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SOR0010.1177/0038026119854260The Sociological ReviewÁlvarez-López

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The Sociological Review Monographs

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2019, Vol. 67(4) 847­–865
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DOI: 10.1177/0038026119854260
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positioning and moral journals.sagepub.com/home/sor

worth among working-class

Chilean women

Valentina Álvarez-López
Independent Researcher, Santiago, Chile

Abstract
This article explores ethnographically the ways in which working-class elderly and mature women
position themselves in class and gender terms through the cleaning practices they carry out in
their own households. Following contemporary research, it understands domestic labour as a
site of production and negotiation of classed, gendered and ‘raced’ subject positions. Scholars
researching on paid domestic labour have emphasised cleaning labour as devalued; however, this
article argues that the unpaid cleaning labour the women carry out in their own households might
become a source of self-worth. It does so by briefly depicting how the twentieth-century Chilean
modernisation and processes of class formation were coupled with an emphasis on hygiene
and cleanliness. It also provides an ethnographic description of working-class women’s cleaning
practices, attending to the classed and gendered meanings and value the women attach to these
practices, and discussing their negotiation of expected standards in relation to material conditions
and the multiple demands and values of everyday life. It shows that the margin of negotiation is
much reduced when the results of cleaning practices are more open to public view. It also argues
that the women not only express their subjectivities through everyday negotiations of cleaning
standards, but also produce particular modes of being working-class women.

Keywords
class, cleaning, social reproduction, subjectivity, value

Instead of our looms, crochet and needles, we brought olives, tuna and mayonnaise,
cream cheese, crackers and crisps to the last meeting of the year of the knitting workshop
I attended while living in a working-class neighbourhood in Santiago de Chile. In this

Corresponding author:
Valentina Álvarez-López, Independent Researcher, Santiago, Chile.
Email: valentinaalvarezlopez@gmail.com
848 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

workshop, mature and elderly women meet once a week, not only to learn new knitting
techniques but more importantly to spend time in the company of other women like
themselves. The party was set for just before the start of the long summer break, and was
to be the occasion when the teacher would present us with the diploma of participation
issued by the council to which the neighbourhood belongs. The previous week, we had
arranged what to bring in order to avoid bringing the same things or missing out on
favourite nibbles. By the time I arrived, almost all the women were already there. Isabel,
Laura and María were bringing the school tables from the opposite room and placing
them into two rows. At the back of the room, on a big wooden table were several plastic
bags containing the nibbles. Rosa was standing next to the table, dressing the cream
cheese with some soya sauce she had brought.
I left cheese and crackers on the wooden table. The women had finished with the
school tables and were helping to put the snacks in the dishes. I took the white tablecloth
that was folded next to the bags of food and Señora Consuelo helped me to unfold it over
the group of tables where we were going to eat. Some yellow, seemingly old stains
became visible. We looked at each other, knowingly. As Chilean women, we both knew
these stains were inappropriate. We took the tablecloth and placed it again over the group
of tables, this time the other way around. The stains remained visible. We made a few
other attempts until we realised no folding could conceal the stains and had no choice but
to place it as such. The obvious stains attracted Señora María’s attention, who suggested
turning the tablecloth upside down. Señora Consuelo and myself spent some time con-
vincing her there was no way of concealing them.
Some of the women sat around the groups of tables while I continued to help Rosa put
out the food. The knitting teacher and Señora María stood behind us talking about a non-
traditional reliever for the pains of ageing: marihuana leaf tea. A bit surprised, Rosa and
I initiated a conversation about how things have changed, and she started telling me a
related story. Another conversation was taking place around the table that distracted my
attention: the women were complaining about the stained tablecloth. ‘I could have
brought a clean one’, one of them said, while another started lecturing about the products
and tricks she uses to keep clothing ‘albo’ (bright white) as she likes. I could hear some
of them – including the owner of the tablecloth – rushing to affirm they would only ever
leave tablecloths ‘albo’. By the time Rosa and I were seated at the table, the conversation
had already shifted to the next funding applications for the workshop’s knitting materi-
als. I felt disappointed about missing the details of that important ‘ethnographic moment’.
Dirt and stains are the normal outcome of tablecloth use. Yet, when publicly acknowl-
edged, they became uncomfortable for these mature working-class women. Stains,
Douglas (2002) would say, appear here as ‘matter out of place’, a contravention of the
‘symbolic normative order’ in which a white tablecloth should remain albo despite use.
In Chile, albo is an adjective that refers to white clothing that has preserved its original
brightness. Here, the failure to maintain a tablecloth in this condition appears as a moral
statement. By publicly condemning stains, giving proof of their mastery of the laundry
process they perform, or claiming they might have had more appropriate tablecloths to
bring to the meeting, these women aimed to demonstrate to their peers that they do
accomplish expected norms of cleanliness. The women recognise the appropriate stand-
ard of a white tablecloth and value it; otherwise they would not bother to refuse
Álvarez-López 849

