Emma Casey, "The Return of the Housewife: Why Women Are Still Cleaning Up" (Manchester UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Emma Casey about The Return of the Housewife, Why Women Are Still Cleaning Up. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Welcome. This is a fantastic book. It's incredibly timely. I mean, literally, like almost every day, we're seeing the kind of, I suppose, the

revenge of really kind of outright sexist and misogynist attitudes across many countries in the world. And the book kind of really speaks to that, really tries to kind of unpack that. But it does it, I think, in a way that speaks to a much kind of like longer history of feminist critical thought and

And I'm intrigued by, I guess, kind of like where the inspiration came from for a book about housework, about, you know, the kind of seeming blandness of domestic life. And yet something that's like kind of so important to understanding contemporary society. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think the sort of impetus for the book came from,

During the COVID-19 lockdown. So one of the things that I noticed during the pandemic was that there was an intensification of the use of Instagram in particular. It was being used in kind of new sorts of ways, in particular by women, predominantly women.

And obviously during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a real emphasis on germs and hygiene. And alongside that, there was this sudden kind of intensification of a new type of digital social media content, which was content depicting women frantically cleaning, tidying and decluttering their homes. So I found that really interesting in itself.

But what I try to do in the book is to think about the historical context of these kind of new cleaning influencer accounts, because I don't think they appeared out of nowhere. I think, like you say, they are part of a long history of the white woman housewife who kind of has never really gone away. So a few people have said to me about the title of the book, you know, it's called The Return of the Housewife.

And a few people have said, you know, did she ever go away? And I think they're right. You know, I don't think she did ever go away, but I think she's really kind of back with a vengeance at the moment. But yeah, if you look across the history, particularly of the 20th century, but even earlier than that as well, every so often we get a kind of resurgence of very kind of conservative images of the kind of happy housewife,

So in the 1950s, for example, again, in the 1980s, we see the sort of resurgence of a kind of almost like a domestic goddess kind of figure. So, yeah, the Klee Influencer kind of is part of that tradition. You know, in some ways she's not new. She often emerges during times of crisis. And obviously, you know, I talked about COVID earlier.

which was obviously a huge health crisis, but there were other crises occurring at the same time. You know, it was a real sort of moment of multiple crises. If you think about Brexit, you know,

Trump in the US, austerity politics, the cost of living crisis, for example. So all of these different crises coalescing meant that, you know, it was almost a kind of perfect moment for the resurgence of these very sort of hyper normative images of housewifery. So yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important to think about where she comes from in terms of her historical context.

I guess, though, the kind of hook for the book and the really kind of crucial thing that reinforces the contribution and its newness is, as you've mentioned, these cleaning influences or clean fluences, which, you know, is the kind of like, I guess, kind of key term for them. And I'm fascinated. I mean, you sort of touched on this already, but I'm fascinated to know kind of like,

a bit about what's new about them, who they are, I guess maybe like how you define one, both in terms of thinking about how they're different, I guess, from that lineage of the white housewife, but also, I suppose, the kind of characteristics that make them unique and special.

Yeah, well, I guess the fact that they're digital is the sort of the first thing to note. So, you know, we tend to sort of assume that social media and Instagram has been around forever. But I think we have to remind ourselves that it really hasn't. And so, yeah.

in the way that we know it today has only really been around for sort of six years or so. It used to be a photo sharing app in the very early days and then it became associated with big companies. So the paid partnership app

The paid partnership function, for example, was introduced in 2017, and that completely transformed the ways in which people started to use social media and Instagram especially. So I think that's an important point. You know, the clean fluences are important.

predominantly who are setting up their own representations, their own accounts, they're creating their own content and they're creating their own versions of the white woman housewife. So I think that's probably slightly different to what came before. But at the same time, they are kind of doing something that is

housewives have done for a very long time, which is to impart tips and knowledge and guidance around how to create the perfect home to their followers. But I guess in terms of how you define a cleanfluencer, a cleanfluencer is a cleaning influencer. And in order to be an influencer, there are certain kind of...

certain you know things that um that have to also occur so an influencer has a high number of followers um heavily commercialized content so often quite lucrative um and they don't follow very many people so they've got that kind of online social media celebrity um so what you tend to get is a few sort of clean influencers who've really made it become really really popular

And it's a bit like a triangle. You know, you have a few who've really made it at the top, made it work for themselves. And then you have an infinite number of smaller kind of imitation accounts. So.

