Not Quite a Clean Sweep: Rhetorical Strategies in
Grose’s “Cleaning: The Final Feminist Frontier”
A woman’s work is never done: many American women grow up with this
saying and feel it to be true. One such woman, author Jessica Grose, wrote “Cleaning:
The Final Feminist Frontier,” published in 2013 in the New Republic, and she argues that
while the men in our lives recently started taking on more of the childcare and cooking,
cleaning still falls unfairly on women. Grose begins building her credibility with
personal facts and reputable sources, citing convincing facts and statistics, and
successfully employing emotional appeals; however, toward the end of the article, her
attempts to appeal to readers’ emotions weaken her credibility and ultimately, her
argument.