ownership of the stained article. Since the owner was not publicly named – even though
some, like me, might have known who she was – they all fall under suspicion; the stains,
it seems, threaten to stain the women’s morality. The stains seem to exert a moral power
over these women who, unlike their counterparts from higher social classes who often
delegate this work to domestic workers (Bustamante, 2011; Fernández, 2018), are
responsible for maintaining expected standards. If a tablecloth in a similar state appeared
at a get-together with my middle-class friends in their mid-thirties, it is very likely that,
like the women in this vignette, we would try turning the tablecloth upside down to con-
ceal the stains; we would probably laugh or plead guilty, but certainly we would not feel
threatened. The moral power of the stains seems strongly classed.
This article explores ethnographically the ways in which working-class elderly and
mature women position themselves in class and gender terms through the cleaning
practices they carry out in their own domestic spaces. It draws upon two different theo-
retical perspectives, which are approached in the first two sections of this article,
respectively. Firstly, it understands both paid and unpaid domestic labour as a site of
production and negotiation of classed, gendered and ‘raced’ subject positions (see, for
instance, Carrington, 1999; Fernández, 2018; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010; Lan, 2006;
Pink, 2004). While much of the cited literature focuses on how differences are repro-
duced through the distribution of domestic labour, this piece of work expands such
conceptualisations by exploring women’s gendered but also classed positionings
through the devalued activity of cleaning for their own households. Secondly, class is
understood as a historical, relational and antagonistic category which, following
Skeggs (2004, 2010), is loaded with notions of moral worth. Such notions – developed
in historical processes of class formation in relation to other systems of classification
such as gender, sexuality or ‘race’ – set limits not only on people’s ability to accrue
value and move in social space, but also on their possibilities of identification in
classed terms. In this line, the second section of this article briefly depicts how wider
processes of class and gender formation during the twentieth-century Chilean mod-
ernisation became intertwined with ideas of hygiene, cleanliness and a particular
understanding of the home. These values, it will be shown, allowed the creation of
moral boundaries (Lamont, 1994, 2000) between the respectable working class and the
masses of urban poor, in a context of struggles for housing.
In the last part of this article, I describe ethnographic observations on the regular
housing conditions and cleaning practices of four women, part of a generation who
founded their neighbourhoods through housing struggles. Acknowledging the endless
nature of cleaning labour (de Beauvoir, 1956), I describe the everyday negotiations that
the women engage in, in relation to the material conditions, expected standards and mul-
tiple demands and interests of everyday life. I argue that the women invest cleaning
practices with meanings in direct relation to the symbolic systems of class and gender,
and the notion of self-worth inherent in them. As will be seen, there is greater space for
negotiation when the products of this labour are more private or less visible to people
beyond intimate networks; arguably, this can be seen as a consequence of the negative
moral values historically ascribed to these women. While not fully achieving bourgeois
standards, women nevertheless negotiate cleaning labour as a way of claiming dignity
and respectability.
850 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

This article describes cleaning practices of only four women, taken from a larger
PhD research project aiming to explore the classed and gendered subjects produced
through practices of social reproduction, or ‘the activities associated with the mainte-
nance and reproduction of people’s lives on a daily and intergenerational basis’
(Ferguson, LeBaron, Dimitrakaki, & Farris, 2016, pp. 27–28). During almost 10
months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I lived in a Chilean working-class neigh-
bourhood or población, I regularly visited these four women to talk with them and
occasionally carried out participant observation of domestic chores. They all belong to
a generation who grew up in a period in which ‘well-constituted homes’ (Rosemblatt,
1995) were based on the male breadwinner model of the family, although many also
had to work or engage in other income-generating activities to assure the adequate
reproduction of their families. The presence of a younger middle-class researcher of
‘women’s work’, and cleaning practices in particular, motivated certain spoken state-
ments such as ‘we are poor but clean’, or apologies for not meeting certain cleaning
standards; and my presence in their domestic space might also have motivated increased
efforts in the women’s routine cleaning practices in order to meet perceived moral
expectations. Yet, since many of my visits were not pre-arranged, I could often access
dwellings that were not necessarily ‘prepared’ for the normative expectations of the
external eye. The epistemological issues related to the position of the ethnographic
researcher are discussed in each of the described cases.

Cleaning labour and the production of gendered (and

classed) subjects
While domestic labour is symbolically associated with women and notions of femininity
through the figures of both mother and wife, contemporary research on paid domestic
labour has reconceptualised it as a site in which gender, class and ‘race’ positions are
produced, reproduced and negotiated. Research (see, for instance, Anderson, 2000;
Fernández, 2018; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010; Lan, 2006) has shown how middle- and
upper-middle-class working women can perform valued forms of womanhood despite
delegating part of the domestic labour to a domestic worker. For instance, Lan (2006)
argues that female employers create boundaries to differentiate themselves from their –
also female – employees by clearly delimiting and distributing ‘menial’ and ‘spiritual’
housework. Echoing the findings of previous research, she shows how Taiwanese
employers reserve for themselves the ‘tasks that affirm their primary status and enhance
their affective bond with children’ (p. 115) and family more generally, such as cooking.
Employers delegate to domestic workers the tasks that directly deal with dirt and disor-
der, such as changing nappies or tidying rooms. By freeing themselves of the ‘dirty
work’, middle-class women are able to achieve ‘domesticity and motherhood’ (p. 107) or
spend ‘quality time’ with their families (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010) while at the same
time pursuing professional careers and (better-paid) jobs elsewhere. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez
goes on to argue that employers can embody the cultural norms of a middle-class wom-
anhood marked by positive affects that contrast to the negative ones experienced by
domestic workers. Organised through an ‘international division of reproductive labour’
Álvarez-López 851

