Bad Housekeeping

This podcast theorizes bad housekeeping as a form of feminist refusal: an impulse to question the happy housewife, abandon the dishes in the sink, and seek out alternative modes of domesticity.

The first season of Bad Housekeeping takes Shirley Jackson’s work as its lodestar, using her stories about domestic disturbances to explore the contradictions of the postwar fantasy of the good life—an ideal predicated on the dream house, nuclear family, upward mobility, and strict gender roles. Although the war had extended women's roles in public life and the workforce, postwar America revived Victorian ideals of separate public and private spheres, even as the suburban home and its ever-expanding array of appliances promised fulfilment through domestic order. Jackson’s stories, memoirs, and novels expose the anxieties and ambivalences beneath this promise, unsettling the figure of the happy housewife and rendering the home and its social scripts uncanny and often frightening.

Through conversations with scholars and writers, Bad Housekeeping traces the forms domestic disruption takes in Jackson’s fiction and the broader context of the postwar period. We ask: what does bad housekeeping make legible about the fantasy of the good life? From the postwar dream house to today’s trad-wife revival, how do domestic ideals continue to shape women’s lives, and what happens when we question or refuse them—even if only through fiction? With Shirley Jackson as our guide, the podcast considers the generative possibilities of stories about uncanny and unruly homes.