Isabella Mary Beeton may not have considered herself a domestic goddess but unwittingly she set the precedent. Mrs Beeton is best known as the author of “Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management” published in 1861, a tome which has become synonymous with the housewifely arts. Mrs Beeton’s book was far more than a guide to running a household. For the Victorian housewives who were its readers, it became a veritable bible. It also sold over 60,000 copies in its first year of publication.
Encyclopaedic in scope and extravagantly illustrated, it covered every conceivable domestic matter from “Arrangement and Economy of the Kitchen” to “The Rearing, Management and Diseases of Infancy and Childhood”.
I recently bought a second-hand paperback edition of the book called “Beeton’s Book of Household Management: a First Edition Facsimile” (pictured right). Nothing like the scarlet bound, gold-lettered original, this one is a small chunky doorstop of a book, with yellowed dog-eared pages and strips of sticky tape holding the spine together. (I didn’t buy it for the recipes I might add, but because its quaintness appealed to me.)
For many people the name “Mrs Beeton” evokes the image of an upper-class matron lording it over a retinue of servants. But this is quite wrong. Mrs Beeton was born to lower-middle-class parents in the appropriately named Cheapside in 1836 and knew nothing about how a gentrified household operated. It wasn’t until she married Samuel Orchart Beeton, an English publisher, that she found herself suddenly elevated to the role of supervisor of his household. Miserably unqualified, inexperienced and intimidated, she quailed at the prospect.
“Why has no-one written a book,” she allegedly asked her sisters, “a good book for brides … to help them learn these things?” (Many years later I found myself a similarly ignorant bride, not in a gentrified household alas, but in a humble flat in Cheapside on sea, with no clue as to how to boil an egg, let alone anything else remotely domestic, the kind of household blunderer Mrs Beeton had in mind.)
A woman of initiative, Mrs Beeton didn’t just complain, she took it upon herself to write the guidebook herself. Clueless in the kitchen she may have been, but she was no slouch when it came to taking up a challenge. As for being matronly, she never reached that comfortable state, succumbing to puerperal fever at the young age of twenty-nine. So much for the myth of Mrs Beeton. The other myth, which is yet to succumb to anything, is that of the domestic goddess.
A domestic goddess, according to the Urban Dictionary, is a woman who “excels at baking, cooking, cleaning – housework of all sorts. She loves to please and enjoys hearing compliments about her awesomeness around the house/kitchen.”
Nigella Lawson is a perfect example of a contemporary domestic goddess and she too wrote a book telling others how to do it. No doubt she gets compliments about her awesomeness all the time, being far more celebrated (and photogenic) than the average housewife. Such average housewives probably also love to please but wait in vain for compliments about their awesomeness.
Nigella’s claim to domestic goddess status is confined to cooking. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine her on her hands and knees scrubbing a bath, but naturally she’d have someone else to do that. Part of her allure is that she makes cooking look glamorous. Cooking in Nigella’s kitchen is not just throwing ingredients together, it’s a fantasy of sensual delight. For example:
“… we don’t want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake. … what I’m talking about is not being a domestic goddess exactly but feeling like one.
Wafting seductively around the kitchen was hardly what Mrs Beeton had in mind. Hers was a more evangelical stance, as evidenced by her explanation for writing the book:.
“What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.”
Nicola Humble, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mrs Beeton’s book, credits Mrs Beeton with introducing “the new cult of domesticity that was to play such a major role in mid-Victorian life”. The term “cult of domesticity” itself was in fact coined in the 1960s by Barbara Welter, a historian, who also gave it the more contemporary definition of “True Womanhood”. Described as “an idealised set of societal standards placed on women of the late nineteenth century”, it went well beyond housewifely skills, and dictated standards of piety, purity and submissiveness. It was this dogma, not surprisingly, that sparked the feminist movement.
