THEY say everyone has a negative internal voice. It provides a running commentary in your head warning that whatever you are doing is wrong and you’ll get caught. My negative internal voice is actually a chorus. A big gang of people is trying to persuade me to give up and go back to bed. I struggle on, regardless.

One of the voices is that of Germaine Greer. She sits in the corner of my kitchen telling me I’m a pathetic victim of the patriarchal system. When I’m cleaning out the cutlery drawer, I can do without a lecture from the Australian feminist, but she won’t go away.

The problem is, I think Greer is magnificent. I love reading her. I love the way she opens my eyes to the vast conspiracy that seeks to crush me.

She talks about the “fantasy war on filth”, but I’m starting to wonder if ignorance isn’t bliss. Would I be happier if I wasn’t so familiar with her theories on the evils of shopping, the futility of housework? I can understand why housework is an important target for feminism. It was one of the principal tools by which women were suppressed. If you kept women cooking, washing floors and clothes they’d never have any money nor any power. Freedom from housework is essential to the freedom of women.

The way this freedom could be achieved was to make men do more and reduce the amount of work to be done. My battlefield is the division of labour and I think we are gaining ground. I’d say we have the men up to about 20%. A long way to go, but from a low base it’s not bad.

But the war on volume is the one on which Greer focuses and it seems to be a lost cause. Despite the invention of washing machines and dishwashers, the amount of housework has increased. We buy more clothes made from synthetic materials that have to be washed more often. My mother used not to wash clothes in the winter because with no drying weather it was impossible. Everyone wore overalls or aprons and protected their clothes. I can dry clothes 24/7.

My Greer voice tells me this is madness and I try hard to stick to one laundry day a week. If it doesn’t get washed on Monday, it stays dirty. But then I break out and sneak a midweek wash.

How did it get to the point where I have to justify a midweek wash to the Greer in my head? I’m at the stage where I wish she would come to my house so I can tell her it’s possible to be a good feminist and a good housewife. Because if feminism and housewifery are mutually exclusive, then I am doomed to a life of torment. It’s important that I work this out.

While Greer lectures me on the pointlessness of my existence, I also have to contend with the Monica factor. Monica was the character in Friends who overcleaned. Each character had their distinguishing “thing”. Joey was handsome but stupid; Ross was clever but dorky. Monica cleaned so much she gave it a bad name. If you were caught cleaning, someone would say “you’re such a Monica”. What they meant was that you had obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Thanks to Monica, cleaning now equals madness. It’s become a standing joke — the premenstrual woman frantically scrubbing the bath with a toothbrush. So here I am polishing a worktop trying to decide if I am entitled to take pride in my work. Am I a victim, a fool or insane? The fact that I am a well-educated liberal compounds the problem. Last year The New York Times expressed horror that educated women were getting married and dropping out of corporate life. Even Mary Robinson got in on the act, complaining about well-to-do women graduates staying at home with their children and cleaning their houses.

Linda Hirshman, an American writer, says that feminists care about women who stay at home because “what they do is bad for them and certainly bad for society”. So not only am I mad, I’m also bad.

I know it’s important to have women in public life in the hope they will make decisions that will benefit women. But is it absolutely necessary to gang up on me for trying to do the right thing in my own way? Actually, I think the feminist war on housework fell into a patriarchal trap the sisters didn’t see coming. Since it suited men to apply no value to housework, feminists did the same thing. From Betty Friedan onwards, they agreed that nobody could be fulfilled washing the floor and the only solution was to get out of the house and pay somebody else to do it. But women kept cleaning.

Now the Linda Hirshmans are furious some women have accepted that running a house well is conducive to a pleasant life for a family and therefore is a job worth doing. Even if nobody believes that.

While Ireland does have a culture of clean houses, I want to see a value placed on the work that keeps them clean. If spin doctors, advertising executives or graphic designers didn’t work the world would continue to revolve. But if someone stops washing the floor, your feet will stick to it. I know there is a disinfection thing going on that I don’t buy into. But where do you draw the line? Wiping the worktop is fine, but making it shine is the mad bit? A friend, in some kind of postmodern ironic gesture, gave me Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management for my birthday. I accepted it in ironic good grace and ended up turning to Isabella for solace. Her quotes from The Vicar of Wakefield made me smile — “She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims one from vice and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romances.” I’m not sure if my husband is grateful to have been rescued from vice, but I’ll give training the children to virtue a go.

The opening lines of the encyclopaedia have a better attitude. “As with the commander of an army or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of the house . . . for household duties are perpetually dependant on the happiness, comfort and wellbeing of a family.” This is an approach I can adopt.

I’ve done my working-in-an-office stint. I operate on the basis that my current sojourn at home will not last forever — just while the children are small. In the meantime I have to find a way to get some kind of professional satisfaction from what I do.

Doing it well is a good start. In the office I was always well organised and paid attention to detail. I don’t see why applying this practice to housework can’t earn me the same kudos, instead of labelling me a conservative neurotic and a lackey of Procter & Gamble.

So c’mon Greer, how about providing a little validation for mad, bad housewives?