Good morning everyone,

If you are in my phone book, the chances that I have texted you about my present decluttering project are basically one. Are you bored of it yet? Don't worry, I'm well on my way. We'll be through this soon I promise.

NOT THROUGH IT YET THOUGH, ARE WE? That's right, I'm going to do a whole Fem Fri on decluttering. Like so many things in my life, this newsletter is one that I wanted and expected to be easy – as easy as typing "history of decluttering" into a search engine. It… was… not.

Instead, I started as I so often do with an ngram:

This makes sense, I think. As consumerism starts to really bite in the 1980s, we start to buy more stuff and need to get rid of that stuff. And then in the 2000s (I want to link this to eBay, but time is limited) we REALLY REALLY want to get rid of stuff and we KEEP WANTING TO DO THAT.

On the basis of this ngram, I did searches over time for books that mention decluttering. Highly conveniently they are mostly written by women so fit the rubric of this newsletter. One of the first books to mention decluttering is Kathy Mayer Braddock's The Intrepid New Yorker from 1992, which looks like a quite sweet book of tips for anyone who is moving to New York for the first time. Because apartments are tiny, this means getting rid of a lot of kipple:

https://archive.org/details/intrepidnewyorke00brad/page/226/mode/2up?view=theater&q=kinney

It's notable that there's no spiritual element to this. It's all practical/financial – you need room to exist and storage units are expensive.

The spiritual element comes in pretty fast. A notable early example (1999) is Donna Schaper's Sabbath Keeping, which has a whole chapter called Decluttering as Sabbath. Here's an extract:

https://archive.org/details/sabbathkeeping0000scha/page/38/mode/2up?view=theater&q=decluttering

And then, wow, here's something I'd forgotten, it's that everyone was super into Feng Shui in the early 2000s. Obviously as a culture we were not ready to drop the idea that giving Joshua Ferris books to charity was somehow a spiritual practice. Anyway, Google Books reminded me of this and here's the start of Mary Lambert's 2001 book, Clearing the Clutter for Good Feng Shui:

https://archive.org/details/clearingclutterf0000lamb/page/8/mode/2up?view=theater

I love that she reminds you not to buy crystals until you have got rid of stuff from whatever you were into before you were into crystals.

For the decade after that there was a hard stop on the Feng Shui chat but still decluttering was pitched as a quasi- or actual spiritual activity. And then, of course, Marie Kondo's book was translated into English and people went AN ABSOLUTE BUNDLE on that. Including me! I got a ton out of her book and techniques and thinking. Here's an interview with her on her work with clients:

We should see that our goals are aligned and that we can work toward them. Everyone has a slightly different vision. I also want that individual to know what items or objects spark joy and to be able to really cherish them. When challenging moments occur, the most important thing is to discuss again “What are our goals?” and “Can we realign?” It’s important to always come back to why the work is worth it.

https://hbr.org/2020/05/lifes-work-an-interview-with-marie-kondo

And here's a soothing Autostraddle guide to her Netflix show, which I also watched and enjoyed:

Their first date lasted for three days, they seem to have moved in with each other essentially immediately and their primary concern is somehow impressing upon their parents the seriousness of their relationship via the cleanliness of their house.

https://www.autostraddle.com/marie-kondos-tidying-up-lovingly-drags-the-depressed-defeated-viewer-into-2019-445493/

I hope you have enjoyed this quick journey through decluttering discourse since 1980. DON'T FORGET TO CHECK OUT MY EBAY STORE ahahaha just kidding guys I'd never do that to you.

xxx.