Books about Housework from Amazon.com

America's leading housekeeping expert shows you how to de-clutter, organize, and clean your home, with easy-to-remember tips for every job, from keeping your bathroom clean and doing the laundry to sorting out paperwork and organizing the family photo album. Where there is hope, there is help. You can win the chore wars!

• Author, founder, and editor of the top-ranked website OrganizedHome.com
• Introduces easy-to-remember tips for organizing the home
• Step-by-step photographs throughout show how easy it is to reach your goal

.
Price: $9.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The first edition has sold more than half a million copies! IS THERE LIFE AFTER HOUSEWORK? 2nd Edition, A Revolutionary Approach to Cutting Your Cleaning Time 75%.
Written in Don's practical, "you-can-do-it" style, this essential guide is chock-full of clever, efficient strategies that show readers how they can maximize results while minimizing effort, including:

Solid cleaning advice for every room in the house, from the basement to the attic

How to involve the entire family--and make clean-up fun

Cleaning schedules that work for you no matter how busy your lifestyle

Stain charts and spot removers

When you need professional help—and how to get what you pay for.
Price: $2.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the "real economy." Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor..
Price: $28.42 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The typical American family has changed dramatically since the days of "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best." Double-income families are now the rule, and fathers are much more involved in raising the children and cleaning house. Reactions to these changes have been diverse, ranging from grave misgivings to a sense of liberation and new possibility. Groups as diverse as Promise Keepers, the Million Man March, and Robert Bly's mythopoetic men's movement tell us that fathers are important. From the fundamentalist right to the feminist left, opinions about the changing nature of the family--and the consequent rethinking of gender roles--have been vehement, if not always very well-founded.
In Family Man, sociologist Scott Coltrane brings a wealth of compelling evidence to this debate over the American family. Drawing on his own extensive research and many fascinating interviews, Coltrane explodes many of the common myths about shared parenting, provides first-hand accounts of men's and women's feelings in two-job families, and reveals some innovative solutions that couples have developed to balance job and family commitments. Readers will find an insightful discussion of precisely how and why family life has changed, what forms it may take in the future, and what new kinds of fathers may be on the horizon. The author firmly places these questions within a broad contextual framework. He provides, for instance, an illuminating history of the family that shows that, far from being a fixed structure, the family has always adapted to changing economic, social, and ideological pressures. And by examining how families operate in a variety of non-industrial societies, he demonstrates that our own notions of gender-specific work and parenting roles are culturally rather than biologically determined, and thus inherently flexible. And indeed these roles are changing. While contemporary American women still perform the bulk of domestic tasks, Family Man gives us decisive evidence that men are becoming increasingly involved in both housework and childrearing. Coltrane argues convincingly that this trend will continue. Given the current economic situation--with two-job households now the norm--and the gradual ideological shift away from restrictive gender roles, more and more couples will find it both necessary and desirable to share the workload. More important, Coltrane suggests that as fathers participate more fully in raising their children and performing traditionally female household tasks, men will themselves be transformed by the experience in profoundly positive ways and American society as a whole will move closer to true gender equity.
Family Man succeeds brilliantly in bringing clarity, perspective, and above all hope to a discussion that is too often shrill, chaotic, and beset with the rhetoric of nostalgia. It shows us not only exactly where the family is today, but where it has been and what it may become..
Price: $24.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Thankless, mundane, and “never done,” housework continues to be seen as women's work, and contemporary women poets are still writing the domestic experience sometimes resenting its futility and lack of social rewards, sometimes celebrating its sensory delights and immediate gratification, sometimes cherishing the undeniable link it provides to their mothers and grandmothers. In Sweeping Beauty, a number of these poets illustrate how housekeeping's repetitive motions can free the imagination and release the housekeeper's muse. For many, housekeeping provides the key to a state of mind approaching meditation, a state of mind also conducive to making poems. The more than eighty contributors to Sweeping Beauty embrace this state and confirm that women are pioneers and inventors as well as life-givers and nurturers. “My fingers are forks, my tongue is a rose . . . / I turn silver spoons into rabbit stew / make quinces my thorny upholstery . . . / how else could the side of beef walk / with the sea urchin roe?” sings the cook in Natasha Sajé's ode to kitchen alchemy. “I love the notion that we can take our most poisonous angers, our most despairing or humiliated or stalemated moments, and make something good of them--something tensile and enduring,” says Leslie Ullman. Whether we are fully present in our tasks or “gone in the motion” of performing them, whether our stovetops are home to “stewpots of discontent” or grandmother's favorite jam, something is always cooking..
Price: $4.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $2.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Housewives constitute a large section of the population, yet they have received very little attention, let alone respect. Glenna Matthews, who herself spent many years as "just a housewife" before becoming a scholar of American history, sets out to redress this imbalance.
While the male world of work has always received the most respect, Matthews maintains that widespread reverence for the home prevailed in the nineteenth century. The early stages of industrialization made possible a strong tradition of cooking, baking, and sewing that gave women great satisfaction and a place in the world. Viewed as the center of republican virtue, the home also played an important religious role. Examining novels, letters, popular magazines, and cookbooks, Matthews seeks to depict what women had and what they have lost in modern times. She argues that the culture of professionalism in the late nineteenth century and the culture of consumption that came to fruition in the 1920s combined to kill off the "cult of domesticity." This important, challenging book sheds new light on a central aspect of human experience: the essential task of providing a society's nurture and daily maintenance..
Price: $12.64 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Based on a landmark survey of American husbands across the country, VoiceMale reveals that most men are not commitment-phobic, that they don't have sex on their minds all the time, and that they are willing to talk frankly about their relationships -- just not in the same way women do. Men have complex inner lives, just like women. But they have a unique, masculine style of loving that focuses more on doing than talking, on sharing space rather than sharing feelings, and on side-by-side closeness rather than face-to-face intimacy..
Price: $2.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]