Still cleaning after all these years: Post-feminist woman is still behind the Hoover. Geraldine Bedell on Nineties housework

UNDER my kitchen sink I have cream cleaner, hob cleaner, carpet cleaner, and three separate cleaners for laminates, ceramics and chrome. I have detergents which claim to differentiate between bathrooms and kitchens, though the surfaces look pretty much the same to me; a no-rinse fridge cleaner - can't remember when I last used that - and air fresheners in both aerosol and slow-release form. There is even something under there which claims to love the jobs I hate.

I buy all these plastic bottles of detergent to make myself feel better about not doing much housework. The marketing messages imply they will save me effort, even while they conspicuously increase the number of jobs I am supposed to be doing. So they sit there, getting dirty and silently reproaching me for not being able to remember the last time I descaled the bath.

I am not especially eccentric. Volume sales of household cleaning products rose 15 per cent last year; according to a report to be published next month by the Economic Intelligence Unit, as a nation we spend more than pounds 1.5m on things to help us clean, polish and primp our surfaces.

Practically all this work is still being done by women. Women may be company directors, go on assertiveness training courses, enter politics and talk about emotional and sexual equality; but when it comes to housework, it appears from the latest research that they just carry on getting out the Hoover.

A 1991 Mori survey for Vax Appliances found that 77 per cent of women vacuum, and 75 per cent dust, at least every two or three days, while 46 per cent wash the kitchen floor every two or three days. More than one in three women all over Britain spend more than 10 hours a week cleaning (in a regional breakdown this rose to 59 per cent in the North and North-east).

Sexual politics has passed by on the other side. According to research carried out by Gallup in 1990, 62 per cent of women do all their household's dusting, cleaning and vacuuming, compared with only three per cent of men. Doing the washing defeats men almost entirely: only one per cent of men manages to do the washing, and two per cent to iron the family's clothes, against 87 per cent of women.

A European Commission survey reported in June that British men did less about the house than the men of other European countries: 74 per cent said that they would not take responsibility for domestic chores, and when challenged with a list of six common household tasks, three out of four British fathers claimed not to be in charge of any of them.

'I SUPPOSE Toby must have done his own washing before he moved in with me,' says Jane Harrap, a 30-year-old teacher, 'but you wouldn't know it. I sometimes wonder whether I collude in his incompetence, because it makes me think he needs me. But if I didn't wipe down the fridge door, no one would, because he just wouldn't notice it was thick with grease and dust.'

Jane Ussher, psychology lecturer at University College London, believes that 'the pressure to keep your house clean doesn't just come from your mother, or those neighbours in advertisements who commented on your kitchen floor; it's internal. Men simply don't think or care about a lot of these jobs.

'Feminism has had so little impact on housework partly bacause it's a very personal, individual matter - we don't even discuss it in the way we discuss sex: it's not as entertaining. So it all comes down to whether you personally can live with a dirty sink, and if not, whether you can face having the row every week.'

Professor Nick Emler of Dundee University has just been studying the domestic contributions of both boys and girls aged between 16 and 24, and found girls continue to do significantly more, despite professed beliefs in sexual equality among both sexes. 'Boys can choose not to do housework; they're not automatically seen as bloody-minded and lazy. But girls don't seem to feel resentful; they aren't really aware of the gap between their beliefs and their behaviour.'

Professor Emler believes domestic attitudes are impressed on children very early. 'Recent research in Australia shows that by the age of eight, children have a clear idea of which jobs in the home belong to whom. And although men are doing more than they used to, they tend to do the relatively public jobs that can be glamorised - cooking, which then becomes 'cuisine', or childcare, not ironing, or cleaning the toilet.'

Jane Ussher sees cleanliness as an aspect of sexual identity: 'Unclean women are slags and sluts. A good woman is a clean woman.' Daniel Wight, an anthropologist, recently studied a former mining village in Scotland with high unemployment, and found the community was strongly stratified, not on the basis of income, but 'respectability'. Women were the guardians of this respectability, and their ability to keep the house smart was a key factor. 'It mattered whether they had aspirations to renew their furniture, whether the house was kept tidy, the garden mown, the children had new clothes.'

For the women I spoke to, these moral overtones are creating considerable strain: most of them said they often feel inadequate in the face of their never-ending housework, the plethora of jobs they are now required to do. And all too often, labour-saving devices simply create more surfaces to clean: the time you used to spend beating eggs you now spend cleaning the crevices on your food processor.

