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In the 1830s, American readers began to gobble up domestic advice manuals. Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Josepha Hale, and their sisters navigated the new consumer economy and provided the burgeoning middle-class guidance for managing their homes, telling women which curtains, curios, and cutlery to buy and how to care for them. Child and others articulated a close connection between housekeeping, norms of gender and economy, and Christian religious teaching. In The American Woman's Home, for example, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe explained how to make candles and do the over-stitch, when to go shopping for household necessaries, and how often to sweep the parlor. The Beecher sisters also told readers that their Christian faith should shape their housekeeping. The Christian household manager would show hospitality to the poor; she would emulate Jesus, who "spent more time and labor in the cure of men's bodies than in preaching," by caring for the sick in her household; and she would not squander "the bounties of Providence" by serving gastronomic "monstrosities" such as "Green biscuits with acrid spots of alkali; sour yeast-bread; meat slowly simmered in fat till it seemed like grease itself … and above all, that unpardonable enormity, strong butter!" She would, in short, understand that her household labors were also Kingdom labors, intimately connected to her own faithful discipleship as a Christian woman, and to the Christian formation of her family.
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More recent domestic advisors have at least implicitly recognized that housework can be connected to spiritual and religious pursuits, as evidenced by the seemingly endless feng shui craze, with its promises that the correct arrangement of furniture will produce inner peace. Desperate housewives are encouraged, in the words of a contributor to mothering.com, to focus on the "Zen, meditative aspect of housecleaning by trying to slow down and be aware … . [This] makes doing the dishes and folding laundry much more satisfying." Writers freely borrow religious idiom to describe household chores. To wit, a recent article in Good Housekeeping, which tells readers how to "Hide Your Sins"—your sins of cleaning omission, that is: hide the fact that you never do laundry by choosing dark-colored linens that mask dirt, and choose nonpleated lampshades that don't require dusting. Indeed, the language of today's housekeeping manuals suggests that something nearly existential is at stake for the consumers of housekeeping advice. Flylady promises her cult following "a no-nonsense approach to getting your house and your life in order."
It's easy to mock the spiritual language that saturates today's domestic discourses, but in fact, as Margaret Kim Peterson argues in Keeping House, there is something deeply theological at stake in housework. Peterson's creative and compelling exploration of keeping house as a basic practice of the Christian life ranges from the practical (good knives should never be put in the dishwasher) to the spiritually incisive (if you think your house is too small, consider the ways in which, through practices ranging from fasting to marriage, "Christian tradition. . . has been inclined to see limits as a necessary component to human flourishing"; thus the cramped house may in fact be a place in which "to live out our dependence on God and our interdependence on one another").
Contemporary Americans, argues Peterson, a professor at Eastern University, have been shaped by two different cultural conversations about housekeeping. The first tells us that housekeeping is sheer drudgery, that it is mindless, meaningless, and menial, and that if you possibly can avoid it, you should. At the same time, housekeeping has become fodder for fantasy—fantasy that sustains and is sustained by magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Real Simple. Such glossies tell us that housekeeping is not about "doing a good job at something that needs to be done." Rather, housekeeping is an effortless exercise in fulfilling consumerism: buy this magazine/storage unit/boutique, organic cleaning product, and your house and life will be perfect. The truth is that housework is hardly effortless, and it involves, to be sure, some drudgery. But when viewed through the lens of the Gospel, rather than the lens of Better Homes and Gardens, housekeeping presents itself as a theologically meaningful site of Christian formation.
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