(Parrenas, 2000), domestic labour reproduces differential forms of classed and ‘raced’
womanhood.
Gender is also negotiated through the distribution of unpaid domestic labour in the
couple. There is a growing body of literature that shows that, despite the increasing par-
ticipation of women in waged work, they still carry out greater amounts of domestic
labour than their male partners, concentrating on the tasks that have less prestige (see, for
instance, Gammage & Orozco, 2008; Marco Navarro, 2010; Pautassi, 2010). In Chile,
recent surveys on time use have shown how women do much more cleaning and spend
more time in such activity than men, who carry out activities more related to the ‘public’
sphere or whose performance is not required on a daily basis (Instituto Nacional de
Estadísticas [INE], 2015; Silva, 2010; Soto Hernández, 2013). While motherhood in
lesbian couples can posit a radical challenge to heterosexual norms (Dunne, 2000), the
codification of everyday cleaning as a devalued and feminised labour activity seems
prevalent even in non-heterosexual couples. Carrington (1999) has observed that, despite
claiming to share domestic labour equally, homosexual couples tend to distribute such
labour unequally: the partner who has a lower position in the labour market tends to
concentrate on domestic work, producing gender in very similar ways to heterosexual
couples.
While the cited literature focuses on how differences – gender, class and ‘race’ – are
produced and reproduced through the distribution of domestic labour, this piece of work
is more concerned with how women position themselves through the devalued activity
of cleaning. Pink (2004) notes how cleaning always involves a degree of agency which
allows singular forms of gender to be performed which are mediated by a sensorial expe-
rience of the domestic space. This performance, she argues, is produced through identi-
fication with or detachment from the figure of the ‘traditional housewife’, to which men
and women refer when carrying out cleaning labour for themselves and their families.
This article generally supports Pink’s statement that singular forms of femininity and/or
masculinity are performed and embodied through cleaning labour but further theorises
the symbolic and material effects of class in this process. This will reveal the limits of
such performances, especially since the figure of the housewife is not classless but is a
position that has been historically encouraged as means of formation of a productive
working class (in the UK see, for instance, Mackensie & Rose, 1983). Interestingly
enough, in Pink’s study the only two women who identify themselves with the traditional
housewife and claim to enjoy this role are the two working-class women in the sample.
Attention to the formations of class and gender in the Chilean context allows us to under-
stand the performance of gender in cleaning labour is also classed and allows to destabi-
lise the notion of cleaning labour as always devalorising those who carry it out

Hygiene and urban space in twentieth-century Chilean

modernisation
As elsewhere,1 in Latin American cities, hygiene and public health have been deemed cen-
tral dimensions of modernisation (Ibarra, 2016). In Chile, such interest was underpinned by
elites’ concerns over the reproduction of the working classes, inaugurating a debate called
852 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

‘The social Question’, that lasted from the last decades of the nineteenth into the first dec-
ades of the twentieth century. In 1900, negative population growth was measured (Illanes,
1999, p. 194). In the subsequent decades, tuberculosis, syphilis and exanthematic typhus
killed thousands (de Ramón, 2010; Rosemblatt, 2000), while children were dying from
undernourishment and diarrhoea until the early 1970s (Pemjean, 2011). Since the last dec-
ades of the nineteenth century, poor families had lived squeezed into one room in conven-
tillos – old and poorly maintained buildings with no ventilation – where they shared one
toilet with tens of other people. The overcrowded conditions promoted the rapid spread of
diseases. The demolition of conventillos, the construction of ‘hygienic’ housing and the
creation of a system of public health – the National Health Service was established in 1952
(Zárate & Godoy, 2011) – were all attempts to improve the health of the population and to
curb mortality figures.
Modernising efforts were also focused on the transformation of the reproductive prac-
tices of the working classes by encouraging particular forms of gender relations; such
efforts were deployed with particular intensity during the first half of the twentieth century.
Medical knowledge became embedded with particular ideas of classed, gendered and sex-
ual morality. Historians such as Illanes (1999) and Zárate and Godoy (2011) have described
how, at the beginning of the century, medical research found that exhausting working hours
affected pregnancies, resulting in miscarriages and newborn deaths and diseases. Christian
charity workers by the beginning of the twentieth century, and, state agents by the end of
the 1930s, encouraged women to leave paid work to safely give birth and to devote them-
selves to ‘adequately’ raising their children. Working-class women were also educated in
the care of the sick, puericulture, hygiene and housekeeping, while pregnant women were
forced to have follow-up medical examinations (see also González, 2014; Rosemblatt,
2000). Marriage was also encouraged as a way of regulating sexuality, in the hope of low-
ering the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and other ‘social vices’, such as illegitimate
children and prostitution (Labarca, 2008; Rosemblatt, 2000). By the 1960s, however, doc-
tors and academics were realising how little they could do to reduce the high levels of
mortality without improvement in the living conditions and education of the working
classes, in particular housing, food and literacy (Zárate & Godoy, 2011, p. 148).
Increased migration to the cities during the twentieth century, together with inefficient
housing policies, created a context of deprived living conditions for the great majority of
people. If Chilean cities had received a steady stream of peasant migrants since the nine-
teenth century with the decline of the rural economy, after the 1930s the influx to Santiago
in particular grew exponentially as a consequence of the closing of nitrate mines in the
north of the country and more importantly, state-led industrialisation (de Ramón, 2010).
The 1952 census showed that 30.5% of the population in Santiago lacked adequate hous-
ing; the figure was estimated as close to 50% in 1970 (Urrutia, 1972, p. 89). In the context
of the ‘developmental’ model of capitalism2 established since the end of the 1930s, public
policies had tended to benefit the middle classes and the more privileged working classes
who had stable incomes and a capacity to save (Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo
[MINVU], 2004) – the effect was a drop in the ocean in terms of housing demand. From
the 1940s, Santiago expanded and was transformed by the spread of shantytowns built on
lands of little value or on the outskirts of the city. Popularly known as callampas, these
settlements lacked any system of sanitisation and were stigmatised as dirty urban spaces.
Álvarez-López 853

