In the fifties, there were these definite rules about what boys did and what girls did. My sisters were brought up to get married to somebody and be little princesses, and the boys, we were supposed to be tough and work, but cleaning was not in our resumé at all. My dad had two of his friends over watching a football game one day, and they wanted to eat a can of soup. They had to call my mom because they didn't know how to turn on the burner on the stove.
When I moved out and went to college, every place that I lived was a filthy rat's nest. We would set it down and there was no mom to clean it up, and so it just got dirtier and dirtier. By the sixties, women were saying, "Well, this is bullshit, I'm not cleaning up after him! He cleans up after himself." We actually had to start cleaning, and we didn't know how to do it. It's sort of like being asked to dance the tango or something. I didn't know what these things were. For example, I know one guy who washed dishes in Johnson's wax and made everybody sick as hell.
To this day, it's sort of mysterious to me how somebody can make the top of a stove clean. I just cannot do it! I can wipe stuff off, but I can't scrub. It seems to me there's a gene missing. If the toilet gets real funky, I will wipe the toilet off, but I don't think I've ever lived in a house where the toilets looked, you know, institutional.
-Glen
Photos and text from the forthcoming book "Cleaning: People Talk About Housework"