'The virtues of a drop of cleansing water': domestic work and cleanliness in the British working classes. 1880-1914

This paper explores the practice and ideology of domestic labour in the British working classes of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. It is related to my work on the material culture of the British working classes, and to my book entitled Soap and Water. The material culture of the 'respectable' working classes is a relatively underdeveloped field of historical research, with much research on the domestic interior of this date concentrating on the middle and upper classes. The paper takes my research and places it in the context of a discussion of the historiography of women's history, posing a number of questions and suggesting that a more detailed consideration of domesticity, in a specifically working-class context, will help to fill important gaps in the current debate. It thus develops a new argument, considering issues not addressed in Soap and Water. The journal issue in which the paper is published is a special issue addressing historiographical questions, examining where the debate will move to next. All the papers in the issue originated at the Beyond the Widening Sphere conference, Royal Holloway, University of London, July 2006. The Women's History Review is an important international journal in its field, with an editorial board composed of notable scholars from around the world. This article was peer reviewed anonymously by two reviewers. This work has a strong social history content: however, its concerns are with the materiality and representation of social life, and the methods used include those of design history and material culture history