As I have argued in my wider research (Álvarez-López, 2018), the notion of ‘the

home’ crystallised the expectations of modernity, becoming a central marker of class
that symbolically differentiated the respectable working class from the poor. The devel-
opmental model of capitalism sought to promote the formation of ‘well-constituted
homes’ (Rosemblatt, 1995) – built on the male breadwinner model of the family – as a
means of differentiation of a respectable working class. The notion of ‘the home’ was
sought out as a tool for disciplining the working classes. Mortgages in monthly instal-
ments (Castillo, 2016; Murphy, 2015, p. 53) would discourage the abandonment of jobs,
while a dutiful housewife would ensure an agreeable domestic environment (Klubock,
1998), creating a ‘retreat’ for the working man, keeping him away from the bar. A well-
constituted home also required certain housing conditions: sanitary systems and differ-
entiated domestic spaces to ensure the separation of adults and children. Central to
studies and debates during the 1950s around housing shortages and shantytowns/slums
was the question of whether precarious housing conditions were the cause or conse-
quence of a deviant morality or, as in more progressive perspectives, the result of struc-
tural conditions (see Garcés, 2002, pp. 32–35). This particular notion of home that
conflated family organisation with housing conditions enabled the ascription of charac-
teristics of idleness, sexual promiscuity, criminality and, of course, dirtiness to the
inhabitants of callampas. They became the bodies in which the ‘other’ of the respecta-
ble working class was represented.
The emerging pobladores movement, which became visible by the end of the 1950s,
began to contest these negative moral ascriptions converting the seizure of land into a
political act. Callampas inhabitants had organised to provide themselves with urban ser-
vices and were often in negotiations over land titles (Garcés, 2002; Murphy, 2015).
According to Murphy (2015), they tended to legitimate their right to property through
claiming their propriety hence claiming citizenship, a characteristic inherited by the
pobladores movement that struggled for a dignified life. Despite initial repression, dur-
ing the 1960s the pobladores were able to carve out a ‘place in the state’ (Murphy, 2015),
pushing for wider housing policies, negotiating property titles, petitioning the state for
adequate urban services and organising towards building up their own neighbourhoods.
This was especially the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which govern-
ments, with very different emphases, were more prone to include the demands of the
excluded sectors of the Chilean population.
While thousands of families achieved home ownership and worked towards trans-
forming land occupations into neighbourhoods, they usually did so in urban spaces that
lacked sanitary facilities, inheriting the symbolic positioning of callampas as dirty
spaces. As Murphy (2015) notes, such a symbolic link was present in the institutional
language of the time in which callampas were described as spaces that needed to be
‘sanitised’ or ‘healed’. Thus, while housing struggles meant a route to proletarisation for
the pobladores (Álvarez-López, 2018), the material conditions in which many lived for
years – in some cases, for decades – made it more difficult for them to overcome the
negative moral characteristics that were ascribed to them. These negative assumptions
were intensified when, after the coup d’état in 1973, the organisational frameworks of
the pobladores were disarticulated and their chances of improving their neighbourhoods
foreclosed, at least in the years immediately thereafter.
854 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

The neighbourhood in which I undertook my fieldwork was one of the most politi-
cised and radicalised settlements of the early 1970s, with a very well-organised local
government that policed reproductive practices and everyday behaviours. Such histories
of organisation and struggle are often a matter of pride for pobladores, especially among
community organisers. However, the stigma of having lived ‘with their feet in the mud’,
as one pobladora woman told me in an interview, still remains. For Rosa, the precarious-
ness in which she lived as a girl has left a mark which has shaped her sense of class
positioning. On the way to her son’s school, she told me about the pretentiousness of a
fellow pobladora who claims to only wear well-known clothing brands, and who forgets
‘she stank of fonola too’. Fonola is a cheap roofing material made from thickened and
corrugated cardboard and asphalt that shaped the landscape of shantytowns. While this
material does not really smell, in Rosa’s narrative it served as a metaphor that symboli-
cally linked poverty with unhealthy – smelly – housing conditions, in a way that acknowl-
edged the negative moral characteristics ascribed to the inhabitants of these settlements.
For her, having ‘stunk of fonola’ in one’s past remains a mark that is not erased, for
instance, by accessing middle-class consumer goods.
Around the time the women featured in this research were young mothers starting
a new life in precarious settlements, cleanliness was central in the construction of
working- and middle-class women’s self-image (Mattelart and Matterlart, 1968), a
marker of classed moral boundaries. Middle-class women used dirtiness and laziness to
reinforce their difference from the lower classes. In turn, the lower classes perceived
cleanliness as a way of endowing with dignity their impoverished living conditions, but
also as a means of differentiating themselves from some of their peers whom they
deemed as stagnant and lacking a sense of improvement. In contrast, upper-class women
did not use such dichotomies to define themselves and others, revealing the centrality of
positionality in the production of moral boundaries. In the 1960s and 1970s, the classed
and gendered meanings of cleanliness were materialised and assessed through clothing.
Washing machines and laundry powder advertising connected the state’s ideals of health
and progress and the activity of washing and ironing clothes to a proper, respectable and
caring femininity: Chilean women of all social classes signified this activity as a way of
participating in the modernising project of the developmental state (French-Fuller, 2006).
Cleanliness has been one of the means by which pobladora women have claimed self-
worth throughout their lives. While past poverty is not denied, women of older genera-
tions contest negative moral ascriptions by claiming and producing cleanliness.
Utterances like ‘poverty and dirtiness should not be confused’ or ‘wherever you are, you
will be clean if you want to be’ were commonly repeated when we talked about housing
conditions or were cleaning together – probably all the more often given my position as
a middle-class researcher. The adjective ‘cochina’ (dirty) is still common currency, either
as a concept to allow the women to differentiate themselves from other – concrete or
hypothetical – pobladora women or as a label that others have explicitly or implicitly
used to depict them. The symbolic linkage of poverty and dirtiness, consolidated during
the twentieth-century modernisation, remains as a historical legacy that exceeds the par-
ticular case study presented here (see Martínez & Palacios, 1996; Mayol, Azócar
Rosenkranz, & Azócar Ortiz, 2013). This remains the case even when the sanitary condi-
tions that led to the poblaciones being categorised as dirty urban spaces are no longer in
Álvarez-López 855

place. In the light of this history, it is not surprising that a stained tablecloth can threaten
the perceived morality of its owner.

