‘Work’ has no single definition or shared meaning for the individuals who do it; the meanings of work are as various as the kinds of job that exist. Nevertheless for most people the idea of work contains some notion of externally imposed constraint. Even if one's occupation is freely chosen, it usually carries with it a set of rules about what should be done, when, how and to what standards. A train driver follows printed schedules and rules controlling speed and safety; a typist processes other people's material in accordance with pre-ordained standards of tidiness and literacy; accountants are accountable to their clients and are governed by rules of ‘professional’ conduct, and so forth. Not so for the housewife. Housewives, as Chapter 3 showed, are impressed by the freedom from the constraints of externally set rules and supervisions. However, a consequence of this autonomy is their responsibility for seeing that housework gets done. The housewife is her own supervisor, the judge of her own performance, and ultimately the source of her own job definition.

The two dimensions of this job definition are standards and routines. In describing her daily life every woman interviewed outlined the kind of standards she thought it important to stick to in housework, and the type of routine she used to achieve this end. There was, of course, a great deal of variation between one housewife and another. Some set what could be called ‘perfectionist’ standards, while others adopted a more casual attitude to order and cleanliness in the home. For some there were rigid routines repeated in the same way from one day to the next; for others, routines were more flexible. Different criteria are used in defining standards. Cleanliness may be the basic aim, with untidiness tolerated; or there may be an attitude of ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ while the dust under the beds and the dirt hidden in crevices pass relatively unnoticed. Two portraits taken from the interviews will illustrate some of these differences.

Barbara Lipscombe, a cheerful, warm, slightly dumpy woman, lives in a rented three-bedroomed house and has three children under five. She used to be a typist and is married to a car patrolman on shift work.