New Goods and New Habits: Cleanliness as a Class Marker and the Making of the Peasant Homemaker, Sweden 1850–1910

The article examines what cleanliness, that is, hygiene and tidiness, meant for landowning farm households in the county of Härjedalen in the inland of northern Sweden from the 1860s to the 1910s. The period is characterised by a growing understanding of bacteria and of how infectious diseases could be prevented through improved hygiene, leading towards a ‘germ panic’. In Härjedalen, the industrialisation of forestry led many farm households to sell their homesteads, leaving landowning farm households a small but influential group in local society. The study shows that wealthier farm households improved their houses and adopted bourgeois customs and attitudes to cleanliness to distinguish themselves from the landless peasantry. The shift in the main source of income from livestock farming to forestry altered the dynamics of men's and women's tasks and responsibilities, enabling wives to devote more time to housework. The increase in domestic work and the reallocation of labour were not driven by fear of bacteria or by social pressure from above, but by cleanliness and housewifery as markers of social class. Spacious and well‐kept homes were not an option for the areas’ workers, crofters and tenants.