To describe Mrs Beeton’s book therefore as a self-help manual for the mistress of the home would be disingenuous. It set out a moral code for what Nicola Humble describes as “the new bourgeois ideology of industriousness, placing a similar emphasis on organized, dutiful living, education, and will-power.” According to this ideology the demonstration of “virtuous diligence” in the house was the way to achieve the desired class status. How women conducted their households came to be a reflection of how the family was perceived and domestic standards became a measure of a woman’s virtue.
Things have changed since then. Women today have thrown off the shackles of the nineteenth century and are no longer expected to conform to antiquated rules set down by moralists like Mrs Beeton. We live in the best of all possible times (domestically speaking), an appliance available to do every task, robotic helpers becoming commonplace and a nourishing meal just a phone call away. What woman now would choose to spend her days and nights knocking herself out with baking, cooking, scrubbing, dusting, polishing, sweeping, vacuuming and all the rest, just to prove her virtue?
But before we get too jubilant, evidence suggests we haven’t completely brushed the dust of Mrs Beeton’s legacy from our hands. Cultural conditioning passed down through centuries is not so easily discarded.
Elise Loehnen’s recently published book “On Our Best Behaviour: The Seven Deadly Sins And The Price Women Pay To Be Good” points out that women have an innate drive to nurture, serve, please and prioritise the needs of others over their own. There may not be a Mrs Beeton dictating how things should be done but throwing off those bonds is not as simple as it seems. There’s considerable evidence to suggest “the arts of making and keeping a comfortable home” are still women’s lot in life, simply by virtue of our gender.
Paradoxically it’s the feminist inspired doctrine that modern women can “have it all” that’s largely responsible. Translated into the vernacular of day- to- day life, what this really means is that women must do it all. Loehnen tells how she ended up sobbing in her therapist’s office after a prolonged bout of acute stress.
“There I sat in my therapist’s office that month, in exhausted tears. ‘I feel like I can’t breathe’ I said. … ‘it’s like I’m suffocating, like I’ve been buried alive.’ …’It feels … as if something is sitting on my chest and no matter what I do I can’t get it off.’
‘I’m just so tired. I don’t understand. I try to do it all right, to be perfect, to be everything for everyone.’”
Incongruous as it seems, given the enlightenment of the twenty-first century, women today still measure their worthiness (or goodness as Loehnen calls it) against externally decreed benchmarks. Given that most women work outside the home now, these are a lot more challenging than Mrs Beeton’s.
One of the so-called seven deadly sins of Elise Loehnen’s book is sloth. For decades women have worried that they’ll be seen as slothful around the house, often to the point of neurotically striving for an unattainable perfection.
Loehnen gives the example of her mother who “measured her sloth-less existence by a pristine home”. I remember my own mother developing a weird fixation on how neatly she could arrange the linen cupboard, to the point where if the piles of towels, sheets and so on were not equally aligned to within a millimetre she pulled them all out and began again. Fortunately, she eventually acknowledged the problem wasn’t the unruly towels but her frustration at being a stay- at-home mum, so she decided to go back to teaching.
When it comes to household management (or mismanagement), women automatically assume responsibility. Why is this? Why, when other people with functioning limbs and faculties live in the house, if things fall apart it’s the woman who shoulders the blame?
Loehnen believes it’s because women’s self-worth and “goodness” are inextricably tied up in how they’re perceived. As she sees it:
“I want to be seen as professionally successful, and I want to be seen as someone who cares for and nurtures her family lovingly and effortlessly; to get it all done, I wake up early, go to bed late, and am constantly busy.”
And it’s not just her.
“My fellow moms who also work outside the home feel compelled to deliver excellence in both spheres, to prove we can do it all, without shirking any of it.”