It is fascinating, I think, because, you know, if we think about housework as being something that is invisible historically, you know, women's labor is often described as valueless, invisible. You know, nobody really wants to talk about it. Scholars have completely ignored it.

You know, it seemed to be something that has no monetary value because women are supposed to do it, you know, out of love and care for their families, etc. And bearing all of that in mind, one of the things that clean fluencing does do is makes it highly visible. It makes it a visible thing.

And it makes housework visible probably for the first time. So it's very sort of omnipresent. And it's really kind of bringing housework into the into the sort of popular mainstream, particularly around digital culture, of course. So I think, you know, there are a lot of parallels between.

in terms of the cleanfluencers and the housewives that came before. But yeah, the book really explores what is kind of different and unique about the sort of digital media aspect of housework in this regards. Yeah. The other thing, and slightly kind of

Further into the book, you know, you've talked about, I guess, the kind of domestic drudgery of like the labor, the work of social reproduction in the house. But one thing that really kind of comes out from these digital influencers is the way that like housework is kind of glam, which I can really assure you it isn't. And I'm kind of like struck by that.

as again this sort of um new or novel aspect partially i guess how does it you know sort of differentiate them from both uh housewives in the past but also i guess kind of like the way feminism has dealt with domestic labor in the past but then also i'd love to know like what are the techniques for you know turning doing the dishes into uh something that can be instagrammable and you know can kind of get you thousands of followers

Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. Of course, you know, there's absolutely nothing really glamorous about housework. And, you know, there's centuries of feminist writing, which has, you know, described the sort of drudgery, the monotonousness, the thanklessness of housework. So, you know, of course, Simone de Beauvoir talked about housework as being a flight from self.

She talked about it as being torturous and even as a form of kind of masochism at one point as well. So, you know, the idea that housework is somehow glamorous and good for us really kind of flies in the face of so much feminist research and feminist writing. But that is the really interesting thing about clean fluencing. You know, it's kind of...

re-articulated housework so that instead of being about drudgery and monotony and boredom and torture it's actually repositioned as a form of self-care something that is good for us and somehow kind of good for our mental health and I'm really fascinated by the ways in which we've all kind of accepted this as true and which to me seems bizarre because in the process of writing the book I've

searched and searched and searched everywhere I could think of for any peer-reviewed research whatsoever that would demonstrate that there's a link, a positive correlation between housework and as being good for your mental health. And I can't find anything at all. Instead, all I can find are studies which quite often make clear links between feelings of depression, feelings of captivity,

housework. So it is really interesting that it has been kind of repositioned to something quite sort of glamorous and good for us. And I think that's probably what marks it as separate to the housewives that came before. So if you look at sort of housewifery

guide books from the past, you know, even in the 1980s, 1970s and 1980s, the sort of how-to housewife guides, they were quite sort of instructional. You know, there was nothing, it was kind of advice about how to get through the day basically as efficiently and painlessly as possible. Whereas today,

It's less about, you know, just getting it over and done with. And instead, it's more to do with enjoying your housework. And it's almost sort of described as a form of self-care, you know, something that makes me happy. And, you know, something that really kind of, you know, you shine your sink and you also shine your soul, you know, something which is actually good for us. And it's bizarre because, like I say, I can't find any evidence to

demonstrate scientifically that this might be the case. Yeah, so it is. It's very interesting how people have sort of accepted this mantra that housework is somehow good for us. But it's also interesting that Klee influencers never use the word housework. And I wonder whether that word housework and the housewife has quite a sort of

And it has connotations which the contemporary clean fluencer might want to distance herself from. So, you know, the housewife, if you think about the sort of stereotypical image of the housewife, it's maybe somebody quite downtrodden or like a Stepford wife or whatever.

