Social housekeeping

Differing attitudes towards the work of woman, particularly those held by ideologies including material and cultural feminism, culminated in the creation of social housekeeping. According to material feminists, the unbalanced division of domestic work could be aided by a financial acknowledgement of these tasks. Cultural feminists believed that skills that developed from traditional women's work made them better suited to the tasks of local government. An interweaving of both paradigms resulted in the reframing of the definition of the home to include the wider community. Social housekeepers described the city as an enlarged home that had to be managed as such, which served as a safeguard against the masculine model of the city as a business. This feminised civic activity provided a mutual ground for activism and reform to develop, supported by connections with the political mechanisms of local government. By redefining the home in a manner that was all-encompassing, the exclusionary practices in the public sphere could no longer hinder the socio-political participation of women. == Development ==

Early appearances of the language of social housekeeping can be found in the writing of female activists, club women and assorted women's publications. The social housekeeping movement utilised the image of housekeeping to bond traditional domestic gender roles with their pursuit to aid social matters. As the movement developed, groups of women sought reform in similar areas which led to involvement in the work of the women's club movement. The women's club movement benefited from the language of social housekeeping, as it facilitated their later promotion of maternalistic ideology. == Impact ==

Waste and sanitation Social housekeepers sought legislative reform for street cleaning and tenement inspection with the aim of establishing systematic waste and sanitation management. Female politicians often focussed on policy that would deal with cleaning up the city under the guise of housekeeping, like the installation of a piped water transport system by the mayor of Jackson, Wyoming. The sanitation reform enacted by municipal housekeepers bonded domesticity and politics, which positioned the skills of the woman as an effective municipal asset. Reformers such as Caroline Bartlett Crane described the club as the natural opportunity to educate a woman in topics like sociology in order to better seek social reform. The institution of a new Pennsylvanian constitution in 1874 permitted women to sit on school boards. It was not until almost a decade after the initial election of two women in the first year for more women to be elected. The Civic Club advocated for the election of Eliza Butler Kirkbride and Sophia Wells Royce Williams to the school board of Philadelphia's 7th Ward. The unsuccessful campaign's collection of data was spread in a pamphlet titled "The Story of a Woman’s Municipal Campaign", edited by Williams and published by the American Academy of Political and Social Science, which facilitated the spread of the work of municipal housekeepers to other reformers around the nation. The work of writers like Rheta Childe Dorr in magazines such as the Hampton's, matched the tones of other expose styles, such as muckracking. The articles written by female journalists of the time, particularly those dealing with social reform or the women's club movement, can be considered as a manifestation of social housekeeping. In the articles, issues such as juvenile delinquency, sanitation and hygiene, and the difficulties faced by working women were explored through challenging discussions of important social problems supported by empirical data. == References ==