OPINION: Spring cleaning has lost its shine

At this time of year when I was a little girl, I watched my mother reorganize closets, wash drapes, clean rugs and scrape windows of winter's detritus. In households like mine everywhere, spring-cleaning - indeed, all housework - fell to women.

In the current bestseller "The Help," set in the civil- rights era South, the oppressive and redemptive power of cleaning is a central theme - the chores of housework bring domestic workers, black and female, and their bosses, white and female, together on common ground.

Otherwise abused, the "help" are relied upon for their seamless homemaking skills. The novel has been embraced by women's book clubs across the country because it strikes both a sense of relief - that we have gone beyond the time when housework meant subjugation - and a feeling of longing for an age when the task of cleaning was respected for the effort it requires and the satisfaction it bestows.

Because more men are manning the stove and chefs have become celebrities, cooking has climbed a pedestal while cleaning - still women's work - has been crushed underneath it. But I think there's something else afoot. Along with welcome liberal attitudes toward gender roles and race, has come an unwelcome tolerance of bad manners, public incivility and rampant messiness.

Disappeared is the expectation for kids to clean their rooms. It's a chore, mandatory when I was young, that has gone by the wayside. Parents now feel that chewing out the children over picking up their things is not worth the fight.

At home - where my husband does the cooking and I do the cleaning - my affinity for organizing and wiping is seen as an illness. The children accuse me of wantonly throwing out their (misplaced) possessions and my spouse calls my scrubbing obsessive. Our son (a chef!) and our daughter (a college student) are mostly out of the house now, but they are both still slobs. That this is my only beef with them makes me a lucky mom. But I still feel I have come up short by failing to persuade them that presenting your personal space in its best possible light demonstrates a regard for yourself to the others who are willing or forced to share it with you.

While we can be proud that the position of women, of all races, has improved dramatically since the early 1960s of my childhood and the Mississippi of the novel, we need also recognize that part of the price of that progress has been an abandonment of the rituals of housecleaning that were seasonal markers as celebratory and reliable as the first day of school or the emergence of new spring growth.

I wish we could again embrace a reverence for cleaning, and in so doing collectively revisit a feeling most don't experience anymore: the sense of order, calm and joy you feel when you have made a house shine.