Beyond the clichés: Cleaning (and other) labours of

everyday life
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the
clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife
wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … . The
battle against dust and dirt is never won. (de Beauvoir, 1956, p. 438)

A Chilean popular saying goes, ‘you will be treated as you are seen’ (como te ven te tra-
tan). Indeed, personal appearance seems to be one of the most important frames of refer-
ence by which people are assessed and judged (see, for instance, Araujo, 2011; Martínez
& Palacios, 1996). For the mature and elderly working-class women depicted in this
research, clean and ironed clothes are central to their ability to present themselves and
their families with a respectable and/or dignified appearance.
Most of the women in this study are responsible for the laundry process in their house-
holds, which many see as a form of caring for their families. Thus, they ensure that
adequate standards of cleanliness and hygiene are maintained. In the past, this meant
exhausting hours of washing by hand that took up most of the time dedicated to domestic
work. In the present, all of the women use washing machines, yet they deploy different
strategies to care for clothing. If it is a popular practice to separate by colours to avoid
decolouring and stains, some women go further, pouring laundry liquid onto collars and
cuffs to assure all stains have been removed. A couple even give the clothing an extra
scrub. Clothing is hung out very carefully, making sure that items are inside out in order
to avoid fabrics being bleached by the sun (for an in-depth description of washing prac-
tices, see Álvarez-López, 2018). None of the women of older generations (65–80 years
old) compromise on the time or labour invested in washing clothes, as they aim ‘to care’
– as Señora Marta told me in conversation – for clothing in ways that ensure it keeps its
respectable appearance (for instance, by keeping whites ‘albo’). In contrast, some are
willing to lower the time and labour invested in ironing, even though they all value
unwrinkled clothes. While María prefers synthetic fabrics that eliminate the need for
ironing, Marta – after a life as a domestic worker – refuses to iron but invests her efforts
in hanging and folding clothing for storage in ways that avoid it becoming wrinkled.
Through such strategies, the women conceal that the ironing has been missed out in the
laundry process, thus compromising on the labour and time invested against social
expectations, a possibility not available at the washing stage.
Compared to the washing of clothing, which is visible to the external eye, house
cleaning is an activity that is less open to public scrutiny, allowing a wider negotiation of
time and labour dedicated to the practice. A stained tablecloth might still be used in the
privacy of the domestic space, even while it would be condemned in public. The women
must usually negotiate the standards and expectations of house cleaning according to
concrete material conditions, competing values and demands of everyday life. And yet,
they can still authoritatively claim to be ‘poor but clean’. In the following paragraphs, I
856 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

explore the process of negotiation that takes place in house cleaning, discussing how
these practices relate to different forms of classed womanhood.

María
Señora María’s house was by far the cleanest house I saw in the neighbourhood (and
beyond). In none of the several visits I made, even when I arrived without notice, did I
find a dusty surface, marks on the kitchen furniture or floors, toys or other objects left
around the house or any visible mess on the patio (despite the presence of two dogs),
and there were never more than a couple of plates drying in the rack. The levels of
cleanliness and tidiness she maintains are only comparable with domestic spaces that
rely on domestic service. Certainly, the solidness of María’s house, the modern and rela-
tively new furniture and the ceramic tiles that cover the floors and walls of the kitchen
and toilet, intensify the sensation of perfect tidiness and cleanliness that emanates from
the domestic environment. This sensation is also facilitated by the low-intensity occu-
pation of the house, since her husband, her son and his partner, who all live with her,
leave early in the morning and do not come back home until the evening. She very
rarely has grandchildren to take care of, and therefore has plenty of time to make her
house as spotless as she likes.
If we think of cleanliness as a discourse of modernisation tied to the process of class
and gender formation, María (70+) has been strongly subjected to this discourse. She
was never an economically dependent housewife and throughout her life she undertook
a great diversity of precarious jobs and other income-generating activities. She is proud
of having been able to provide for her family, especially after entering into her second
marriage with children. While her position as breadwinner endows her with self-worth,
so do the labours she carries out at home. Those who know her are aware of her ‘obses-
sion’ with house cleaning; it was actually a female neighbour who advised me to visit her
if I was interested in cleaning practices. When I approached her, I made my interest in
her ‘obsession’ explicit. ‘I am terrible’, she replied with a touch of pride, and happily
granted my request to undertake participant observation of her domestic labour after only
my first visit; I received permission from other women only after a few months of visits.
Unwilling to make explicit her priorities around housework (‘everything is important’),
she usually emphasised cleanliness as a way to differentiate herself and her family from
their neighbours. One afternoon during the summer, in which she was sweeping some
apparently invisible dust from the tiled patio floor, I told her that I could not see any. She
laughed and replied, ‘My daughter-in-law says the same’; she continued after a pause: ‘I
do not know how there are mothers who abandon their children’. Thus, she seemed sym-
bolically to connect cleaning and mothering.
Through cleanliness María is able to endow with value her classed and gendered posi-
tion in traditional ways. In different conversations, she claimed she had always been ‘as
clean as today’ despite having been ‘very poor’, positioning herself as both dignified and
respectable. In the present, she believes her cleanliness to be the main reason why the
social worker classifies her as middle class, thus excluding her from social benefits she
believes she is entitled to. Even though in the past she delegated some housework to her
children – they had to make their beds or wash their own clothes from the age of 14 – she
Álvarez-López 857

acknowledges that the standards she aimed to accomplish were achieved through personal
cost. For instance, she dropped out of the adult evening class that would have allowed her
to complete, at least, primary education, because she preferred to use this time to do
housework and be with her children so that they would ‘be raised properly’. While some-
times she regrets having forgotten her own needs, she presents herself as proud of a past
in which cleanliness distinguished her and her family – she claims her children were said
to be ‘posh’ – and a present marked by their familial and professional success.
The value María attaches to cleanliness seems also to apply to her sexuality. Like her
house, she presents herself as being totally ‘clean’, making constant efforts to make her
sexuality invisible. Sharing a cup of tea and talking about domestic concerns, she told
me: ‘My son says I am an exemplary woman. I wonder why he says “woman” and not
“mother”?’ She would like to be recognised as a mother, a category that in Catholicism
– the religion she practises – has a long tradition of purity and sexual cleanliness (Illanes,
1999). This claim resonates with other personal narratives, such as her claims never to
have worn makeup or waxed, or her dismissal of young women for what she deems an
excessive concern with their physical appearance. Thus, for her, the cleanliness of her
house, her clothes and even her body is a fundamental source of her value as a woman.
For this reason, there is little or no space to negotiate these standards, and her house is a
clear expression of that.