And so, yeah, the clean fluence, clean fluences are kind of a way of sort of reinventing, cleaning, tidying and decluttering so that it's somehow kind of energizing and good for us. You know, sometimes the clean fluencing videos feel a bit like exercise videos almost. You know, this is something, you know, it might be a bit painful, but it's really good for us.

You know, it's energising, it's fun, it's glamorous. And yeah, that whole kind of narrative feels a million miles away from, you know, somebody like Hannah Gavron in the 1960s who wrote about, you know, housework as a form of captivity. Yeah, so absolutely. It's really interesting how housework has been sort of reframed as kind of a form of glamour. I mean, this, and again, you've kind of gestured towards this,

is part of the way the book takes its critique much kind of more broadly. There's, again, two kind of aspects here. One is a critique of, I guess, kind of, you know, self-help discourses in which clean fluences are really embedded. And you've talked, you know, again, shine your sink and shine your soul as a way of kind of dealing with

you know, multiple crises that contemporary social life and contemporary capitalism confronts people with. But I'm also intrigued, I guess, by the book's critique of the sort of anti-social nature of capitalism

these you know positive thinking self-help kind of discourse is the way I suppose kind of the book is saying that this really places all of the responsibility onto the individual and I mean treat to hear I guess kind of what the critique of sort of self-help discourse is and how that critique you know is kind of embedded in your critique of clean fluences too yeah absolutely um

Yeah, I think it's really important to think about the clean fluences in tandem with the wider sort of very, very popular positive thinking movements, which is firmly embedded within popular culture today. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. It's a kind of it sort of has its roots, doesn't it, in the 1980s and the kind of early days of communism.

neoliberal discourses, I suppose, and very much taps into this idea that, you know, it's fine to acknowledge that things are tough. That's fine. It's okay to talk about the fact that you have anxiety and depression. It's okay to talk about the fact that you might be struggling with money. It's even okay to talk about how messy your house is. But the point is to take personal responsibility for fixing it.

And so the kind of, you know, clean fluency, clean fluency is in a way of the sort of ideal neoliberal citizens, aren't they? You know, they're quite sort of relatable. They have the same sort of problems as everybody else, but they don't turn to the state for solutions. They don't look outwards towards the community. They don't expect anything from anybody else. They just crack on and solve the problems themselves.

And so, yeah, I mean, clean fluencing is absolutely full of these kind of positive affirmations, you know, which are quite often expressed through hashtags and.

So things like, you know, don't give up on your dreams. Just be you. That's a real big one. And you do you. You know, you see these sort of affirmations all over clean fluency content. And yeah, the message is really simple, isn't it? It's, you know, yes, your life might be tough. And we are a community of people here within clean fluency culture who get it because we're just like you.

But, you know, all you have to do is shift your mindset, you know, have a down day, but then kind of bounce back from it.

And, you know, kind of work on yourself, better yourself in order to find the solution. It's that whole idea, isn't it, that the solution to all of the kind of inequalities that very much permeate our everyday lives are solvable from within by changing our mindset. And I think it's really harmful, actually, to sort of, you know, to kind of

well, within clean fluencing culture, it's quite aspirational, isn't it? So it sort of gives people who follow clean fluencing the kind of hope, the idea that if they too work hard enough, if they too follow their dreams in the same sort of way, if they crack on and clean their house in the same sort of way, then they too will be on the route to happiness.

and um yeah and it it doesn't really appear to be working so it's yeah it's it's very interesting how um clean fluencing very much sort of reproduces those um kind of positive thinking mantras in a completely uncritical way um yeah and it it basically lets um

It lets kind of those sort of old meritocratic narratives unfold completely unchallenged.

