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According to a 2006 article in the Corriere by Elvira Serra, American women spend an average of 4 hours a week doing housework. Italian women beat them, hands down. Here are the details: “80% of Italian women iron everything, including socks and handkerchiefs, 31% have a dishwasher, 2% use scrubbing brushes and 1% have a clothes dryer [Electricity is very costly in Italy, so most people don’t want a clothes dryer]. In the end, Italians devote twenty-one hours a week to household chores, of which five are spent ironing. Cooking is not included in the total.” So, 21 hours a week for Italian women and 4 for Americans.
These figures don’t tell the whole story, either. By and large, Italian homes are much smaller than American homes. The average house size in the U.S. is +/- 2300 square feet. Here in Italy, the average is 700-1100 square feet. So Italian women are spending 4 times the hours to take care of half, or less than half, the space.
This got me thinking, of course. Back when I had a full time job in Connecticut, we hired someone to clean the house. And wouldn’t you know, Kathy, and later Peg, came for 4 hours a week and took very good care of our 2700 square foot house. When we moved to Italy we continued our practice, and Lada cleaned our house for almost four years. (When her second child arrived, Lada retired… but she worked until 2 weeks before Daniel’s arrival, that’s how great she was.) Lada worked 4.5 hours a week, and did a terrific job on our 1184 square foot house, but ironing was not included in her job description, just cleaning.
Why does it take so much longer in Italy? Because in Italy a basic weekly clean includes a lot more than in the States. In the States the job entailed dusting, vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms (but not the kitchen – there wasn’t time), and mopping the bathroom and kitchen floors. When I knew Lada was leaving I watched carefully to learn how to clean in the Italian style. First she carried all the rugs outside and gave them a good shake, and left them hanging over a railing. Then she dusted and vacuumed. In particularly high traffic areas (kitchen, stairs) she first swept, and then vacuumed. Then she washed all the floors, which meant moving all the light furniture around and then replacing it. Then she carried the rugs back in and vacuumed them. The house sparkled. After Lada retired I took over, and it takes me about 5.5 or 6 hours to do what she did in 4.5. But I do it all (over two days) because the house looks so nice afterwards.
Another big difference between here and there is the number of cleaning products. (The French gentleman above lives in Italy, too. Here his name is Mastro Lindo.) 
In the States we used amonia in the water to wash the tile floors, window cleaner for the windows, and, if we were feeling really fancy, some kind of spray on the dust cloths. We also had special polish for the wooden furniture, which we polished once or twice a year. Here there is an endless parade of cleaning products, each aimed at a very specific task – one to clean porcelain basins, another to clean tile floors and walls, another to clean stone, another to clean wooden floors, polish for furniture, window cleaners, anti-calcium cleaners (liquid for topical use, powder to add to the clothes washer) – it’s quite confusing to know exactly what to get. (According to the Corriere article, when Unilever tried to market a one-cleaner-does-it-all product it was a complete flop.) In desperation I’ve begun to make some of my own cleansers, but just the basic ones. I’m an American cleaner after all, it seems, a 4-hour a week girl. Even without another job I can’t imagine spending 21 hours a week on household chores. Nor can I imagine ironing the Captain’s socks!
Why do Italian women spend so much time cleaning? The Corriere article answers: “Perhaps a British poll can throw some light on the issue. The Discovery Channel Home and Health website asked 2,000 women aged from 18 to 80: 59% said that cleaning their homes made them feel in control of their own lives and 60% found housework “mentally therapeutic”.” Well, there is a certain zen-like monotony to house cleaning – you do the same old things in the same old way every week, and then you get to do it again the next week and the next. I guess that’s therapy of a sort. Me? I’d rather take my therapy in a swimming pool, at the gym or, better yet, at the dining table!
An Ex-Expatriate 
Fascinating! You have described EXACTLY what my cleaning lady does down here in Naples. I always wondered.
My mother was German and went to “Housewifery” school in Germany at the age of 16. She learned to iron underwear and socks as well and the beds had to be made up perfect. As a consequence, I rebelled and made sure to ask every potential suitor if he knew how to iron, sew, and cook. So I married a man who does housework with me. (I broke up with guys who didn’t know how… and I was 21 at the time.)
In this day and age with Italian women so educated and having only one-child per household, I wonder why the women don’t ask the same of their men? That’s always puzzled me.
Thanks for a wonderful post!!!
Hi Barbara! Italian men’s habit of sometimes (not always!) being less than helpful around the house may have something to do with Italian women being less eager to get married. Some of my young Italian women friends say they would never marry an Italian. I think it speaks to the whole complicated Italian mother-son relationship; many men are trained by their mothers not to be helpful. Having said that, there are some wonderful men out there who are more than willing to do their share. Ironing socks: a concept I never could quite grasp.
