It was assumed then and is to an extent to this day , that boys are by nature dirtier than girls .sx It was women and girls who spent so much of their lives carrying , heating , and steeping their hands while washing things , clothes and people in water - that fluid element which dissolves matter and is so often used in rituals of purification :sx " water symbolizes the primal substance from which all forms come and to which they will return " ( Eliade , ) .sx The middle- and upper-class house , within its walls and continuing down its front steps and path ( ideally maids were supposed to wash both back and front paths as well as steps every day ) was the clean tidy haven in the midst of public squalor and disorder ( Davidoff , L'Esperance and Newby , 1976) .sx It was the housemistress's responsibility to make it so .sx Even more important than the equation of femininity with cleanliness , was , of course , the equation of cleanliness with class position , part of the parcel of behaviour and attitudes bundled together in that imprecise but vital concept respectablility .sx Whatever the other strands in respectability - church going or temperance - cleanliness was supposed to be its hallmark .sx In the nineteenth century the labouring classes , the poor , the proletariat were , in middle-class minds , 'The Great Unwashed' ; they smelled uncontrolled and disordered ( Schoenwald , 1974) .sx This view persisted well into the twentieth century , and George Orwell is one of the very few writers to discuss openly the implications of this fact .sx He was in no doubt as to its effect on efforts at social equality .sx " That was what we were taught - the lower classes smell .sx And here obviously you are at an impassable barrier " ( his italics ) ( Orwell , 1959 :sx 129 ) - a barrier created in childhood and so doubly difficult to break down .sx Smell and sound as well as sight of dirt and disorder were more obtrusive in crowded cities than in the countryside , and the idealisation of Nature as pure compared to towns as impure may be connected to this fact .sx " The great unwashed were socially unclean , too , the typical attitudes first expressed to this emergent group by those above them were [also] stereotyped - a blend of contempt , fear , hate and physical revulsion " ( Dyos and Wolff , 1973) .sx Himmelfarb notes a disturbing habit of Victorian observers of using the same word to describe both the sanitary condition ( Chadwick ) and the human condition ( Mayhew ) of the poor ; i.e. 'residum' was the offal , excrement or other waste that constituted the sanitary problem ; and was also the name applied to the lowest layer of society ( Himmelfarb , 1971) .sx Conversely , manual work and hence dirt , or the absence of cleanliness became associated with ideas of masculinity ( Lockwood , ) .sx Personal habits associated with dirt and mess , e.g. spitting , chewing tobacco and smoking , became strictly masculine from the end of the eighteenth century onwards .sx Similar attitudes were part of an aggressively proletarian identification , and held by the type of radical who was " goaded to fury by the sight of a clean shirt " ( Shipley , ) .sx A second element used in the separation of classes was fresh air .sx Again , the recognition of the value of fresh air undoubtedly had much to do with new forms of physical pollution - smog was already a feature of London life in the eighteenth century .sx But the metaphorical use of the term 'fresh air' to blow away and cleanse social problems was also a constant theme .sx Newman in his Apologia wrote :sx " Virtue is the child of knowledge , vice of Ignorance .sx Therefore education , periodical literature , railroad travel and ventilation seem to make a population moral and happy " ( Young , ) .sx " Morality was intimately connected with the free circulation of air - exposure to public gaze " ( Stedman Jones , ) .sx Middle-class children were told that servants' bedrooms were inevitably fuggy and stale smelling because they did not understand the benefits of fresh air .sx Charity workers and others brought the message home to their working class ( largely female ) audience with tracts such as those put out by the Ladies' Sanitary Association 'A Word About Fresh Air' , 'The Black Hole in our own Bedrooms,' etc. ( ) .sx And until very recently , the 'airing' of rooms , bedding and clothing was seen as one of the English housewife's indispensable daily tasks .sx I have indicated that one of the rewards of a superior position within a hierarchical structure is the protection of the super - ordinate from potentially polluting activities .sx The ultimate nineteenth-century ideal became the creation of a perfectly orderly setting of punctually served and elaborate meals , clean and tidy warmed rooms , clean pressed and aired clothes and bed linen .sx Children were to be kept in nurseries with nursemaids ; animals and gardens cared for by outdoor servants ; callers and strangers dealt with by indoor servants .sx In other words there was to be a complete absence of all disturbing or threatening interruptions to orderly existence which could be caused either by the intractability , and ultimate disintegration , of things or by the emotional disturbance of people ( Davidoff , 1973) .sx In the nineteenth century this ideal of perfect order could only be approximated by the small group of wealthy and powerful individuals who could command the attendance of numerous domestic servants .sx Below this small group , men , middle class and to a certain extent the best paid , most regularly employed of the working class , were provided with an intensely personal form of ego-protection and enhancement by their wives ( or daughters , nieces and unmarried sisters ) , aided by female general servants .sx This process must be recognised as a relational aspect of social stratification .sx I should not be substituted for an analysis of the distributive aspects of inequality .sx Drawing attention to the part such interaction plays in the maintenance of stratification , however , emphasises the way the system was divided along both class and sex lines .sx BUDGETARY SEPARATION OF THE ENTERPRISE AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY .sx The attitudes and behaviour relevant to nineteenth-century middle-class housekeeping - cleanliness , order , the segregation of activities in time and place , careful overall planning , diligence and hard-work - had all existed and been commended for a very long time .sx Not only do they appear in Puritan and other Nonconformist precepts , but they go back as far as the moralists