Hortensia
Hortensia’s solid self-built three-bedroom house does not look as spotless as María’s.
The tidiness is everywhere interrupted by traces of the multiple activities of her and her
husband’s everyday life: some handicraft material or a newspaper on the table, some
papers about acupuncture, a toy left by one of her grandchildren on the sofa. Decorative
objects crowd the rooms and the walls are filled with pictures of relatives; she also stores
a great amount of handicraft material on shelves, in wardrobes or piled up in different
corners of the house – there is the feeling of an organised mess – where they accumulate
dust. While moderate levels of dust or mess do not seem to be a problem for Hortensia
(65+), she is extremely sensitive to dirty bedding and clothing. She changes her pillow-
cases every other day because she does not like the smell they acquire with use, and clean
and properly folded bedding is usually evident on a single sofa in the living room.
Similarly, she mops the tiled floor on a daily basis with a mix of water and bleach, ‘just
in case’, to make sure it is clean and smells as such. Pink (2004) has stressed how senso-
rial experience informs cleaning practices. For Hortensia, her sense of smell is central in
her negotiation of cleaning practices, setting the limits to what cannot be left undone.
While Hortensia is responsible for carrying out domestic chores in the house she lives
in with her husband, engaging with her community, attending courses or making handi-
craft are, for her, activities which are more valued than cleaning. As I reconstructed in
my fieldwork notes based on an informal conversation, she told me as a confidence: ‘I
am not a fanatic. I do a little bit of cleaning and other tasks in the morning, and then have
plenty of time to do my stuff.’ Given the decades she has spent as a community leader
and activist, her sense of dignity is established by her involvement in social struggles and
is unlikely to be undermined by a greater or lesser degree of house cleaning. Nobody
858 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

could claim she is ‘stagnant’ or lacks a ‘sense of improvement’, as seemed to be the

hegemonic ideas associated with dirtiness around the time she participated in the land
occupation that gave birth to the neighbourhood she lives in. This does not mean cleanli-
ness is not an important value for her as a woman. Her expectations usually set limits to
her activities beyond the domestic space, in which she can engage only as long as ‘me
and my house are clean’. In the present, without grandchildren to look after, she is usu-
ally able to commit to both, maintaining a ‘non-fanatical’ standard of cleanliness while
also pursuing the activities she values more. Some decades ago, however, in the context
of a dictatorship marked by human rights violations and extreme poverty, she was unable
to achieve such a balance. If her involvement in activism and wage labour forced her to
lower her childcare expectations – she recognises she left her youngest child alone too
frequently – it is very likely she was forced to lower her standards on house cleaning too.
With no room to negotiate expected standards against the actual possibilities of investing
labour and time in cleaning, she would not have been able to assume the roles of activist,
community leader and breadwinner at the same time, or in the contemporary context,
devote time to handicraft making, her present favourite pastime.

Marta
Like in Hortensia’s, traces of life could be seen in Marta’s house every time I visited her.
Toys or coloured pencils on the floor, sofas or dining table made visible the presence of
her five-year-old grandson; items of furniture with little use in everyday life – such as
those used to display decorative objects, or a collection of glasses for use only on festive
occasions – would be accumulating dust; some clean, folded clothing would still be wait-
ing to be stored. Sometimes, there would be a couple of stains on the kitchen floor. Yet,
it cannot be said that Marta (70+) spends less time on domestic labour than María. On
the several visits I made to her house during the almost 10 months of my fieldwork, only
twice did I find her lying on the sofa watching TV, taking a rest from domestic work or
having just returned from shopping. More often, I found her doing the laundry, cleaning
the patio, hanging or folding clothing, cooking and so on. However, in comparison to
María’s, her living context requires a greater investment of labour time for spotless
standards to be maintained. Marta lives with her youngest daughter and Antonio, her
grandson, and retired a few years ago to look after him. She is the main person responsi-
ble for the reproductive labour of her household; while her daughter also contributes to
the completion of chores, she has a blue-collar position in the service sector and has to
take her child to school, meaning she has far less time to do so. In the back yard, some
wooden shacks have been erected in which a granddaughter of Marta lives with her fam-
ily, and from which they have access to the toilet and kitchen of the main house.
Marta’s activities related to the care of her grandson take up an important part of her
domestic labour time. This is in line with research that has found childcare to be the most
time-consuming activity of all domestic chores (Barbieri, 1989; Carrington, 1999;
Servicio Nacional de la Mujer [SERNAM], 2008). At the same time, the constant use of
the space by her extended family increases cleaning needs. Yet, and unlike in her work-
place, she feels in control of her own cleaning and other reproductive practices; for
instance, she might refuse to do the ironing. For Marta, keeping her house as spotless as
Álvarez-López 859

María’s would imply devoting herself solely to an endless activity of cleaning, some-
thing she is not willing to do. Having worked since her childhood at her home or in other
people’s houses for a wage, now as a retired elderly woman, she sometimes says, it is
time for her to enjoy herself. Marta acknowledges the dust on the furniture and a couple
of times she apologised about it to me. Yet, keeping the furniture spotless might compro-
mise sleeping time, her attendance at the weekly meetings of the elderly club, her ability
to share teatime with family and neighbours, or her decision to invest time in cooking for
her children or grandchildren. Her concrete material conditions, the high intensity of the
occupation of the house, the relative lack of resources for improvement and renovation,
and especially, the constant presence of her five-year-old grandson, make it more diffi-
cult for her to achieve the standards that María is able to.
While she is willing to compromise on the time and effort involved in specific activi-
ties of house cleaning (such as dusting the furniture), for Marta there is no room for
negotiation in the cleanliness of her cooking practices. When she invited me to make a
cake with her, she carefully examined the hygienic condition of already-clean kitchen-
ware and the ingredients to be used: she looked at and touched the inside of the plastic
mixing bowl, smelled and washed an already clean grater and a fork, smelled the inside
of the milk carton she took from the fridge before pouring it into the dough, and changed
the wooden spoon I had taken – which she identified as ‘for cooking’ – to one she used
for cake mixing. In her cooking practices, she takes time and care in avoiding contamina-
tion, not just to prevent food poisoning but also to avoid mixing flavours. Similarly, she
only buys humitas (a Chilean dish consisting of mashed corn cooked in corn leaves)
where she knows they are made hygienically and complained about what she deemed
‘dirty’ practices in the soup kitchen organised in the neighbourhood during the 1980s.
Marta might tolerate some dust on her furniture and compromise ironing in the laundry
process, but she admits no negotiation on hygiene in her cooking practices and the food
her family consumes more generally.