Women like Loehnen are knocking themselves out to ensure they’re perceived as super-functioning, in control and sloth-less. If they’ve taken the doctrine of having it all to heart, they accept that they must do it all. One of the major indicators that they’re making it all work, despite the strain and pain, is an immaculate home. In striving to be seen as perfectly in control, they’ve set the bar unrealistically high. Women, Loehnen says “ … are so conditioned to be selfless, caretaking, and “other-directed,” we fail to recognize this overreach of responsibility.”
In a 2012 article published in “The Atlantic Magazine” titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department in Washington and a mother of two teenage sons, says “I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet.” She explains how as a role model for younger women negotiating the work/family nexus, she was worried that if she couldn’t manage, she’d be sending the wrong signal.
“…I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot)”
All of this is not to say that there aren’t women who enjoy housework. There can be something intrinsically rewarding about seeing a spotlessly clean and well-ordered house that your own blood sweat and tears has brought about.
In this vein and proof that the more things change the more they stay the same, Cheryl Mendelson in her 1999 book ”Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House,” reveals she has a “passion for domesticity”. Described as “a readable guide for both beginners and experts of all the domestic arts” it’s essentially a reincarnation of the tenets of Mrs Beeton.
The blurb on Amazon is ebullient:
The classic bestselling resource for every American household, Home Comforts addresses the meanings as well as the methods of housekeeping to help you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to modern domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home.
There’s more than a hint of Mrs Beeton in Mendelson’s stated objective in writing the book.
“Over and over, I found myself visiting homes where the predominant feeling was sepulchral, dusty, and deserted, or even hotel-like …”
Mendelson’s mission, like Mrs Beeton’s, is to alleviate the discomforts and suffering of household mismanagement.
“Inadequate housekeeping [decreases] the chance that people’s homes can satisfy their needs.”
Echoes of Mrs Beeton resound also in Mendelson’s comments on “traditional women” (for traditional read good, virtuous, those who get it all done).
“Unfortunately, what a traditional woman did that made her home warm and alive was not dusting and laundry. Someone can be hired to do those things (to some extent, anyway). Her real secret was that she identified herself with her home.”
“My own experience convinces me that there is still no other way to make a good home than to have attitudes toward home and domesticity modeled on those of that traditional woman.”
“Even when you hire someone who understands laundry basics, however, you cannot expect the same kind of knowledge and attention you would give the task yourself.”
Mendelson is careful to be politically correct in terms of acknowledging men.
“You can be male and domestic. You can have a career and be domestic. You can enjoy keeping house. No-one is too superior or intelligent to care for hearth and home”.
I have no argument with this, although in my experience there aren’t too many men who would be receptive to instruction in such things as cleaning china, setting the table, making up a bed with hospital corners, how to use a broom and so on, all of which are covered by Mendelson in detail. Most men regard instruction in any form (especially how-to manuals) as completely unnecessary because their male genes give them an innate and intimate understanding of how to do everything.
In a review of Mendelson’s book published in the June 2000 edition of The Women’s Review of Books (Vol 17, Issue 9), Martha Nichols notes Mendelson’s subliminal message is that women should “embrace housework [themselves] … rather than handing it off to someone else.” The proselytising shines through. While Mrs Beeton wields her moral code like a rolling pin, Mendelson is a little more subtle.
But the message is there nonetheless. Good housekeeping is still a way for women to demonstrate worthiness. As Nichols notes, “it feels like another call to righteous striving for perfection”.
The focus in Mrs Beeton, Mendelson, and other such gospels of domesticity is on defining the right way to live. Women are still being encouraged to conform to a value system that has its roots in the nineteenth century.
As Loehnen puts it “women are primed to serve … it’s how we’re conditioned”.
Unarguably, nurturing is as much a part of women’s nature as refusing to read manuals is of men’s. But when the pressures of life escalate as they continue to do, and it’s taken for granted that women will prioritise the needs of others over their own, they will increasingly struggle to make it work.
Mrs Beeton can’t be blamed for the social ills of a society she could never have predicted, however her legacy lives on in the domestic goddess myth that sets impossible standards for women.
