What Makes Women Clean

If feminism is, at least in part, the radical idea that women are people, then part of letting go of clean culture is the radical idea that women — and not just white, bourgeois women — deserve free time. More specifically: free time unburdened by the feeling that they “should” be cleaning or parenting or meal-prepping or doing laundry instead.

What if I begin to understand that clean culture — like diet culture, like purity culture, like bourgeois parenting culture — persists in part because it conveniently keeps women so busy, fatigued, and distracted that they can’t more effectively combat patriarchy? What if I really internalized how much it’s used to make other people who can’t or wo... See more