Herminia
Being affected by an illness that restricts her mobility, cleaning is experienced by
Herminia (65+) as something problematic; as she admits, ‘I find it very [physically]
hard to do the cleaning’. She lives with her husband and, a few times a week, looks after
her grandson. Her husband shares some of the domestic work – sweeps the floors, goes
shopping or makes the once (evening tea) – but he is not committed to cleaning, cooking
or caring in the ways Herminia would like. For harder tasks, like mopping or cleaning the
toilets, she usually depends on her adult children, especially one of her daughters. The
food products she makes to sell also increase the amount of labour that is required. When
cleaning, she gives priority to the entrance hall, where she produces and sells foodstuff
and ensures the cloths she uses for covering them are kept perfectly clean. Yet, the visibly
deteriorated condition of some walls, ceilings or furniture gives a general sense that there
is ‘matter out of place’.
Unlike Marta, who experiences domestic labour as something over which she has
control, Herminia experiences a tension between her cleaning expectations and the mate-
rial conditions in which they can be achieved. Clichéd phrases that disentangle poverty
860 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

and dirtiness, commonly uttered by other women, are almost absent in Herminia’s narra-
tives, although she still symbolically connects dirtiness/messiness with morally devalued
people. For instance, she reads the intensification of her son’s custom of ‘leaving every-
thing messy and dirty’ as an expression of his detachment from the values she taught
him; she also told me about her other son’s new ‘bad friendship’: the friend’s house being
‘full of cachureos [useless stuff] and rubbish’. Yet, for Herminia, cleanliness seems to
play a less central role in the production of herself and her family as subjects of value
than it does for the other three women.
Food preparation is the reproductive practice in which she feels most comfortable and
can claim self-worth as a woman. Indeed, despite past and present economic difficulties
her daughter recalls ‘in my home we always eat well’. While all the women care for the
family through cooking and attach great value to it (see also DeVault, 1991; Lan, 2006),
for Herminia this activity is the most important means of expressing love and care. She
is extremely careful to prepare fried eggs the way her grandson likes them, gets worried
her son is not eating properly and is constantly treating visitors with some tasty morsels.
Uncountable times I heard the story of how, when one of her granddaughters was in
hospital, nurses and doctors were pleased she ate everything. She blames the mother of
her five-year-old grandson for not being patient enough to motivate him to eat and
instead feeding him only with cow’s milk. In contrast to what she deems these incorrect
mothering practices, when her grandson is at her house, she waits as long as necessary to
persuade him to eat all his meal. It is in this ability to provide appropriate food that she
bases her value as a mother, and she is proud to have raised well-fed children who are not
fussy eaters (mañosos). For Herminia, eating well is the central dimension of a proper
life; it is what endows her role of mother with moral worth.

Conclusion
This article explored the ways in which working-class elderly and mature women posi-
tion themselves in class and gender terms through an ethnographic description of the
cleaning practices they carry out in their own domestic spaces. It explored the values that
the women attach to such practices in the light of the processes of class and gender for-
mations during twentieth-century modernisation in Chile, symbolically tied to the mean-
ings of cleanliness and hygiene. It also described how the women negotiate the normative
standards of cleaning, in relation to their material conditions, and the multiple demands
and interests of everyday life.
The women in this research believe that specific standards of cleanliness are of fun-
damental importance in order to live with dignity – an assumption that might hold more
generally as a consequence of the modern project and its symbolic association with
hygiene and cleanliness. However, these ideas appeal to pobladora women in particular
ways. Not only do they carry out cleaning labour that among the middle and upper
classes globally is often delegated to domestic workers, but they inhabit stigmatised
urban areas, symbolically associated with dirtiness and moral degradation in the past and
with crime and drug dealing in the present. Behind the pobladoras’ public claims that
they always achieve appropriate standards of laundry, or that ‘poverty and dirtiness
should not be confused’, these women resist the negative moral ascriptions they have
Álvarez-López 861

been subject to as a consequence of living in what used to be precarious settlements. The

