There’s a recent book (the name of which escapes me) which brings up the interesting point that it isn’t just that more women work outside the home - our idea of what parenting is all about has changed, such that back when Mom kept the house spotless she also dumped you in a playpen all morning or shooed you out of the house all day, and now we don’t let our kids out of our sight at all whatsoever and we feel we have to spend all day enriching their environments and directing their play and such. So it’s more than terminology that turned “housewives” into “stay at home moms”.
There are several arcs at play here.
One is that people had to learn cleanliness, through trial and error, discovering that debilitating diseases could be transmitted by unclean conditions.
The second arc is that, as fewer and fewer people became affected by these diseases, few had exposure to them, and the body’s natural immune system became less efficient at recognizing pathogens and resisting them.
The third arc is medical science, which has successfully reduced quite a large number of illnesses to near zero or created a pharmacology to combat them, so that most people no longer had any exposure to them – if they ever encountered the pathogen, it was easily cured.
The fourth one is chemistry, which has enabled us to combat pathogens in our environment without really “cleaning” it in the traditional housekeeper sense.
All for of these trajectories (and others I haven’t thought of) have brought us to our present state of affairs, and being adaptable as we are, we have adjusted our “cleaning habits” to more or less conform to where those arcs are all currently intersecting. This has led us to believe that we don’t really need to concern ourselves with housecleaning as diligently as might have been the case in other historical times.
I agree entirely with this. I just can’t stand it. Mrs. MeanJoe and I do not see eye-to-eye on this and honestly it is the #1, #2, #3, and #4 thing I get annoyed about. And no, I’m not some neanderthal who believes it is her role to do the house work. I’m more than happy to split it 50/50. I’ll even do 60/40 or 70/30. I just cannot stand the 99.999/.001 division of labor we have now. I just can’t wrap my head around her view of cleanliness (and some of those who’ve posted here) as it is completely foreign to me.
One of these days i’ll stop being so stubborn and just hire a maid. Then again, that would be admitting defeat… 
When my mom was a housewife (it was the '60s. She was a housewife) She had routines, and once I was tall enough to reach I was big enough to help. My sister is older and was already in school all day by the time I started retaining memories, but I imagine she had jobs, too. I dusted the end tables and coffee tables.
And yes, there were times and rooms where my “help” was counterproductive so I’d go play by myself in my own room or in the yard.
She had a schedule and she stuck to it. That’s the piece that I’m sure would solve all of my cleaning woes. If I could just get everything put away once and for all I could put a schedule in place.
My house is clean.
I don’t have routines as such. My motivation fluctuates a lot, so the level of tidiness/cleanliness also fluctuates. If the mood to clean/sort/toss/declutter strikes me, I get stuck in because I don’t know how long it’ll be before the mood strikes again. Right now, I’m on the cleaning/decluttering binge.