Over the holidays, I realized just how many Italian women do NOT do their house cleaning and wrote a post about it: http://americaninpadua.blogspot.com/2010/01/welcome-to-world-of-holiday-cleaning.html. But as for those who do clean, your post is great and I have made reference to it from my blog.
Happy 2010!
Hey, Irene – good post you wrote there (and thanks for the mention). What you say is so true about the women who have ‘house angels.’ They get mighty peeved when the angels fly away over Christmas… and for a month in August!
Hello:
I felt that this article was very good.
Thanks Niama.
arabic women as well as turkish women also seem to clean so much .They ar certainly far from lazy ,so the question is how do we push ourselves more but still not over the top ironing socks????? turkish women love to clean walls doors with bleach many timea aweek if house smells of bleach for them that means its clean ohhhhohohoho
Hmmm. I rather like the U.S. model of 4 hours a week. Perhaps there’s more dust in Turkey? I don’t know. I’d be reluctant to mess around with bleach several times a week, though I agree it certainly has a ‘clean’ smell.
My mother used to iron everything too. Underwear, socks, tablecloths, towels, (I know)….dish towels, sheets, etc. I think, though, that was because her clothes were hung on a line and dried and not whirled around in a warm dryer which takes out a lot of wrinkles. Our house was so clean. When I went to visit some of my friends I remember looking around in wonder at the unmade beds and not so neat kitchens some of them had. Most of them had siblings and working mothers, whereas I am an only child and mother did not work outside until I went to high school. My Granny once told me she didn’t like to visit my mom’s house because it was “too shiny.” Funny. You couldn’t mess it up because mother would be behind you with a broom. I could never keep up to her standards although I tried for a long time. I keep my head above water most of the time and that’s good enough for me.
Phew! Your Mom set the bar pretty high – glad you don’t hold yourself to her standards (towels??); head above water is a good place to be. Few people in Italy have dryers, and maybe that is part of the reason they iron so much, I don’t know.
Interesting article indeed. I own a house cleaning service in Dallas that specializes in window washing, gutter cleaning, and power washing.
Interesting stats. I have noticed that a lot of Italian women are hiring help for the cleaning and ironing. That seems to be part of the foreign worker dispute because Romanian and Moldavian women are more willing to clean other people’s houses these days than fellow Italians.
Traditionally, few Italian women worked or they worked part-time so they had more time to clean.
Class also is a factor. The higher the class, the less likely they are to do any housework. I have a lot of clients who would never be seen with a broom in their hands!
It’s unbelievable about the ironing socks part! And I know its true. These women get up at 5 am to iron in the cool hours of the day during the dead of summer. Real dedication, I would say.
I’ve never been able to cotton (oh ha ha) to the socks-ironing thing. Friends in the States ironed their husbands’ underwear and hankies, and I thought they were nuts! It’s interesting the way different immigrant groups gravitate to certain work – a lot of Romanians here do house work, and a lot of Philippinos take care of old folks – both jobs that Italian women no longer care to do. Having come to cleaning later in life myself, I find it rather pleasant in a mindless kind of way – also not bad exercise.
I can’t imagine what in the world kind of mess you’d have to make in order to require 4 hours of cleaning per day!? At that rate, you’ll start wearing away the surfaces… heh heh.
In total, I’d say I spend about an hour a day in total, on dusting, general tidying, laundry, loading and unloading the dishwasher… and these tasks are shared between myself and fiance, so the work becomes even less.
Kitchens do take some time to clean, inside and outside the cooker, and the surrounding tiles, etc… but we eat so little at home the cooker and fridge remain virtually pristine! I guess we’re not a very traditional household in that sense.
Any more than an hour per day would mean I am cleaning things that do not require it… I too would agree there are many more things to life than cooking and cleaning… I’d much rather groom and dress myself, then go for a long walk sipping a freshly blended smoothie, and enjoying a relaxing scrub-free afternoon, watching all human life…
Sounds to me like you’ve got your priorities in good order – and how great that your fiance is helpful. Hope one day you’ll discover the joys of (Italian?) cooking…
Oh man, I soo saw myself in your post. My fiancè is used to having the classic Italian mother who is a 100% full time housewife and did EVERYTHING for him. Then he found me. I am naturally disorderly, and with all the love I have for him have been unable to dedicate myself to keeping the house to his motherly levels…there is just so much other stuff to do out there, and I already work two jobs and have very little time for another. So after much bickering I caved and used the alternative Italian solution – the cleaning lady. Yesterday was her first day – the house was fantastic 🙂
With two jobs, having help in your only solution! So glad you’ve found someone who makes your house sparkle – no matter who does the work a clean house is a pleasure I think.
