Cleanfluencing: The Spectacular Return of the Housewife in the Late Modern Digital Age

Abstract

Popular depictions of housework as ‘sparking joy’; as the preserve of the ‘happy housewife’; as key to a happy family; as an expression of ‘care’; and as ‘women’s work’, have a long and stubborn history. Today, digital social media is flooded with images of gleaming, immaculately tidy homes with accounts dedicated to reproducing images of women cleaning, tidying and ordering domestic spaces omnipresent across social media. The influencer boon, alongside a renewed post-pandemic focus on keeping homes clean, germ-free and ‘safe’, has culminated in the burgeoning popularity of ‘cleanfluencing’; an online re-configuration of the white woman housewife, responsible for curating digital images of the perfect home and with overwhelmingly women followers. 

And yet housework remains one of the most unequal institutions globally. Women, especially poorer women, and women of colour continue to do most of the low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. In this paper, I ask why these inequalities matter and why they persist. In doing so, I offer a call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the ‘naturally competent’ woman homemaker. The paper will tell the story of what happens when the false promise of ‘domestic bliss’ and neoliberal striving towards self-realisation via housework, is combined with the meteoric and unbridled success of social media. I explore the onslaught of heavily commercialised social media content, saturated with images of women as competent, content and happy homemakers, and consider how housework, with the promise of a life of love and contentment to those who commit to it, has become central to the recent digital self-care and positive thinking movement.

Emma Casey is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. She writes primarily about domestic life and social inequalities, with a particular focus on everyday practices and processes that are often overlooked within academic scholarship. Emma’s previous books include Women, Pleasure and the Gambling Experience, and Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life (with Lydia Martens). She is currently writing a book called The Return of the Housewife to be published in 2024 by Manchester University Press. 

Laura Schwartz is Reader in Modern British History at University of Warwick. Her publications include Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2019).