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is to think about some of the examples in the book. And I sort of hesitate to be like name names, but the book throughout has got examples of some of the kind of clean fluences who are big. And I wonder if you could kind of give a couple of those to sort of bring to life that kind of structural critique you've been talking about. Yeah. Well, I suppose, I mean, the kind of obvious example is Mrs. Hinch, mainly because she's

She is the UK's most well-known clean fluencer by quite a long way. You know, she's a household name. She's been sort of referenced in EastEnders and Coronation Street, which is generally a marker of being a household name, I think, in the UK. She's got about almost 5 million followers on Instagram. And she absolutely embodies...

all of what I've just been talking about. So she was a white working class woman from Essex, a kind of, you know, inverted commas, ordinary woman. And she set up an influencing account. And the influencing account, which was a clean influencing account, sorry, I should say, became incredibly popular quite quickly. And so she became this kind of...

you know, extremely popular, clean fluencing celebrity. And, you know, she's ended up with incredibly sort of lucrative deals with people like, with companies like Procter & Gamble, for example. She's got her own kind of branded range of cleaning products. So I think she's a really good example of this kind of meritocratic fantasy, which probably

runs throughout clean fluency and culture um so you know she she kind of makes it seem possible and i think when i was writing the book part of me kept thinking about um you know reality television for example which does something similar doesn't it it um

makes it seem like if you've got enough talent and if you've got if you're hard working enough then anybody of course can make it to those dizzy heights but in reality it doesn't happen you know you maybe get a tiny minority of people who are lucky enough to make it um and then everybody else kind of trails along behind um

So, yeah, I think in terms of an illustration of the kind of process of clean fluencing, I think she's a really, a really good one. There's another clean fluencer who I talk about in the book called Laura Mountford, who has a book called Live Life Laundry. I think that's the right title, but I might have to check.

And yeah, she talks about her journey towards self-care through her laundry.

So, yeah, there are plenty of examples within the book of the ways in which different influencers have kind of, you know, they record video diaries basically of their everyday lives. And sometimes the video diary might be them talking about their feelings of depression, their feelings of anxiety, you know, sometimes even talking about taking antidepressants. So, you know, it's quite candid often.

And but then the point is that, you know, the next reel shows how they've kind of, you know, pulled themselves up. They've cleaned their house. They're sitting down having a nice cup of tea in their immaculate home and everything is OK again. So it's this kind of, you know, almost like a cycle of kind of failure and then and resolution always through failure.

you know, through turning inwards. So the solution is always within. Yeah, so I think Mrs. Hinch is probably a really good example. And there are other examples in the book as well.

Now, a lot of, I guess, kind of critical cultural studies would almost kind of like stop there and have that kind of sense of, you know, presenting structural critique. But one of the things that really struck me as kind of fascinating and maybe kind of unique about the book is, I suppose, the balance you bring towards the end of the book where you kind of say, actually, there are some...

redeemable elements of the clean fluencer that there's kind of you know ways that they can help us sort of understand the realities of gendered

and racialized divisions of labor and i'm sort of intrigued by um can the clean fluencer be sort of saved can they be um you know kind of part of the solution as much as um their kind of you know real work is obscuring a lot of social problems yeah

I mean, I think one of the things that I'm really careful to do throughout the book is to make sure that at no point am I laying the blame for any of this at individual influencers. So, you know, for a very, very long time, women have often sought ways of finding a balance between the demands of their unpaid labor and their paid labor and thinking of different ways in which they can work.

you know, combine the two. So if you think about the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, for example, this was a way in which women, an early example of the ways in which women combined those two worlds. So in a way, you know, clean fluency, you can see how it's become popular because

Because it does appear to offer that, you know, you don't have to leave your home. You don't have to, you know, check into an office. You can do everything from home. You can be there for your children and hopefully, you know, make a little bit of money in the process. So I think in a lot of ways, the sort of the problem doesn't lie with the particular women who set up clean freelancing accounts.

You know, the problem lies, I think, in a society that is still structured and set up in a way which, you know, simply doesn't work for many women. So it still sort of rests on the assumption, especially today, you know, we get all of the we hear all of these debates, don't we, about the importance of getting back into the office after COVID, right?

