accelerated and, you know, it's linked to that,

that to that responsibility and that sort of like hustle culture. You're supposed to go to the gym, et cetera. You're supposed to groom yourself. You know, when people talk about like it's like masculinity crisis, it's not surprising. You're being dragged in like loads of different ways, probably by the same people at different times as well, if you think about male influences and these sorts of things. Yeah, I'm really sympathetic to that. And I think two things that are important to mention there is how all of this interfaces with like platform capitalism and also like the diversification of markets. Like it's much, you make a lot more money if you divide things on gender lines and you say not just these toys for boys and these toys for girls, which is hugely sexist and has come back in the 2010s like in the 2020s, like in a big way in the toy market. But also the same goes for like grooming. Like you can't.

can't have men get into grooming and use, quote, unquote, female products, like you've got to brand it in a certain way. So men feel like you need to go out and buy and consume more of this. But also how all of this, you know, engages with platform capitalism and the kind of social media and like, you know, society of the spectacle and the rest of it, which is one on trad wives, don't get me started. This is a whole like trip, if not microdose, you know, like on that phenomenon. But what that and part of, you know, the crisis in masculinity in terms of like image creation have in common is like that these, you know, influencers and images are being perpetuated and people are bombarded with them, whether you consciously think you disagree or

disagree with a certain image of, you know, what a woman is or like what a man is and, you know, how you dress and how you behave, whereas we know that all of the really successful influencers in the space, like, it is a performance. Like, Tradwife is a performance so in the same way that this kind of hyper masculine concepts of, you know, playing out self-responsibisation and, you know, I get up at five and I do this at five past five and I do this at, you know, 10 past five and then I pump iron and that I drink Kuel or whatever. Like, like that is also like a performance. Nobody actually day and day out like lives like that. Yeah, and there is a whole category of cleaning influences. So my partner Joe Littler and a friend Emma Casey is a sociologist at York.

They published a journal article a couple of years ago about clean fluences, especially this person, Mrs Hinch, who has 5 million followers on Instagram, sort of showing people how to clean. There was an interview with them on this website, the conversation, talking about this article. And that sort of clean fluencing culture, it sort of, it does tell us a bit with tradwife culture, but it, you know, it wouldn't have the reach it did if it was mainly aimed at aspiring tradwives. Like it's more aimed, I think, at, you know, people, mainly women, of course. But also, I think to some extent, actually, like men who were kind of anxious about meotically, who see themselves as like trying to operate in this highly complex environment.

I think we should play Queen. I want to break free. Not so much for the lyric, but this energetic and fun song from 1984 has a fantastic video in which several of the band members are cleaning. I want to break free. I want to break free. I want to break free from your lives. You're so self-satisfied I don't need you I've got to break free God knows God knows I want to break free

We should play Vivian Goldman's song Lawn Durette from 1981 So Vivian Goldman's Probably more well known as a music journalist From that time But in 1981 she produced an EP called Dirty Washing, How Relevant! And Laundarete is the A-side. She wasn't primarily a musician, and in fact, she recorded this EP

using the downtime for when John Leiden and Keith Levine were recording Pills Studio album, I think it was the first album. And so there was some downtime, and they said, well, why don't you do a song? And so it's produced, the song is produced by Adrian Sherwood, who's the legendary on you, producer, along with John Leiden and Keith Levine. And she improvises this song, which is sort of like a romance that starts in a laundrette. She improvises it in the studio over this quite brilliant bass line by George Levy Oban from Aswan. I want it 10 bends for the dryer.

Yes, that was how we met. my long knee bag was broken my clothes were soaking wet I felt I needed hugging you needed bored and lodging I can't complain we went down the drain seems like I can't get away from you even in the laundered

I think all this obviously it raises the question of like well what are the alternatives because it feels like we're describing a situation which is quite familiar to us, whereas on the one hand, like a very obvious kind of system of subordination of oppression to which women in particular, like women across a whole range of social classes were being subject in the mid-20th century, has given way to this different regime wherein, despite all these changes, as we've been describing, overall levels of freedom don't really seem to have expanded. I'm always going on about this. You guys

always hear me moaned about this personally, but like, you know, as a parent, the extent to which basically, it just feels like the school system is now not, it's not set up in the way it was when I was a kid where it really was, I mean, basically parents stood the view that after you were about seven, you were basically the school's problem until you left home. And it doesn't really work like that anymore. Maybe it never should have done. But it feels like a massive set of social provisions has been kind of subtly withdrawn

and replaced with something which doesn't really increase anybody's freedom. And so the question around housework, what you do about that, you're given the domestic labour needs doing somehow, who should do it, how should it be rewarded, how should it be valued? That's obviously been an issue for decades.

