Making women masters of the domestic realm was a double-edged sword that also served to confine them: to keep house, you had to stay home. Meanwhile, the conflation of good health and proper hygiene with elite social class continued apace: a tidy house didn’t just denote the upstanding moral character of the woman who lived there but elevated her and her family above the poor, nonwhite, and immigrant communities, who didn’t even have ceramic toilets, let alone the time and money to devote to keeping them clean.
