Two weeks before she died, I got a long e-mail from Ellen about a book of mine that had just been published and that I’d sent her a few weeks prior. Given the feistiness and verve of the e-mail, I was all the more stunned to hear about her death. The letter was mostly about the chapter “Dirt” in the book The Female Thing, which deals with women’s excessively complicated relation to . . . well, dirt: in the housecleaning wars, of course, but extending to bodily anxieties about purity and impurity generally, and the age-old accusation that it’s women who are, in fact, the dirtier sex and need social sanitizing in the form of various religious rituals and so on. Ellen wanted me to have said more about the unequal division of domestic labor — not just cleaning, but also child care, cooking, household administration, and the rest; I wrote back, too briefly (because, you know, I had piles of e-mail, yada yada), that those arguments had already been made pretty extensively by others, and I was more interested, at least here, in the sexual symbolics of dirt.