So, as a lot of people will know, one strand of the women's liberation movement in the 70s took the form of the campaign for and set demands for wages for housework. the idea that women should be paid wages, really should be paid by the state, or anyone should be paid wages by the state, for carrying out domestic labour. And I think it's an interesting issue, wages for housework is one of those things that, like, you hear about it a lot

these days. And I know, for example, Francoise Verger, who is a really important kind of radical scholar and theorist, she published a book just a year or so ago called Making the World Clean, which goes into a lot of issues around racial capitalism, the impacts of colonialism, like global South oppression, gender depression, and the way in which all of these issues, both around domestic cleaning and the growth of the new servant class in the global north, and also issues around pollution,

and who takes responsibility for environmental degradation, are tied up with all these power systems. And she has quite a lot of time for wages for housework. She presents wages for housework as sort of a turn not taken by the women's liberation movement because it became too captured by a sort of, basically by a sort of neoliberal form of feminism, which I've already sort of alluded to a bit. Basically, instead of campaigning for wages for housework, the campaign was just to get women out of the home into the workplace

and to share out housework evenly within the family. Yeah, that was the idea. I would have, and also, wages for housework is something you hear a lot about these. I mean, I hear that younger people, like, whenever I hear, like, millennial leftists on podcasts refer to women's liberation, they'll always always make some allusion to wages for housework. But I would also say, like, most historians of that moment and most people I know who live through it in both the states and Britain will say that wages for housework was really never, it wasn't seen at the time as a big part of the women's liberation movement, even

within the socialist sections of it, they were seen as a bit cranky, it was seen as, it was seen as fairly contradictory demand and one that was obviously never going to be met, and it was sort of, you know, it was kind of a meme, you know, before people had memes, like wages, housework, rather than like a serious demand that anybody thought was ever going to actually be realised. Like, one of the things with like social reproductive work, domestic, it worked either like domestically as in by the housewife or you know cleaners in an office you know is it's invisibleized do you know what I mean the cleaners go in they're out before the rest of the staff go in it's like and so like wages for housework in part it's like a pedagogical thing

how do you make this how do you make this work visible you can demand wages for it for instance I also made me think about the women's strike which are quite a big thing in lots of different countries probably like 10 years ago isn't it was a huge win in Argentina in Spain and in Poland, then there were marches here. And one of the things behind that was, you know, if you're not doing the washing up, you don't notice who's doing it, then there suddenly stops doing it, and it starts piling up, do you know what I mean? And it also made me think about this huge move for unionisation of cleaners,

you know, the Justice for Janitors campaign in the US, for instance. Part of the innovations of this, so this was like a big campaign by the SEIU in different parts of the EU, US, which are like hugely significant. So one of the things I read about that was in 1987, just 10% of janitors in LA were unionized. By 1995, it was 90%. So this hugely successful campaign to unionize janitors. They had to invent completely new, or not completely new, but they had to invent innovative ways to struggle, basically, which involved things such as like street theater and like protests on the street and like making things visible.

basically, you know, making themselves visible, their work is not something that comes to notice, if you know. And like wages for housework plays that sort of role, I think. It, like, it says housework is work. Somebody has to do it. It's very similar, in fact, to that sort of work that you would do outside of it. Well, but that still makes sense now, I don't know, because, like, the regime of domestic labour has changed quite considerably. I still think, I mean, I think that's completely right, and it's a really, really important point. raise, which is, like, even making the argument makes it visible. Like, it changes the way that a task or a set of tasks or behaviour is viewed, you know, by putting the word wages next to it. So I think it's really important that it still exists, you know, even as a concept that's talked

about today. That sort of does lead us on, doesn't it, right? If, like, if, like, demanding how wages for housework of the state may not make a whole lot of sense, like, well, what do we want and around domestic labour, we want the people who do it in market conditions to have like much higher levels of wages and status, etc. You know, that's what the justice for janitor's thing is about. There was this very interesting development in post-war Britain, actually, in the 40s, which is the 50s, and there was a national institute, I can't remember what it was called now, it was just something like the National Institute of Housework, and there was this idea that you would professionalise domestic labour, and that the idea was, and it was kind of, you know,

It was a sort of, it was a social democratic idea. It was a sort of welfare capitalist idea. So it wasn't like, so it wasn't providing domestic labor to everybody on the state. But it was partly because they wanted to revive like the domestic service industry. Partly it had support from some conservatives. You wanted to call servants. But it was also supposed to give sort of dignity to the, to housework. And sort of, and the idea was partly that housewives themselves would would be,

recognized as almost sort of a profession. So it was this very ambivalent demand. There was this sense that sort of something had to be done about the situation that we couldn't just sort of muddle through. And part of that would involve just sort of professionalising it. And I thought of think, I mean, from a socialist perspective, it would be a really appealing idea, actually. Because I would say, I mean, one thing I would say about domestic labour is it is, I think it is skilled, you know, cleaning a house really well and really quickly, really efficiently. Like, You sort of need to know the house really well, but some people are much better at it than others, and you tend to be better at it the more experienced you are.

