GLORY TO MOTHER SCRUB

A woman in her fifties is lying sideways in bed, a phone screen illuminating her face. Her eyes flash up and down the glowing rectangle. An almond-shaped, rhinestone-encrusted nail is a cursor that conjures up one TikTok reel after another: moving images of other women in various immaculate domestic environments. There are things being made from scratch, skin taken care of, meals prepped and cabinets organised over and over again. The women there look sleek, serene and perfectly lit. Her brows furrow as there seems to be no end to such reels. The next one suggests she should tape her forehead before sleeping to prevent it from wrinkling further. Pressing the side button, the phone makes a soft sound of a cage door closing.

It’s past 2 in the morning, she is lying awake in bed. Something about the rigorous performance of those clean, ethereal, whispering, thin women online reminds her of her own rural upbringing, of her mother’s arduous, never-ending shifts both at home and the kolhoz.¹ She remembers how in the Soviet scarcity of personal care items and fashionable wardrobe, it was expected of young women like her to look clean and neat.² She shudders as the memory of the scrutinising glances of all the teachers, mothers, neighbours and complete strangers flash before her eyes. She rolls over, a slow and smooth voice is guiding her to sleep— some ballerina on a farm³ churning butter from scratch, sporting what looks like a Soviet floral smock.

The progressive gender-equal revolution-era image of the Soviet woman as a worker was modified by the 1950s Stalinist regime to create a new “superwoman” image that combined the woman as a worker with the woman as a mother. Women were needed in the workforce to aid with heavy industrialisation and building of the centralised economy. To minimise the social disruption that Stalin’s policies wrought, the regime decided to cultivate traditional nuclear families to combat declining birth rates.⁴ The propagated image of the clean and neat superwoman-mother-worker was socially rewarded with higher respectability and, in the case of mothering at least ten children, with a national order of Mother Heroine.

The arduous life of women in the former Soviet Union has been well documented: in a society with an almost 90 percent female labour participation rate, women also did almost all the housework, child care, and family work (such as shopping) without much labour-saving technology.⁵

In the Soviet Union’s declining economic situation of the 1980s, state-subsidised childcare, canteens, and allowances granted to women workers to support their labour force participation were cut back. This made strapped enterprises view women as less desirable workers. Despite laws against sexual discrimination, enterprises found ways to dismiss women workers. These highly skilled and trained women workers⁶ were advised by the state to instead find fulfilment in their maternal instincts and caretaker role in the household.

The Soviet Union elicited heavy societal normative control on women through various state institutions, legislation, and the media. Contemporary social media operates as a similar apparatus. The “clean girl” trend, a microtrend on TikTok, serves as an example of the subtle pressures surrounding female domestication. In the (post-) pandemic era, the aesthetic homemaking content racks up high engagement on social media, making the algorithm reward and prioritise this specific type of content. This incentivises creators to churn out more of the white Western housewife aesthetic, subliminally susceptible to the viewer as a new superwoman archetype.

Emma Casey examines cleaning content in her book The Return of the Housewife (2025) and notes that COVID-19, civil unrest, the rise of the far-right, and manosphere⁷ have made the outside world unsafe for many femmes. The domestic and online space, by extension, has therefore become an instinctive safe haven. In this safe haven, however, the home acts as the owner’s body demanding its own routine of self-care. Despite a century of feminist activism, housework remains predominantly a woman’s task, as the COVID-19 lockdown recently underscored.

Back on the screen, a woman on all fours moves double speed as her rubber-gloved hands propel a smiley face-shaped pink scrubbing sponge over ceramic tiles. Her movements are chopped up by fast-paced editing, accompanied by a chipper voiceover listing products used on her quadrupedal journey across the bathroom floor. Looking at homemaking content through a post-Soviet lens, one can’t help but see resemblances between the suppression of women’s rights in the Stalinist era’s resource scarcity and current pronatalist trends in our time of crisis clusters.

It is morning. The windows have snowed in; only the yellow light from the gas lamps in the street illuminates her cluttered Byzantine-styled bedroom. She rolls over to grab her phone on the nightstand. But no, a cigarette first! She slides into her ostrich feather pompom slippers. A few feathers fly off as she shuffles past the pile of clothes on a chair, dust bunnies, pictures of her children she raised on her own, and a DIY upholstery project waiting for its turn in the hallway. ‘No clean girl content to be made here,’ she thinks to herself. She arrives at her destination—the kitchen. She remembers last night’s dream. The farm, the work, hordes of children, the back pain, the Soviet smock very much like in her youth. Strange!