Hire a professional and play tennis. You get the best of both worlds!
My mother-in-law came from the generation where having the cleanest house was a neighborhood competition. She told how once a week she moved all the furniture to make sure not one spot was missed. When I came in from playing tennis one day she sighed and said, “I wish I’d played tennis instead.”
A great post …… housekeeping is indeed an art, alas, one that I have not mastered.
My personal motto has long been “Boring women have perfectly clean houses”. I would much rather live with some friendly clutter and dirt than be able to eat off my floors — that’s why God invented tables! Floors exist to serve me, not the other way around.
If I can keep the big pieces picked up and move the little ones around until they finally end up facing the business end of a vacuum cleaner I am a happy girl because I have more time to spend cooking something delicious. So far, with the help of my ever-faithful Josie, the Health Dept. has not come calling in an official capacity.
Four hours a day????? What on earth is there to occupy four full hours a day cleaning house? I suppose I could take cotton swabs and alcohol to clean out the keyholes but this seems more like when my former MIL came to visit than what happens in real life today.
We have (mostly) clean clothes to wear, the important things are ironed (socks are not important), our minds are full and our lives are rich. Most importantly, our tummies are happily filled with delicious food straight from my kitchen, mess be damned! I don’t clean the oven after each roasting but neither do I wash the tires of my car after each drive either.
I’ve chosen to spend my time and money where we enjoy it most – in the kitchen and library. Foodstuffs and books replace cleaning product purchases except when mandatory. I would buy a perfect peach long before shelling out money for the newest washing powder. Perhaps my life’s story will read “Tales from the Gleefully Slovenly”.
The corollary to your personal motto is A Clean House is the sign of an Empty Mind. Oh dear. I would like both to have a clean house AND to be an interesting person. Perhaps it is possible. Or perhaps one can have a half-clean house and be sort of interesting? I would buy a perfect peach before just about anything – it’s not so easy to find a perfect peach, though they’ve certainly been good this year. The story of your life would make great reading no matter what the title!
Well at least I can see myself in the figures up there…I’m in the minority, the 1% with a clothes dryer. Now while I do a light cleaning (more like tidying up) every day, I am nowhere near to an italian woman’s standards. When guests come over I just make my excuses, shrug, and point at the dogs(!). My mother-in-law on the other hand, would be scandalized if I decided to walk barefoot on her marble floors. Something about the oils on a person foot that is not good for marble???!
Great post, and it gives me a sigh of relief to know that my priorities run with the garden. It is only there that I wish to be in more control of things! (read: darn weeds!)
With all the rain you’ve had this summer it’s a good thing you have a dryer! Real Simple did a good story on how to keep your house looking clean in only +/- 30 minutes a day – here:http://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/cleaning/daily-cleaning-checklist-00000000000953/. I used to keep after the bathrooms that way and it really made a difference. I’ve been walking barefoot on our marble stairs for 7 years and they don’t look any worse than they did when we moved in – I must disagree with MIL. I’m with you on the garden – better a messy house and fewer weeds around the veggies!
Your house cleaning hours seems a bit low to me for American women. But then I did a google and found another study that said women spent 16.8 hours on core housework as of 1999. However, that included making meals! 4 hours was on housecleaning, leaving out laundry/ironing (2.7 hours) and outdoor chores. Imagine if you added meal preparation onto the hourly count for an Italian woman. Another study noted that American women were as satisfied with the cleanliness of their house as women had been 20 or 30 years earlier when they spent far more time on housecleaning. So is the average Italian woman spending more or less time than she did 20 years ago on her home? I can remember reading something when I was in my late teens/early 20s that all the new cleaning products in American life only served to raise the bar on cleanliness so that women were spending as much time cleaning as they had in the 1930s. Since the 1960s, however, more women have entered the work force and the impetus or whatever it is to maintain an antiseptically clean home has greatly diminished. 21 hours on housework. Sheesh. I cannot imagine.
I don’t know if they’re spending more or less time now than they used to. And it’s a mystery to me what women who work do – they must have help. People who help in the house here are called colfs, a shortened form of ‘collabooratrice famiglia’ – a collaborator! Sounds dangerous to me. Back to the garden!
Too funny! What a great post – and true! Italian woman take absolute pride in their homes, and it shows. You can eat off the floors in 9 out of 10 homes!
You’ll not be eating off my floor if you’re smart! Do you suppose the house-pride is part of the whole matriarchal thing? Thanks for reading and for commenting, Peter.