Women - Kathryn Hughes at last understands the working-class obsession with cleanliness
It is 1980 and I am about to meet the parents of my first proper boyfriend. He and I have bonded at Oxford over Bede and discovered that we are soulmates whose thoughts coincide on every subject. There are a few superficial differences between us - he is from a Manchester working-class family and I am a Home Counties princess - but basically we feel so close that it is as if we were twins freakishly divided at birth. Just before we walk up the path that leads to his parents' home, the boyfriend turns to me expectantly: "I honestly don't think," he says, eyes shining with quiet pride, "you'll ever meet nicer, cleaner people."
I stared at him with absolute bemusement. There had been several things that I had been looking forward to learning about his family, but their standard of hygiene was not one of them. It had never occurred to me whether his mother's whites were dazzling and how often his sister had a shower (baths, I soon learnt, were nasty things that encouraged lazy people to soak rather than wash the dirt off properly). Nor had I speculated, as I discovered his folks habitually did, on whether various people washed their hands after using the lavatory and how often they took their dogs to the vet to protect them against fleas. In my family, as long as you didn't smell, then you were probably doing OK. And even if you did, it was hardly a hanging offence.
The 12 years that my boyfriend and I spent together were fraught with struggles over hygiene. I accused him of being a clean freak (although we didn't have that phrase in those days, nor yet "obsessive compulsive"), while he thought I was a slut (not the sexual kind, which might have been fun, but more the grubby type who doesn't bother to scrub her front step unless visitors are expected).
If only I had known then what I know now, having visited the "Dirty Linen" exhibition at the Women's Library. The truth is, there was nothing wrong with either of us. Instead, we simply inhabited different - though, given our backgrounds, highly predictable - positions on the social and cultural meaning of dirt.
"Dirty Linen" is organised along broadly chronological lines, and starts with the moment in the mid-19th century when the urban middle classes began to worry that the working classes were contaminating their lives with stink, disease and even death. In order to stay safe from cholera and typhoid, it made sense to ensure that the homes of dairymen, washerwomen and greengrocers were sparkling like new pins.
To this end the busy, bossy reforming classes laid on running water to working-class streets and, where this wasn't possible, built communal wash-houses where bodies and clothes might be scrubbed into submission. The Women's Library, which emerged from the metaphorical ashes of the Fawcett Library earlier this year, is itself housed within Whitechapel's old Goulston Square Baths. Carefully included in the "Dirty Linen" show are the joint-smashing, blister-forming scrubbing boards and washing dollies that constituted the only cleaning technology available in 1846.
By the end of the 19th century, other initiatives to get the working class nice and shiny were following thick and fast. Elementary schooling for girls went heavy on lessons in housewifery: as the future custodians of England's homes, it was crucial that they knew how to keep everyone around them spick and span. The exhibition hints at the deadening effect of all this brutal cleanliness by showing serried ranks of blank-faced little girls in pinnies, busy with their boiling metal tubs.
Much harder to illustrate, though actually just as crucial, is the process by which generations of working-class children, girls especially, internalised the idea that to be clean was to be "good" and to be dirty was to be nasty, common, sinful or poor. By the middle of the 20th century, with Hoovers and Hotpoints appearing in every home, the real battle against grime had pretty much been won. Yet instead of freeing up women to pour all that energy into something else, something more creative, the battle against dirt continued, and still continues frantically to this day. The exhibition points out that we spend an anxious £25m a week on an ever more tricksy array of cleaning products. Clearly, something complicated is going on. Like so many demented Lady Macbeths, we are scrubbing away at stains whose real meanings go far beyond the biological.
"Dirty Linen: the history of women and their laundry" is at the Women's Library, Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT (020 7320 2222) until 21 December
Kathryn Hughes is working on a biography of Mrs Beeton
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