Page 41 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 35

households, even ‘those who could not afford any other domestic services’, hired
‘step girls’ to scrub the threshold and the front steps of the house:
Showing oneself uncovered and dirty in public was…considered especially
degrading. In their memoirs, several servants emphasized the humiliation
they felt at having to kneel (thus showing legs and petticoats) to scrub the
front doorsteps and paths every morning, open to the stares of passersby,
the whistles and importunings of men and boys.
(Davidoff, 1983:44)

Middle-class women simply could not perform such tasks in public. To do so
would involve an absolute foreclosure of their identity in terms of both gender
and class. If economic deprivation forces them to clean, they must do so hidden
in the privacy of their homes. Davidoff notes that, beginning in the late
eighteenth century, ‘there was a continued effort to shift the manual work, or at
least the heavier, dirtier tasks onto domestic servants’ (1983:23). The progressive
separation of middle-class women from both ‘work’ and ‘dirt’ as inappropriate to
their identity coincides with and mirrors the formation of the same illusory
distinctions that divided private from public sphere. Significantly, the normative,
and therefore implicitly prescriptive, criteria for appropriate bourgeois femininity
are an actual or at least apparent distance from both dirt and work. These criteria,
we can assume, are vital to the cultural developments which, as Nancy
Armstrong has argued, institute gender as a primordial difference that overrides
all transitory social differences (1987:21).
Middle-class women’s physical liberation from manual labour and the
handling of dirt coincides with their developing role in ‘controlling middle-class
male sexuality’ (and of course, the notion that they had none of their own to
control). Lack of sexual control serves as a mark of the working class, native
blacks and women who were not ladies (Davidoff, 1983:21). In this symbolic
schema, the division of women into two groups—‘ladies’ and ‘women’ (or those
who don’t clean, don’t work and aren’t sexual, and those who do clean, do work
and are sexual)—becomes mixed, Davidoff argues, with other racial, colonial
and class polarities—‘white and black, familiar and foreign, home and empire’
(1983:21). This division also, very significantly, ‘has much to do with new
divisions of labor in the middle-class home’ (1983:23).
Although Davidoff does not specifically highlight this point, her argument
implies the practical and symbolic force, indeed the necessity, of regulating who
cleans and who doesn’t, who is clean and who isn’t, who works and who
doesn’t, in implementing a gender standard that would discreetly maintain and
symbolize class and racial differences as well. We have only to look at the
bourgeois home, the site of subject formation, to understand some of the
processes whereby social differences are transformed into transcendent,
ahistorical, symbolic differences like those that animate Freud’s interpretation of
Grusha’s cleaning scene. In both its topography and its division of labour, the