The publicity for the exhibition Dirty Linen, which opens this week at the Women's Library in east London, tells us it presents "a visual record of women being taught and persuaded to keep clean". This is a story to make the blood boil. Note the "taught and persuaded", as if women, poor women in particular, hadn't a clue how to keep clean and didn't want to. Here is the proof that they have always slaved away, often against almost impossible odds, to save us from filth and disease, with barely any help from men.  "We make the point that laundry, of all domestic chores, has always been done predominantly by women," says Gail Cameron, the exhibition's curator. It still is. Of the 6.5bn washing loads done in the UK each year, women undertake 85% of them.  Lucky men, because laundry seems to have been a particularly knackering job. Imagine it for the mid 19th-century urban poor: hand-washing blankets without heating, plumbing, or proper sanitation, a massive tax on soap and the air clogged with filth. Women got water from a tap in the street, probably dragged it upstairs in pails and could rarely afford to heat it. Then they hung their wet woollens and linens up to dry in their damp and stinky little homes.  It is stories like this, tales of desperate domestic battles with dirt, that the exhibition, subtitled "the history of women and their laundry" aims to resurrect. "The poor did care [about dirt], definitely," says Cameron, "but for people in this area (the East End), particularly in the mid-19th century, it was very difficult to keep clean. But they did have ornaments." A poignant little fact. They were willing, but not able, to make their homes pleasant. Rapid urbanisation and industrialisation made the dirt and squalor; women were responsible for cleaning it up.  Fortunately, the middle classes began to panic - filth breeds disease, and disease spreads. "There was a consciousness in the 1850s that dependence on the lower classes for your washing and sewing was hazardous," says Peggy Reynolds, a writer and broadcaster who will be giving one of a series of parallel lectures at the library - in her case about Charles Dickens's obsession with dirt. "Typhoid and cholera could have been sewn into these beautiful clothes, made in festering conditions. Dickens's letters are manic about sparkly silver and glassware and pressed linen, but he was also very aware of waste, pollution, poverty, dirt and riff-raff."  At last, social reformers realised the poor needed help. As part of a push for cleanliness and social order, public baths and wash houses began to be built. It had been decided (largely by middle-class philanthropic women who had the time and energy) that the female poor should be allowed out for a couple of hours to slog away at the laundry. A woman could then bring her washing back home clean and dry, rather than "keep her dwelling-room all day in a state of steam and slop, her children being wet and dirty and her husband driven by sheer necesssity to the beer-shop".  In 1847, the Goulston Square Public Wash House was opened for the poor of London's East End - the building that now houses the Women's Library. It's a strangely gloomy place: in one room you look up a very long way to a skylight, like a prisoner in a pit. But at least I wasn't doing the laundry.  In its day, it provided women with soap, warm water, a wringer, a tub, and a wooden dolly for pounding their washing - luxury compared to the grisly conditions at home - but the household wash could still take hours of backbreaking work. The wash house also provided 94 private baths, but they were mainly used by men. It wasn't respectable for women to go to public baths - anyway they didn't have time to spend on themselves, baths cost money, and men came first. Still, let's not quibble. It was a step in the right direction.  And if it wasn't bad enough doing your own washing, the exhibition also illustrates the plight of laundresses - who had to do everyone else's. They worked in commercial steam laundries, young girls and married women working 14-hour shifts in hot and cramped conditions, who frequently burned themselves on the irons, died of carbon monoxide poisoning or even fell through the rotting floors. For all this, they were part-paid in beer. What a life.  "Laundresses had a reputation for being tough and drunken," says Cameron, and who can blame them? They were perhaps at their toughest in Russia, where, disgusted by their working conditions, and having to wash the aristocracy's knickers to boot, they started the February 1917 revolution.  Back in London, there were few signs of rebellion. Women of the "labouring classes" appear to have done as they were told. There seems to be a peculiarly English bossiness running through this story of laundry. It has been nag, nag, nag, from the early philanthropists and reformers onwards: pamphlets for busy housewives, manuals of household management, campaigners impressing "essential moral virtues upon the poor".  Reformers homed in on schoolgirls, hoping to create the "future wives and mothers of the English race". This was the best way, they thought, of "altering the behaviour of the poor" and putting a stop to the "chaos and disorderly living" of which they thought they were guilty. More domestic science was stuffed into the school curriculum for girls: endless, fusspot lessons on how to do particular tasks scrupulously, peg your washing this way, starch it that way, iron every little frill. And if your legs ache - too bad.  After the second world war there was another push for women to return to the home. Battalions of "educators" continued to tell them what to do when they got there: the Townswomen's Guild, the Good Housekeeping Institute, the Electrical Association for Women (buy more electrical appliances - lovely clean white ones) and women's magazines.  And all against a constant background of nagging by advertisers to be cleaner than ever, whiter than your slobby neighbour, and germ-free. We are now having to clean the invisible. Where will it all end? How clean can one be?  But there's the rub. It isn't just visible, external dirt women are meant to be dealing with. There was, and still is, a rather hysterical, crusading feel to this "education" of housewives, because "cleanliness is tied to the idea of social order," says Cameron. "An unclean house was thought to reflect low morals. Ideas of cleanliness have been sold as a duty - keeping the family respectable" - making women responsible for both moral and physical cleanliness. What a burden. We are still struggling with it.  Well I'm not, because I can't be fagged, but for many women there is no let-up. The easier the work becomes, the higher the standards required and the more we have to do. Washing has now become an obsession - two or three decades ago we used to bathe once or twice a week, but now many of us do so daily, wear clothes briefly and wash them more frequently. Every trace of smell must be blotted out by another smell that has nothing to do with bodies. "In many of today's cleaning products there are large amounts of perfume and small amounts of detergent," says Cameron. "We associate cleanliness with particular smells rather than genuine cleanliness."  Perhaps this is because there's nothing left to genuinely clean, but we're still being told to try harder. How odd that women have put up with this hectoring for so long. It wasn't until the 1960s when housework was a comparative breeze and our homes were full of helpful appliances, "that women began protesting and demanding domestic democracy", says the writer Melissa Benn, who will be giving another of the lectures. "It's only in the past 40 years that feminists really turned their attention to the home and saw it as another sphere of struggle."  But were the feminists any help, or just one more band of middle-class boss-pots? Their demands haven't got us very far. Many of us are still striving for perfection, but we will never make it. "The association of dirt with immorality still remains as strong as ever," the exhibition commentary informs us, so we could all end up Lady Macbeths, scrubbing away at imaginary stains. So come on ladies: give up. Don't bother. Look back at the wash-house women, see the difference and believe it. You are now clean enough.  · Dirty Linen opens on September 28 at the Women's Library, Old Castle St, London E1 7NT. 020-7320 2222. www.thewomenslibrary.ac.uk
For centuries women have been bullied into keeping their laundry - and their morals - whiter than white. Michele Hanson on a grubby history of domestic drudgery.