of Roman husbandry .sx They are echoed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence by such writers as Alberti and continued in various places where trade and commerce flourished as far apart as sixteenth-century Holland , Defoe's London , and eighteenth-century Pennsylvania .sx There the rubric reached its fullest expression in the writings of Benjamin Franklin , 'the perfect bourgeois' , particularly in his Autobiography and The Way to Wealth ( Sombart , 1914 , 1967) .sx The purpose of all these guides to conduct was , in every sphere , to make life more calculable , to balance expenditure with income in an effort to save .sx Thrift in regard to both time and money was the cardinal virtue .sx The goals of saving might vary ( a dowry for a daughter , an extra piece of land ) , but the primary drive , for continued saving , for saving as a way of life , was to create capital for commercial expansion .sx And it was the growth of capitalist commercial enterprise which was responsible for the critical organisational change :sx the separation of the business 'house' and the domestic household .sx Even more important than physical separation was the budgetary division of these units ( Weber , 1968) .sx Strangers began to be admitted as partners into what had been an organisation of kinsmen , brotherhoods or guilds .sx This process reached a critical point in the adoption of detailed accounting and eventually the introduction of double-entry book-keeping into business practice ( an invention of seventeenth century Holland) .sx With this development , business and commercial activity were finally cut loose from other goals of family life , allowing the systematic accumulation of capital .sx Such expansion of the enterprise is not possible without the use of rational accounting , which in turn must use an all purpose medium of exchange - money .sx Only then can any true calculation of input and output , of profit or loss be made .sx It is also true that the rational ordering of life is quite possible whatever the chosen ends , even if they are 'unworldly' ones .sx This is a point worth remembering in the context of the present discussion .sx For example , European monasticism was just such a system of living , for the glory of God , with its minutely calibrated daily activities rigidly prescribed by the constant ringing of bells .sx Yet even under monasticism , such attitudes seem to mesh most easily with the rationalisation of economic life , for the monasteries were also very often large farming and productive enterprises .sx As Weber noted , " the Reformation took rational Christian asceticism and its methodical habits out of the monasteries and placed them in the service of active life in the world " ( Weber , ) .sx In this way , the stage was set for economic expansion , in enterprise which had " no boundaries to this process of addition " ( Sombart , 1916 , 1953 :sx 35 ) , and it is this type of enterprise and its descendants which have been the concern of social commentators from the seventeenth century onwards .sx Few have asked , however , about what happens to the household which has been thus disengaged from production .sx Before trying to answer that question it should be remembered that this separation was a very slow process , starting with a few mercantile and tradesmen's households which were exceptions to the general case of more or less self-sufficient units which drew their sustenance directly from the land ; which ranged in scale from great landowners to cottages .sx A high proportion of the income of such households remained in kind , not cash .sx The large numbers of rural households which were partially dependent on outwork ( e.g. textiles , straw-plaiting , lace-making ) further complicates the total picture .sx Nevertheless , the trend was for more and more household relationships to involve a cash nexus , whether in the form of proletarian wage earner , salaried or professional occupation , tradesman , rentier , capitalist or a mixture of these .sx This shift was associated with a higher proportion of families living in towns , and , although this was an important aspect of the change , it is not possible to discuss it here .sx The final and complete break , however , was not reached in England until full extension of limited liability with the passing of the Company Acts of 1856-62 , which once and for all freed business activity from any restraints imposed by kinship obligations .sx The very slow pace of the separation of household and enterprise and the persistence of home production of a great many commodities did not prevent attempts to rationalise activity in bourgeois homes as well as commercial enterprises .sx In particular there seems to have been a transfer of the values of business into the home .sx But these attempts were , and are to this day , unsuccessful for two fundamental and interrelated reasons .sx The first , and probably the most obvious , concerns the limited size of the household .sx Neither vertical nor horizontal extension is really possible and this means that economies of scale and the benefits of specialisation are not practicable for a household .sx While the goal of economic rationality is always the expansion of the enterprise , there are inherent and quite narrow limits to household expansion .sx Of course it is possible to point to examples of really large establishments , but these are very exceptional .sx While one of the biggest in the nineteenth century , Woburn Abbey , had fifty to sixty indoor servants and could house several dozen guests , the mean household size in social class I in York in 1851 was 6.02 ( Bedford , 1959 ; Armstrong , ) .sx As far as growth through devices such as mergers or take-overs is concerned , there was a certain amount of transfer of income and/or services between households across generations or between siblings , but the whole tendency has been for each family unit to act independently .sx In addition , because of other effects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalist developments , households have tended to grow smaller as measured by house size and numbers of inhabitants ( Government Statistical Office ; ) .sx The second point concerns the goals of family and household ( it should be noted that although the two terms are now almost synonymous this has not always been the case) .sx The problem here is not that non-pecuniary ends cannot be reached by rational means , but that the goals themselves - the maintenance of hierarchical boundaries and ego-servicing of superiors - deny the use of rational calculation .sx