This book is the first in a series that aims to bring original sociological thinking to bear on contemporary gender relations, divisions and issues of concern to feminists. We hope the series will challenge received wisdom, offer new insights and expand the scope of sociological knowledge both theoretically and substantively.

In tackling the issue of paid domestic cleaning, Lotika Singha raises questions that trouble the common feminist view that this work is particularly demeaning and degrading to those who do it and that to pay another woman to clean one's home is against feminist principles. She does not deny the material inequalities that (usually) exist between those who clean and those who use their services, nor the injustices experienced by cleaners, but instead asks why this relationship should be so abhorrent to feminist sensibilities. In investigating this issue, she takes seriously the accounts of women who do paid domestic cleaning, as well as those who use their services, in order to develop an analysis that enables us to view this work and the relationships and contexts within which it is carried out rather differently. She questions the definition of cleaning as unskilled manual labour, arguing that cleaning well involves skill, experience and organisation. She also tackles some of the double standards in play in the moral judgements made about cleaning. If it is politically unacceptable to expect others to clean up after us, why is this issue seen as far more problematic in the home than in the workplace or the street? If it is because it is our ‘personal’ mess, why do we not care so much when our waste leaves the house? In addressing such questions, understandings of cleanliness, dirt and dirty work are subjected to scrutiny.

Previous research emphasising the exploitative and degrading characteristics of paid cleaning has focused on those most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse: migrant women working full-time for a single employer, and often living-in; this research has attended to racialised relationships between employers and employees. In such situations, injustices abound – a result of state policies that govern such employment as well as the conduct of employers. The research underpinning this book does not involve transnational migrants but situations in which those who clean and those they clean for are of the same nationality and, in the main, the same ethnicity.