'A MAJOR reason I have a job outside the home is that I know otherwise I'd spend all day wiping my skirting boards,' says Juliet Steele, a 34-year- old journalist. 'But the skirting boards still make me feel anxious. I employ a cleaner three times a week, so I can think it's her fault if the paintwork is grimy - but she doesn't do anything as thoroughly as I would. I agonise about how strict to get about this, because it really isn't that important, is it? And maybe she just doesn't have the time, in the hours I'm paying her for.'

Fran Hepworth, 62, stayed at home when her two daughters were growing up. 'Housework then was my life's work, which was demoralising. In other jobs, work may pile up for tomorrow, but at least what you've done today still stands. There is something very depressing about performing a task only so it can be messed up.'

Sue Halliday, a 35-year-old doctor, believes feelings about class muddle her attitude to housework. 'I grew up in a lower middle-class household where my mother cleaned manically and my parents were always having their friends round to admire their home improvements. Then at university I met all these messy people who didn't see their houses as the centre of their lives, merely as the background to a vivid social and intellectual life. The older I get, the more I find myself reverting to type, and worrying about my home. But I despise myself for it.'

This sometimes grudging reversion to patterns laid down by mothers is remarkably common. Glenys Kinnock, interviewed on BBC Radio 4's In The Psychiatrist's Chair, described her mother as a perfectionist: 'The house was always absolutely spotless. I used to say I'd always be untidy, and never care about cleanliness as the most important virtue around the house, but I'm afraid I've turned out like her. I'm obsessed about having everywhere looking neat, even inside the cupboards. It irritates the children, but I tell them you're saying exactly the same thing I said to my mother.'

If women blame their mothers for the tyranny of housework (and the Mori survey for Vax found that even though women put in fewer hours than their mothers, they pride themselves on keeping the house as clean), they also blame the manufacturers of household cleaning products, who seem engaged in a permanent quest to engender new varieties of guilt.

'One area where (women) still appear to be letting themselves down is carpet care,' a pamphlet put out by Vax lectures sternly. Promotional literature for the disinfectant 24 Hour Lifeguard warns that 'detergents such as washing-up liquid only make the surface look clean,' and urges the disinfection of kitchen surfaces before and after use. Quite apart from the prospect of all the food tasting vaguely antiseptic, the mere thought of all this extra work is enough to make any sensible woman feel exhausted.

'Research has shown that although most people have a cupboard full of bleaches, detergents, cleaners and disinfectants, they remain worried that their cleaning routines are not doing enough to keep the house hygienically clean,' warns Lifeguard's manufacturer, S C Johnson. And who is engendering all this guilt? S C Johnson and others like them, constantly bringing out new products. (Were you aware of smelly ironing before Radion?)

Adam Lury, managing partner of the advertising agency Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury, sees this less as a conspiracy than the natural operation of a mature market. 'The big players have established themselves, so anyone trying to break in has to find a niche; the big companies try to corner off those niches first. What matters is getting stocked and displayed, so if Ajax, say, has four products on display, it might bring out a lemon-fresh variant to get a fifth, and try to persuade the retailer to drop someone else's product in its favour.'

MRS BEETON managed all her cleaning with just soda, vinegar, salt and ammonia. Now, as Adam Lury says, 'we'll soon have a shampoo for red carpets on the stairs'. (Interestingly, though, Mr Muscle window cleaner now boasts added vinegar for extra cleaning power.) This plethora of products is targeted at women at a period when they have less time than ever before to make use of them.

This, combined with the feeling that you are somehow failing if you don't meet the standards set down by your mother, means many women still suffer a poisonous cocktail of emotions about housework. They think they are 'slobs' if their teacups are stained on the bottom, or frozen peas have fallen down the gap between the cooker and the worksurface. And because the task seems so enormous, so unending, they frequently say they find it difficult to approach the work strategically. 'I am incredibly efficient at the office, and no one would think to look at me that my house was teetering on the verge of chaos and filth, that I'm incapable of pacing my housework, but that's how it is,' says Claire Pasmore, a 33-year-old market researcher.

But there is also a rational sense working against this guilt, which is aware of the pointlessness of performing tasks only to have them messed up again, and in revolt against the old- fashioned cleaning ads in which women were assumed to invest their entire identity and self-esteem in having a kitchen floor as gleaming, their washing as white as the next woman's.

Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique referred to housework as indoor loitering. I would like to believe this is what it is. Part of me does believe it. But I still rush around nervously cleaning sinks before people come to visit. Meanwhile, all those bottles under my sink bear witness to a deep emotional need to see myself as someone who can keep her surfaces sparkling, her grouting white, her U-bends as good as new.

(Photograph omitted)