A prolific novelist and journalist, Evelyn Sharp was the first regular columnist on the Manchester Guardian’s women’s page. An early suffragette she was imprisoned for breaking government windows and for refusing to leave the House of Commons after the then-Home Secretary ignored a delegation she was heading. Part of the United Suffragettes, Sharp was editor of its journal Votes for Women and insisted that the movement keep up its activism throughout World War One. In the following article she argues for an end to the tradition of spring-cleaning.
Spring-cleaning always seems to me a confession of failure. Obviously, if the house is dirty enough to require special cleaning in the spring, the implication is that it has not been kept clean in the preceding summer, autumn and winter, and to clean it with a flourish of dusters at one season is not to guarantee it will not need cleaning again during the other three. Indeed, spring-cleaning acts rather as a deterrent than otherwise. For weeks beforehand it seems hardly worth while to clean the house since it is going to be turned upside down shortly; and after the dreadful event is over to start cleaning it again is like going to church on Easter Monday or making a speech the day after the poll.
There are so many rebels on the hearth in these emancipated days that an organised revolt against spring-cleaning ought to be easy to provoke. It should certainly be one of those so-called women’s movements that should have the hearty co-operation of all the men of the household, for the wail of the husband, father or brother is the recognised accompaniment to this yearly disaster. Spring-cleaning is quite an important part of the traditional jest about women, but there is no reason why it should be an essential part, and if there still remain some mockers who would sooner suffer the inconvenience of spring-cleaning than lose one chance of laughing at the absurdities of women, they would be largely outnumbered by those in favour of abolition, and as everybody knows, the next best thing to defeating the enemy is to divide the enemy’s ranks.
But many will still be found to defend this ancient custom. Chimneys have to be swept, they will say, and the sweep alone entails a spring-cleaning. But does he? At this one season of the year he may, with truth be said to ‘come to dust’. But where there is a kitchen chimney the sweep comes at other seasons of the year, too, and except at springtime does not disorganise the whole household. In the case of all other chimneys, the sweep is even an active argument against spring-cleaning – for there are still archaic housewives who permit no fire to be lighted after the chimney has been swept at spring time; and if the sweep could come and go unobtrusively at other times of the year, as the window-cleaner does, whole families would not shiver before a fireless grate in the bitter winds of an English summer.
If spring-cleaning is to be abolished the psychological motives underlying it cannot be ignored. One must allow for the sense of novelty and excitement that seems to be satisfied by this yearly outbreak of cleanliness. Nothing is duller than to keep a house clean by removing a little dirt every day; it is as wearing to the spirit as it would be to sew one stitch – an impossible feat in any case – in order to save problematic nine. The house may be no cleaner after a week’s onslaught upon 51 weeks of accumulated dirt, than if the dirt had never been allowed to accumulate, but the difference between making a house clean and keeping it clean is the difference between having loved and lost and never having loved at all. Clearly, if the spring-cleaner is ever to be converted from this annual orgy of domesticity, domesticity must be itself rendered more exciting and adventurous from day to day.
The elemental desire to wallow in dirt in order fully to enjoy converting it into driven snow is not, however, the only motive underlying the universal love of spring-cleaning. Equally universal, though a little more subtle, is the feeling in the early part of the year – long before the weather justifies it – that ‘summer is i’comen in’. It makes us do all sorts of mad and delightful and pleasant and poetic things; but unfortunately the means for satisfying it in poetic and pleasant ways are not so universal as the feeling. The housewife in the straitened city dwelling, the charwoman who comes in by the day, the domestic servant with her Sunday and her evening out, are all victims of the age-long desire to do something new in the springtime, something to celebrate the renewal of life after death. To make the house smell of furniture polish and soap from top to bottom, to put up clean curtains on the assumption that the sun is waiting to come in, to make the place temporarily unlivable in, and to try to wipe out in a week the neglect of a year, is merely the spring-cleaners’ way of welcoming the eternal miracle of Mother Earth. And that was never done in olden times without a human sacrifice. But if spring-cleaning seems rather inadequate as the charwoman’s Saturnalia, the only cure for her and for all spring-cleaners is to provide other ways of celebrating the return of spring. Until we do that she will continue to worship the fetish of spring-cleaning, and the house will be more or less dirty for eleven and a half months a year.