What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives

In 2012, when the anthropologist Carrie M. Lane would tell people that she was researching professional organizers, most pictured Sally Field as Norma Rae holding up a “Union” sign on a factory floor. In fact, Lane’s subjects were more likely to be sitting on a basement floor alongside empty nesters, helping them discard their children’s old toys. One organizer Lane interviewed recalled asking a client, “What does this toy want? Where would it be happiest, most fulfilled? Is it happy at the bottom of a pile, not being used, collecting dust?” More than a decade later, Lane—the author of “More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working” (Chicago)—need not clarify. The job title “professional organizer” is now firmly part of our lexicon, owing to an overstuffed market of how-to books on getting rid of clutter.

At the top of the pile would be “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” by the Japanese author Marie Kondo, published in English in 2014. Her method evoked the Shinto principle that objects can be inhabited by a kami, a spirit. Socks, for instance, should not be folded into balls. “Do you really think they can get any rest like that?” she asked. She famously instructed readers to pose the question, when deciding whether to hold on to an object, “Does this spark joy?” Kondo herself sparked many things—fourteen million copies sold, the Netflix series “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” intense annoyance (why not ask “Does this spark revolution?” one Facebook post I saw read), and a decluttering craze.

Another international best-seller, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning,” by Margareta Magnusson, arrived in 2018. Her method drew on the Swedish concept of döstädning, organizing one’s things to lessen the load on family members who will have to sort through them after you die. “Let me help make your loved ones’ memories of you nice—instead of awful” is how Magnusson put it, not so gently. During the pandemic, home organization became America’s favorite lockdown hobby. (The Washington Post hailed the era as “the great decluttering.”) Americans who hated math suddenly could not stop talking about the four-box method (four boxes per room, labelled “Keep,” “Give Away,” “Throw Away,” and “Storage”), the 20/20 rule (toss anything you could replace in twenty minutes and for twenty dollars), the one-in-one-out rule (throw out one item for every new one you acquire).

When Netflix released “Get Organized with The Home Edit,” four years ago, one critic declared it “the most 2020 show of 2020”; it featured a smiley crew who swore by the ROYGBIV method: organizing objects by the colors of the rainbow. Theirs was a distinctly American entry in an otherwise minimalist genre; the show’s principals assured us, “It’s O.K. to own things.” Just as long as you bought their branded storage bins from Walmart to keep them in.

Decluttering, an activity that once played a supporting role to cleaning and to moving, became a star in American popular culture. The mystery writer Mary Jane Maffini created a series about an organizer who solves “fatally untidy cases,” in novels like “The Cluttered Corpse” and “Death Loves a Messy Desk.” ’Tis the season to make room for love—in the Hallmark movie “Christmas in the Air” (2017), a busy single dad hires a pretty but anal-retentive organizer. “While she’s organizing his life, he’s showing her you can’t schedule true love,” the trailer’s voice-over teases. You’ll find episodes devoted to home organization in sitcoms like “The Big Bang Theory” (Sheldon’s compulsive organizing is a recurrent plot point) and “Modern Family” (Claire, a type-A personality, rebrands herself “Mrs. Clutterworth” as she tries to corral her husband and children into clearing out the house). Watching people declutter should be the equivalent of watching paint dry, and yet here we are.

Not everyone tuning in is a fan. Somehow, professional organizers—with their cheery dispositions and stickers that say “Donate”—became deeply polarizing figures in contemporary life. A writer in The Atlantic accused Kondo of being insensitive to refugees, who might hold on to things as a trauma response. Others charged that organizers were dulling our creativity, encouraging a house emptied of the objects that make us unique. A quote dubiously ascribed to Einstein was suddenly all over social media: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” When Kondo recommended that people dispose of books that did not spark joy, it became clear she had touched the third rail of American civic society, or at least of everyone who loved the movie “You’ve Got Mail.” The backlash was so intense that Kondo was compelled to affirm publicly that she didn’t hate books.

The debates over detritus eventually spilled into academia. The scholar Scott Herring tied so-called “clutter panics” to eugenics, citing early twentieth-century racist and classist theories of urban disorganization. In his book “The Hoarders,” he asked, “Why is one material life commended while another is reviled? Who calls these shots? Under what historical circumstances?” Why single out keepers of clutter in a society in which greed and overaccumulation run rampant in tidier places like investment portfolios?

Lane, too, went into her study critical of what she dubs the “containo-industrial complex,” the multibillion-dollar business of home organization. “When I began researching professional organizers, I saw them as the human equivalent of Real Simple magazine and the Container Store, part of a growing industry built around persuading Americans that organizing things in pretty boxes is the key to a happy life,” she wrote. That all changed after she conducted her field work.

Lane went native, signing up for a decluttering boot camp where she learned to shred papers with the ruthlessness required for the job. In addition to interviewing more than fifty organizers, she worked with a number of them as a volunteer assistant. (In one session she observed, a client proceeded pen by pen, telling the story of how she acquired each.) Lane walked the red carpet at the Los Angeles Organizing Awards alongside an environmentally focussed organizer wearing a dress made entirely out of repurposed plastic bags. She attended civic task-force meetings, where organizers joined social workers and firefighters to brainstorm best practices for dealing with hoarders. Lane also organized her own belongings, to get a client’s perspective. Sorting her son’s baby clothing for a garage sale was “physically painful at moments.” Conversely, recycling an old stack of unread New Yorker magazines, she felt “both transgressive (Am I really allowed to do this?) and elated (Farewell, scolding pile of ‘shoulds’!).”