refusal to be inscribed with negative characteristics, however, is not only verbally
expressed but actually produced through cleaning labour.
Given the classed and gendered meanings associated with domestic labour, con-
structed mainly during the process of developmental modernisation in Chile, the clean-
ing practices carried out by pobladora women become central means by which they
endow themselves with self-worth throughout their lives. In this context, the meanings
and the effects of performing cleaning labour for their own households contrast with
those attached to cleaning labour exchanged in the marketplace. There, cleaning labour
re-produces classed and racial differences between employer and employee (Fernández,
2018; Lan, 2006) and subjects with differential value in the labour market and marked by
different affects (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). In the context studied here, when the
‘dirty work’ carried out by pobladora women is oriented towards their own households,
this labour does not devalue them – quite the opposite. It endows them with a self-worth
they publicly defend when threatened, for instance, by a stained tablecloth.
The ethnographic description presented here shows that cleanliness is an important
value to these women, a value that is signified with classed and gendered meanings and
through which they may be assessed by others. At the beginning of this article, the
presence of a stained tablecloth among the women, who publicly claimed that their
own tablecloths would never be stained as such, showed the distance between what
appear as the normative standards that the women claim to adhere to, and their actual
ability or willingness to achieve them. It also showed that what is not appropriate or
adequate to be used/worn in public can be of use in private, showing that there is a
degree of negotiation of such norms in relation to those who might assess them. The
fact that the women admit very little negotiation of laundry standards – not compro-
mising either on the labour or the time devoted to laundry, a public-facing activity –
tells us of the importance they attach to the assessments of others. For these women,
properly cleaned and unwrinkled clothing is central to ensuring appropriate personal
appearance. In contrast, spotless standards of cleaning are more often an unrealised
utopia in domestic spaces in which paid domestic service is not available/affordable.
As spaces open to more intimate networks, the women tend to negotiate the cleaning
standards in their own homes against multiple demands, limited resources and the
competing values of everyday life.
In this negotiation, the material conditions – the presence of children, help from other
members of the household, physical capacity, conditions of the dwelling – in which
cleaning practices take place set the limits to the achievement of spotless standards.
While María seems to admit no negotiation and is apparently fully subjectified by the
discourse of cleanliness, the fact that her material conditions make cleanliness easier to
achieve seems to nuance this statement. Other women more clearly define their priorities
in terms of cleaning and tolerate some ‘matter out of place’ to enable them to engage in
other activities and experiences. Full compliance with the highest standards would risk
neglecting some equally or more necessary and/or valuable dimensions in their lives,
such as engaging in waged labour to provide for their families, allowing their grandchil-
dren to play freely, making handicrafts or participating in social organisations.
862 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

Such negotiation of cleaning practices, however, is not simply a matter of material

conditions. The women’s different subjectivities also seem to play a central role.
Modernising projects of the twentieth century tied hygiene and cleanliness to notions of
class, gender, respectability and dignity; but the subjectifying power of these discourses
manifests differently among different women. For instance, for María, cleaning is an
expression of being a good mother, achieved by sacrificing other dimensions of her
personal life for the sake of her family. In contrast, cleaning provides a foundation for
Hortensia’s sense of self-worth and dignity, but her involvement in social organisations
and activist struggles seems to be more important to her in this respect. Marta, whose
material and familial context requires a higher level of domestic labour, sets limits to
the time and labour she invests in such work. This is the only way for her to undertake
other valuable activities such as sharing teatime with her family or relaxing in an elderly
club, having spent a life as a domestic worker. While Señora Herminia uses the clean/
dirty dichotomy to judge other people’s morality and attaches importance to the cleanli-
ness of her house, her sense of value as a mother is more strongly grounded in food
preparation and nurturing than in cleaning practices. Having grown up in a context in
which those in higher positions dismissed the poor as literally ‘dying from starvation’
(muerto de hambre), having food to eat and eating properly may also be a means of
defending her family’s dignity in material and symbolic terms.
Not only does women’s subjectivity shape cleaning practices, but these practices
allow classed and gender positions to be taken. Differently positioned in terms of class
and/or gender, the female professor or the young male university student depicted in
Pink’s (2004) analysis freely claim to position themselves at a great distance from the
image of the dutiful housewife. Unlike them, the women depicted here cannot claim to
be unconcerned about dirt, as this might confirm the old suspicions about inhabitants of
urban spaces stigmatised as ‘dirty’. Class position sets limits to the women’s ability to
negotiate cleaning standards and the time and labour invested in cleaning. Indeed, the
claim to be ‘poor but clean’ or the accomplishment of laundry standards are telling of the
active ways in which the women de-identify from this external – classed and gendered
– moral judgement, hence claiming self-worth. Given the endless nature of cleaning
labour and the impossibility of delegating such work, the negotiations carried out in
house cleaning – as a space less open to the moralised public sight – produce particular
modes of being working-class women. They also claim self-worth in other sets of values
– community organisation and social struggles, spending time with family and friends,
providing adequate and ‘with love’ meals to their families – that expand beyond the dis-
ciplining attempts of the process of Chilean modernisation.

Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to all the pobladora women – especially to María, Hortensia, Marta and
Herminia– who opened the doors of their houses to me and were willing to share their experiences.

Funding
This research was funded by BecasChile, PhD scholarship granted by the Comisión Nacional de
Investigation Ciencia y Tecnología, CONICYT (Chilean National Agency of Funding for Research).
Álvarez-López 863

Notes
1. Research in other geographical and historical contexts, such as the British Empire (McClintock,
1995), the modern US (Hoy, 1995) and contemporary Uganda (Terreni Brown, this volume),
has shown the symbolic relation between urban sanitisation, cleanliness and modernity. For a
discussion, see also Wiseman and Pickering (this volume).
2. The state-led model of development strengthened the national bourgeoisie and expanded
the middle classes associated with the state, whose members became the main benefi-
ciaries of social welfare. This gave shape to a mesocratic state (Calderón & Jelin, 1987;
Cardoso & Faletto, 2003; Rosemblatt, 2000). The proletariat expanded as a consequence
of industrial development, but so too did a wide, non-proletarian urban class which could
not be absorbed by formal and more ‘productive’ sectors of the economy. As Cardoso and
Faletto (2003) state: ‘[T]he rhythm of expansion of the latter [non-proletarian urban class]
usually exceeded the capacity of the new forms of urban employment created by indus-
trialisation to absorb it, which made possible the formation in Latin America of what was
thought of as “urban mass society”, based on insufficiently developed economies’ (p. 42,
my translation).

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Author biography
Valentina Álvarez-López is a Chilean anthropologist. She holds an MA in sociology and was recently
awarded her PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent research
explores classed and gendered subjectivities among working-class women in Chile by integrating
Marxist social reproduction theory and cultural approaches to class. A feminist activist and scholar,
she works on the subject of class, gender, social reproduction, social movements, subjectivity, femi-
nist methods and environmental issues, subjects she teaches in two universities in Chile.