SGB I know I'm late to this thread and your immediate crisis is over, but I was interested in your association between hoarding and slovenly housekeeping and their relationship with feminism.
I'm pretty slovenly at housekeeping but I'm not in any way a hoarder. I'll let things pile up because I procrastinate and am lazy about it, but when I come to clean things out I'm happily ruthless. I have, from time to time, thrown out important documents or things that I later could have used. But I've never regretted it because the bother to replace them was a lot less than the bother of keeping mounting piles of crap potentially but unlikely useful stuff. On the other hand I haven't picked an iron up in years. I frequently choose my clothes out of the "airing cupboard" and there are corners of our kitchen under jars and kitchen equipment that haven't seen a cloth since we moved in.
So I don't really see hoarding and poor housekeeping as the same thing. I also think the sexist pressures on women about the two are different too.
The housework thing is very much a matter of judging women on something for the sake of it that a man would not be judged on in the same way. It seems to be a way of not only ensuring men are served in the domestic sphere, but also of keeping women busy so they don't have time for anything external. The domestic service role is still a moral issue for women, a way to judge how "good" we are. I'm pretty bloody minded about the way people perceive me from that perspective so I laugh at suggestions that I "should" have a cleaner house etc. And I share your (if I read you right) horror of spending much of my time trying to meet a standard that I have no personal interest in achieving. At the same time, as I get older and with the arrival of children, my standards have gone up slightly. This is mainly because an untidy house is more difficult to live in, but also because I've come to appreciate how much my immediate environment impacts my general level of happiness and I want a better looking house. Still, I'm all about short cuts and since I'm married I very much don't see it as "my role" no matter who else seems to. I haven't read the Flylady site, but from your description I don't think I could stomach an approach that tried to reinforce that moral judgement of women.
Criticism of hoarding seems less of a moral judgement in our society and more of a mental health one. I'm not so sure I think hoarding is so much an abnormal behaviour as simply a normal one that is not suitable in a non-scarcity environment; something that has only become a widespread issue in the last 50 - 100 years. And so we have pathologised an otherwise normal desire. I'm not saying that hoarding isn't a problem in today's society, just that many of the people today who we shake our heads and murmur sadly to each other about (not you I'm sure
) would have been seen as wise and valuable members of communities in the past. And, of course, women are generally more likely to be labeled as "broken" by our society. I concur with some one else's thought much earlier in the thread that women "hoard" but men "collect". I think that is a reflection of the fact that generally we accept men to have wider acceptable behaviour norms than women.
So that's my shallow (long though this is -
) feminist view of housework and hoarding. For your personal situation I have little to offer other than - please don't try to keep the house clean/throw away your stuff just to meet others' expectations. Try to keep your goals to things that are important to you and your family.