'Dirty Linen', an exhibition exploring women's uneasy and at times obsessive relationship with cleanliness, opens September 28 at the Women's Library in East London, running until December 21, 2002.
The Women's Library occupies the site of a former bath and wash house: now it's crammed full of curious looking household objects.
There are washboards for scrubbing clothes, mangles and 'dolls' - large wooden implements for pummelling the dirt from clothes. Next to this a Zanussi washing machine gleams, showing how much domestic chores have changed.
Most fascinating are chirpy advertisements for cleaning products, playing on insecurity and fear, such as this one from the 1920's Lux soap flakes:
"It was hard for Elsie to tell me about perspiration odour in underthings; but I'm glad she did. Never will I be guilty again - I'll Lux mine after each wearing. It takes away odour, saves colours too."
'Dirty Linen' explores how middle class women became involved in public health campaigns in Victorian Britain and the drive to educate the poor. There are some illuminating old photographs of working class girls engaged in learning the right way to launder.
Notions of keeping houses, clothes and bodies clean were intrinsically linked to those of moral cleanliness. Women were seen as their family's first defence against moral and personal sloppiness.
Video installation 'Redwash and 'Fluffy Shirts' is visual artist Katja Then's take on the contemporary washing experience: shrunken garments made from lint in the artist's laundry
Visitors can log onto the website at the exhibition and record their own ideas of what cleanliness means to them.
Contributors to the website commented on how good it was to feel clean: or the pleasure of being messy and then clean again. Some contributors felt that, for them, clean meant being drug and alcohol free.
Both the exhibition and the website show that washing and cleaning are still highly gendered activities. Household drudgery is still dreaded and for some, the fear of being unable to stem the flow of grime is the same today. Has Hotpoint merely meant we now have more time to spend doing other tedious chores?
One contributor says, '(Clean) is something people use to judge - a clean child is a well-cared for child - better than my permanently messy, active, inquisitive children. In my house, clean is a swearword'.
A series of talks are running alongside the exhibition on such themes as 'Dicken's Toilet', taking to task Dicken's love/hate relationship with dirt and 'Cleanliness: a healthy obsession?' on private and public pressures and perceptions of cleanliness.