And in some ways, arguably, the way to improve everybody's freedom and to maximise everybody's autonomy would just be to have domestic labour being recognised as a profession and have it a highly value profession and everyone have access to domestic cleaners who are highly trained and I'd recognise as these very important professionals who are going to come in and sort of clean your house and not leave it to just this sort of amateur thing. Arguably, that would be one sort of potential solution to the problem.

I don't know what other solutions there are. There's the sort of techno-utopian dream of actually producing labour-saving devices which would actually make the place that are much cleaner. And of course, it might well, if we had, for example, are much better funded and better resourced education system and a system for the sort of collective care and entertainment and education

of young people up to adulthood, then we might already now be in a situation where all the labour saving would mean that people would actually have more free time at home, especially parents. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the key point there, which is that as we know from history, like the 40s, 50s, 60s utopian idea

for all the free time that we were going to have when the machines were going to be the ones doing the drudgery and like unliked work is not the way it's turned out. It's turned out that we've got to a point where, you know, AI is doing the art and we're doing the housework. So, you know, capitalism like would need to afford us, which it won't, you know, the space to be able to live, you know, the helpful, dignified, joyful lives that we want so that, you know, housework doesn't take a big part of it, whether or not we have technological devices to help out with that or not. But as long as we are constantly, constantly being squeezed for labour, and, you know, as you were saying with your example of,

you know, parenting, like all the responsibility is being pushed back rather than away from institutions and away from societies, we will always feel the pressure that makes us feel like, you know, housework is like totally chaining us to our houses. The other thing with like collectivising social reproductive work, not just having cleaner cooperatives or something, that definitely is a good idea. And in fact, do exist and should be expanded. But, like, you can also think about, like, communal infrastructure as well. I was in Vienna before Christmas, and I went to visit the Karl Marxhof, just this huge estate that was built in Red Vienna in the 1930s. This was, like, this huge model housing development

where they had, like, collective laundries, etc. They were collective kitchens, or they had individual kitchens as well, you know, the childcare, the nurseries were within this huge building, etc. They had like rubbish chutes. In fact, in Leeds, there was a, there was a mirror project called Quarry Hill right near the centre of Leeds, which was based on Karl Marx-Hough. One of the things that's really hard with, like, cleaning, but perhaps more cooking, etc., is, you know, basically people enjoy elements of that and childcare, etc. There's lots of really joyful elements of that. And it's like, so collectivising it all seems like this. really big problem you're going to remove yourself but it's a bit like what you want to get to you want

to get to the stage when you can freely choose to do that and not make it a necessity do you know what I mean one way to think about that is just to think like dishwashers I am actually very much in favor of dishwashers um not not hiring human dishwashers to come and wash your dishes but you know mechanical dishwashers as soon as you've got one of those if you want to clean them back your dishes by hand well that becomes a free choice doesn't it basically it's no longer a necessity And you could totally imagine, like, collective provision of, like, of cooking, of food, etc., childcare, cleaning, et cetera, has been brought into that sort of, you know, we want to get to the stage where you can freely choose whether you want to do this or not.

It's quite hard in domestic spaces, but of course, like, we'd have to have to think about changing the way, you know, the balance between the domestic space and communal spaces, you know, there's that big theme about private sufficiency and public luxury, do you know what me, which, and in fact, lots of housing co-ops these days, or some of the leading-edge housing co-ops have massively expanded the collective common space, but you still retain like your private space, but it's much diminished because, you know, you're going to live a lot of your life in the collective space. Yeah, I think that's right. And of course, you know, one of, a key issue is just that, you know, everybody should be having to work less at work in order to be able

to, you know, do other things, including the element of domestic labour they want to do. We should say, it's like Nick Sernecichick and Helen Hester's book afterward goes into all this in a lot of detail. And Nick and Helen have talked about all this stuff at least once, actually, on the Culture Power Politics podcast, if people want to listen to that. And they go into all the sort of complex relationships between these issues. And of course, the overall political point is that unless you have a sort of mass movement, one of the objectives of which is actually to reduce people's overall workloads. We're not going to get any of this stuff.

We're not going to end up in a situation where actually people have less work and feel freer simply by dint of technological progress delivering these things to us by magic. I mean, in a way, that is the great lesson of the past 50 years in a way of human culture, is that however much technology manages to automate certain things, capitalist will find a way to make sure that we are. still working just as many hours as we were before, unless they are politically prevented from doing that. Even if that is admin, even if it is just adding more and more administration to your life, because the infrastructure and the services have been taken away from you that would

normally have been doing that administration for you. So whether it means like staying in long queues as you're waiting to get through to your doctor on the phone, or like needing to do this or that with your insurance, or like booking your holidays, taking like absolutely ages. and being a total pain in the arse and, like, frying your brain, that capitalism will find ways of making, you know, you do those tasks, which, of course, is work. Far out.