The Return of the Housewife

This holiday season we're spotlighting a review that digs into the inequalities of housework within the context of today's social media "cleanfluencers."

Posted on December 22, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

The Return of the Housewife: Why Women Are Still Cleaning Up

Casey, Emma. Manchester University Press, 2025
224p bibl index, 9781526170972 $29.95

The Return of the Housewife takes a clever, well-researched approach to understanding the persistent, gendered inequalities of housework. Casey (Univ. of York, UK) asks why housework has remained an entrenched patriarchal feature of domestic life despite decades of feminist activism. She weaves together the history of domestic work with the current phenomena of “cleanfluencers”: social media influencers who share content on domestic work, including cleaning tips, home organization, and product recommendations. Cleanflueners often frame home cleaning and decluttering as a route to women’s happiness and better mental health. Casey effectively illustrates how these digital narratives both mask and strengthen existing inequalities, specifically pertaining to gender and the interwoven dynamics of race and class within gender. She further highlights that although cleanfluencers acknowledge some of the feminist critiques about housework in their social media content, they ultimately ignore the structural roots of inequalities that underlie these critiques. They instead focus on individual solutions for women devoid of a political and social context, thereby deepening existing gendered norms and the devaluing of women’s work in the home. This book should be on every feminist scholar’s reading list!

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
Reviewer: M. Gatta, NACE and Rutgers University
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Women’s & Gender Studies
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Sociology
Choice Issue: Dec 2025

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The Return of the Housewife

This holiday season we're spotlighting a review that digs into the inequalities of housework within the context of today's social media "cleanfluencers."