Amid her research, Lane, like many who have enlisted the services of organizers, found things she hadn’t realized were there. She discovered a profession made up mostly of women who had been looking for work that offered better pay or more flexibility when they stumbled into home organization. For them, the challenges of self-employment beat the constant threat of layoffs. Their clients were familiar to them—women with full-time jobs to whom the task of tidying somehow still falls, managing the same feeling of being inundated and unsupported that the organizers themselves were attempting to flee. The two meet in a sea of disposable consumer goods that was supposed to make all that hard work and personal sacrifice worth it in the first place. These women may not be Norma Raes, but Lane comes to see professional organizers as containers for our attitudes about work, what we fill ourselves with when we are unfulfilled, and what keeps us buying things that we don’t even have time to take out of their pretty boxes.

Before there was clutter, there was bric-a-brac, and, as with most instances in which too much is kept inside, we can blame the Victorians for that. A home full of needless curios was once considered refined, expressive of the luxuries that industrialization had made possible. Magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar catered to so-called “parlor people,” those who had the time and the means to laze about in sitting rooms, taking in the décor. A woman mindful of appearances might install doorstops that looked like dogs, all manner of feathers, seashells, dried flowers, and hairwork (art created out of the human variety, preferably braided).

Critics of parlor culture tended to be reformers inspired by William Morris, the English socialist and textile designer who helped launch the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris believed that art had been chased out of the home by mass-produced knickknacks that were useless and, above all, ugly. His ideas found a warm reception in the United States at the onset of the Progressive Era, as Americans preached simplicity and the control of passions (temperance was by then a mass movement) with an almost religious zeal. The novelist and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “Women and Economics” (1898), argued that women were suffering under the weight of their own possessions: The female housekeeper “has crowded her limited habitat with unlimited things,” she wrote, “and the labor of her life is to wait upon these things, and to keep them clean.” As a new era began, women were told to dispose of all their Victorian wares and embrace the pared-down aesthetic of the modern age. “Pictures on sofa pillows and all other objects are out of place,” Charlotte Wait Calkins, an anti-ornamentalist, wrote in “A Course in House Planning and Furnishing” (1916). “No one should want to rest his head on anything that resembles real rose thorns, tennis rackets, pipes, flags, Indian heads and the like.”

Properly modern women were primed to tidy. When more of them began taking on office work as secretaries—or “office wives,” as they were often called—the dawn of a new, less messy era was heralded. “Feminine Hands Have Taken Dirt and Clutter Out of Offices,” a Los Angeles Times headline read. But the postwar manufacturing boom presented American homemakers with a dilemma. They were urged to keep their homes free of knickknacks, and yet knickknacks of a sort—transistor radios, sewing machines, electric mixers—were everywhere they looked. The parlor, now the living room, was once again invaded by wares, thanks to the commercials that aired on yet another new device, the television. Bric-a-brac had made its triumphant return, but women were too busy being office wives to keep it in order. It’s no wonder that, in the nineteen-sixties, Americans had to invent the yard sale.

For most of the twentieth century, it never occurred to anyone that decluttering could be outsourced. Outsourced to whom? Lane writes, “There have always been people who organized other people’s things for pay—butlers, maids, housekeepers, secretaries, personal assistants, efficiency experts, architects, and interior designers, among others, not to mention the unpaid work of homemakers. In each of these cases, however, decluttering and reorganizing were components of a job, not the job itself.” Only in 1974 did the job of home organizer enter the public record, through the paper of record. That September, the Times ran a story about a woman named Stephanie Winston, who could be hired to sort out everything from kitchen cabinets to filing cabinets. “It’s Her Business to Take the Distressing Disarray Out of People’s Lives,” the headline read. Winston was a Barnard College graduate who had worked as a freelance book editor. “She finds it far more profitable to organize people than words,” noted the Washington Post, which profiled her when she published her first book, “Getting Organized,” in 1978. (At the time, she was charging two hundred dollars a day.) The only difficulty, she said, was that “it’s a hard concept to grasp.” One of her clients was quoted commending Winston for making a business out of what seemed “like a non-idea.”

Another organizer Lane spoke to, Standolyn Robertson, similarly had trouble at the start of her career formulating precisely what kind of work she had in mind. After Robertson graduated from high school, in Florida, in the nineteen-seventies, she was asked what she was interested in doing next. “I was explaining this thing,” she recalled. When she offered, as an example, that she wanted to reorganize kitchens, someone said it sounded like she wanted to be a wife. Robertson corrected him, sort of: “ ‘No, no, no! I want to do it and then go home.’ That was the best way that I could explain it. That I was going to play house in someone else’s house and then go home.”

Although the Post identified Winston as the first professional organizer, there were other women beginning to eke out a living this way. One was Barbara Hemphill, a D.C. housewife whose husband’s job, at a nonprofit, scarcely covered the costs of raising three children. She had heard about people who “hadn’t eaten off the dining room table in months because it was piled full of papers, or they couldn’t file their income taxes ’cause they couldn’t find their receipts,” she told Lane, and she thought she could help. Like many other organizers, Hemphill had always been good at putting things in order. When she took out a seven-dollar ad in the newspaper, her first callers were men trying to pick her up. After all, who had ever heard of hiring someone to organize your files? It sounded like a euphemism for something. In 1975, Maxine Ordesky placed an ad in Los Angeles magazine in which she described herself as a “Creative Organizer.” When she told one gentleman caller her rate, he went silent, eventually saying, “If that’s all you’re charging, you don’t do what I think you do.”