But, you know, those kind of debates around flexibility, where you work, whether or not you can work from home. You know, these are really important debates to have, especially in terms of women's lives and especially in terms of the demands of unpaid labor as well. So, yeah, so I think it's.

In a world which is kind of structured to assume that, to assume the presence of somebody at home carrying the domestic load, you know, I think women are going to sort of continue trying to find ways of, you

you know, holding it together and making it work for them. But, you know, we also know that women are, you know, massively burnt out, that the struggle of the, especially for working class women, poorer women and women of colour, you know, those kind of demands of having to be in two, sometimes even three places at exactly the same time are, you know, exhausting, completely overwhelming. And, you

I think part of the problem is that the direction that debate is going in at the moment is to admit that you can't have it all. But then the thing that always has to go is your paid work and the assumption that it is women who carry the bulk of the

unpaid domestic labor and that they will be the ones who will take main responsibility for that, that part of women's lives and responsibilities remains unchallenged.

So, you know, we hear a lot at the moment about, you know, what to do about the overwhelm. And the thing that never gets directly addressed is this kind of link between the home and women as the kind of most naturally competent homemakers. So I think that's interesting as well. And I guess the solution is...

is less of a kind of obviously moving away from this kind of turning inwards for solutions, which I don't think we're ever going to find inside. And instead kind of, you know, looking outwards, looking away from social media for solutions as well. You know, looking towards communities, collectives of care, for example, outside of the outside of the home, perhaps. But, you know, these are kind of solutions.

Kind of quite big sort of radical proposals, I suppose. But I think also, you know, just talking about the problem in the first place is really important. And, you know, giving ourselves permission to critique the cleanfluencers. Because I think sometimes because social media accounts are so, they feel so personal and they look so beautiful and the people involved

in the clean fluency accounts seem so real and sometimes so nice, it almost feels unkind to criticize them, especially when they're saying that they're experiencing a lot of joy and satisfaction.

But, you know, I end the book by talking about Sarah Ahmed and, you know, her idea of the feminist killjoy. And I think it's really important that we do kill this kind of joy where we can and, you know, give ourselves permission to critique it, you know,

Because we know that women, you know, are suffering from those kind of intensive conflicting demands that late modern capitalist societies put on us. So, yeah, I think that's the kind of first step, really, to sort of give ourselves permission to critique. But also as well, you know, to uncouple, to decouple housework and the ultra clean and well-ordered home from feminine value and status. And that's not going to be an easy thing to do because it goes back centuries, right?

And but it's it's a kind of having a well-ordered, gleaming, clean and tidy home is something that has always or for a very long time been associated with kind of feminine value and status in a way that it hasn't for men. And so, yeah, I think the solutions are complex. But yeah, but I think we need to talk about them. And like I said, give give ourselves permission to critique as well.

I mean, all of that strikes me as the perfect kind of starting point for another book for, I guess, an interrelated but kind of new project. But often at the end of academic book writing, there's a kind of sense of having sort of

reached the end point of a research agenda and moving on to kind of new things. So what are you working on kind of next in terms of either this space or something kind of different? Yeah, well, I'm interested in where all of this comes from because like I said at the beginning, when we study culture, there's quite often a tendency to sort of disconnect it from its historical origins. Sociologists are really...

Often not very good, I think, at historically situating the thing that they're studying. So what I'm doing at the moment is returning to the 1980s because, well, for all kinds of reasons, but I think in terms of thinking about

the cultures that surround us today in 2025, I think a lot of what we talk about and a lot of the concepts that we use as sociologists and as feminists as well have their roots in that period in the 1980s. So, yeah, my project at the moment is to think about those narratives and discourses of the 80s, particularly around women and women

and women's everyday lives. So that's kind of the plan. I'm interested in the superwoman as well, who was kind of galvanized in the 1980s. So I'm going to be looking a little bit more at her. We interrupt this program to bring you an important Wayfair message. Wayfair has got style tips for every home. This is Nicole Byer, helping you make those rooms flyer. Today's style tip, when it comes to making a statement, treat bold patterns like neutrals. Goal!

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