A 1942 wartime advertisement for washing powder Rinso, in the magazine Picture Post, featured Mrs Edna Smith from the Midlands; a “blonde bombshell” and more besides. “Holder of Riveting Record is also Model Housewife… does all her own washing,” the ad proclaims. Mrs Smith helped to rivet the wings of an aircraft but more importantly she is also a domestic engineer of genius; her femininity in a man’s world is safe because her real prowess is as a homemaker. She knows, the ad tells us, “clothes come clean with a 12-minute soak in hot tap water and Rinso”.
Homemaking is allegedly back in vogue. In the war years, traditional male occupations were taken over by women while their husbands, brothers and sons were away fighting. Cinema, magazines and ads, however, were ever ready to remind females in factories and workshops of the terrifying consequences if they abandoned their “natural” motherly instincts and lost their femininity. Women in paid work had to be a temporary aberration, otherwise what was to become of masculinity?
Last week, we were told that women, sold a pup by the sisterhood, were once more in retreat, withdrawing from the career zone and returning to home and hearth because “work isn’t quite as much fun as we all thought”. The kitchen sink, Victoria sponge-making and four hours of ironing should now be seen as “one area of women’s power”, domesticity rebranded as feminist and even “sexier” than the exciting time that Mrs Edna Smith once experienced with her packet of Rinso.
Maggie Andrews, professor of cultural history at the University of Worcester, told an audience at the Hay festival that there has been “a shift in culture”; a new generation of feminists is rediscovering fulfilment in the home and turning their backs on “the horrors of society”, which presumably includes not just the uber job at Goldman Sachs but also the twilight shift at Tesco – except the Tesco employee probably can’t afford to consider swapping the checkout for running up a pair of curtains. Evidence of this cultural shift, apparently, is seen in the popularity of TV shows such as The Great British Bake Off, MasterChef and The Great British Sewing Bee – surely vicarious visual pleasures, not manuals for everyday life?
Professor Andrews has a prompt in trying to transform feminism into arts and crafts-ism. In 1997, she wrote a history of the Women’s Institute from 1915-1960, called The Acceptable Face of Feminism, reissued last year to celebrate the WI’s centenary. Professor Andrews explained she wanted to challenge the “jam and Jerusalem” WI image and redefine feminism so that “women can, through alternative female cultures and value systems, challenge the low value of domestic labour”. In a time when neoliberalism has managed to put a market price on almost every aspect of life, the value of domestic labour and care remains shockingly low. Women exploring “alternative female cultures” isn’t going to up the price.
The Women’s Institute, established in 1897 in Canada to improve wages for rural women, can claim a feminist mantle. In the UK from 1915 it battled on issues that included sick pay for housewives. More recently, it has taken up causes such as equal pay and climate change. Through the ages, the WI has also been essentially middle class. And here we come to the core of Professor Andrews’s attempt to put feminism into a frilly apron. If her alleged revival in domesticity exists, it’s not so much about gender as it is about class: a class of well-educated, formerly highly paid women in affluent households, exhausted by the struggle to square careers, children and the inflexibility of employers who refuse to allow reduced hours.
Arguably, many of today’s domestic queens initially have left their careers involuntarily because of the intransigence of the workplace. Once they are signed up to pilates and sushi courses, all enjoyed outside the four walls of home, with the help of an underpaid au pair and female cleaner, then they can’t sing the praises of family life highly enough. This isn’t exercising choice – as some full-time homemakers, female and male, often financially strapped, have done – and it isn’t progress.
According to the World Economic Forum, in 2014, in eight years, the UK has dropped from ninth to 26th place in gender equality in leading countries. A third of Britain’s mothers, more than two million, are the main earners in their families, the majority low earners. The charity, Working Families, in its survey of family life in 2016, says millennial parents aged 16 to 35 are more likely to both work full time and share care. Mothers with a partner and a child are more likely to work full time than a decade ago. Evidence of a “cultural shift” to domesticity is hard to find, except, anecdotally, among the wealthy.
In a 1997 review of Professor Andrews’s book, Sarah Rigby recalls her grandmother telling her that at 16 she wanted to study science at university. Her teacher said he wouldn’t teach a girl maths, physics or chemistry, only the arts. It was 1932. Stephanie Coontz, in The Way We Never Were, talks of the suicide, alcoholism abuse and violence that were also part of domesticity and, in the 1950s, well hidden. In 1957, Reg Smythe drew his first working-class Andy Capp cartoon. It shows Capp’s wife, Flo, sprawled on the kitchen floor, table overturned, crockery smashed. “Look at it this way, hinny,” Capp says. “I’m a man of few pleasures and one of ’em ’appens to be knocking you about.” The home today has changed, albeit for some not enough, and that’s down to feminism.
While a life at home can be rewarding, if choice is squeezed out it is also a prison. Nevertheless, last week, the inevitable queue of 1960s feminists appeared, anxious to don their Marigolds to pronounce “mea culpa” and wrap the home in Cath Kidston nostalgia. Sisters who believed that their careers were all that mattered now say folding towels can be equally fulfilling. “What the feminists of my generation left out of the equation was love – which is the raison d’etre of domesticity,” wrote Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail last Thursday.
Many 1960s feminists had been raised as mother’s little domestic helpers. They were wary of motherhood because it reduced options, increased dependency, ended careers. That has changed. It is feminists who have fought hardest for flexible working, improved parental rights and better support for carers. Love has a lot to do with it. The home does offer huge pleasures, however it’s enjoyed, but, as any feminist will say, not at a cost to anyone’s human rights.
