Look Homeward, Angel

Cheryl Mendelson is a prototypical high-achieving baby boomer, with a doctorate in philosophy and a Harvard law degree. Having worked for prestigious New York law firms and taught philosophy at distinguished universities, she in every external aspect embodied the feminist dream of intellectual and professional success. No one observing her from the outside ever could have guessed the shocking truth. For all along, it seems, Cheryl Mendelson had a shameful secret: She enjoyed housework. As she explains,

I belong to the first generation of women who worked more than they stayed home. We knew that no judge would credit the legal briefs of a housewife, no university would give tenure to one, no corporation would promote one, and no one who mattered would talk to one at a party. Being perceived as excessively domestic can get you socially ostracized.

Focusing on her education and career, Mendelson for many years suppressed her true nature. When she decided she no longer wanted to live in an untidy home that felt like a hotel, she knew what to do. Luckily, she had grown up on a farm and received a thorough education in housekeeping from her two grandmothers.

Even with that background, however, she had many questions on such matters as the care of modern fabrics and floors, and she found no reference works to help her. The comprehensive housekeeping manuals popular in the nineteenth century had been transformed into either random collections of housekeeping “hints” or arts-and-crafts projects. It was this gap that Mendelson set out to remedy. Her model was neither the hinting Heloise nor the project-obsessed Martha Stewart. Rather, Home Comforts is the modern successor to the venerable 1861 classic Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a thousand-page encyclopedia of cooking and housekeeping.

By virtue of the low esteem into which housekeeping has fallen, Mendelson shoulders a task that would never have occurred to Isabella Beeton. In the brilliant introductory essay, “My Secret Life,” and throughout the various chapters on laundry, bathrooms, and dust mites, she mounts nothing less than a philosophical defense of housekeeping, restoring it as a meaningful, dignified, and fulfilling pursuit.

Housekeeping actually offers more opportunities for savoring achievement than almost any other work I can think of. Each of its regular routines brings satisfaction when it is completed. These routines echo the rhythm of life, and the housekeeping rhythm is the rhythm of the body. You get satisfaction not only from the sense of order, cleanliness, freshness, peace and plenty restored, but from the knowledge that you yourself and those you care about are going to enjoy these benefits.

Far from being mindless, repetitive drudgery unfit for anyone with a college degree, housekeeping — as Mendelson’s manifesto reminds us — provides a wealth of cognitive challenges. “You have to be able to decipher insurance policies, contracts, and warranties, manage a budget, and master the technical language of instruction manuals for appliances and computers,” she notes. “You need to exercise creative intelligence to solve problems and devise solutions. . . . Housekeeping comprises the ability to find, evaluate and use information about nutrition, cooking, chemistry and biology, health, comfort, laundry, cleaning and safety.” (And, as she correctly states, of all professionals, “it is actually lawyers who are most familiar with the experiences of unintelligent drudgery.”)

“My Secret Life” sets the tone for the rest of the book, all of which is characterized by wonderful, entertaining writing. Mendelson doesn’t simply tell you how to dust furniture and vacuum the carpet. She tells you exactly why these things are important, why it is important to do them in the way she suggests, and the rewards one can expect as a result. She brings the mindset of a public policy wonk and applies it to running a house. Hers is not simply a how-to manual of the deep comforts and pleasures of housekeeping, it is also an intense sociological examination of a small society and how that society should be ordered.

The example of this approach that delighted me the most is her “broken window theory” of neatening. Applied to crime, the theory holds that a single broken window that goes unrepaired signals that no one cares and encourages further vandalism. According to Mendelson, the same holds true for housekeeping. “The domestic equivalent of an unrepaired broken window can result in a chain reaction that eventually sees the home in complete chaos.” Leave an empty cup and a pair of shoes next to a chair and then “anyone who walks in will feel entitled to add more disorder because the room is already slightly, even if pleasantly, disorderly.”

The net effect of Mendelson’s approach to housecleaning is not only to inform, but to energize and imbue her readers with a sense of mission and virtue in a way Martha Stewart’s twig picture frames and sconces made out of vintage aluminum baking pans simply can’t.

This uplifting quality of Home Comforts is what drives the book’s unexpected success. Home Comforts, more than the presidential race, is what everyone is talking about. The book has already gone into its seventh printing and sold more than 160,000 copies. (The typical how-to manual does well if it sells 20,000 copies.) Mendelson has been interviewed three times on National Public Radio and she is being hailed everywhere as a “revolutionary” and “at the forefront of a new trend.” Celebrity and noncelebrity women are coming out of the closet about their passion for domesticity. Bette Midler confided to Oprah, “I don’t see why people put down housekeeping. It’s a craft and I think all crafts deserve respect.”

Mendelson is the recipient of a stream of confessions from the previously closeted. “I get phone calls from people, famous people. There is one woman, a very well-known public figure, feminist, intellectual, you know. She says: ‘Cheryl, I’ve never had a cleaner in my life. I do it all myself.'” Even more striking, Mendelson’s venerable predecessor, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, is being reissued in Britain this month and in this country later this year.

Why Home Comforts has struck such a responsive chord is almost as interesting as the book itself. Part of the reason is that women now have the self-confidence and professional credibility to admit that home and family are important to them. Mendelson herself has observed that “women feel secure enough about their rights and abilities to go to work that they’d like more from their homes. I think all of us have tasted life with the home part reduced, and we don’t like it.” Another reason is the growing number of both men and women who telecommute from home and thus are more concerned with its maintenance and comfort. Still another reason is America’s incredible affluence: More people nowadays need detailed advice on things like how to clean their fancy granite kitchen counters, hand-wash their silk and cashmere sweaters, and iron their linen sheets.

What it also reflects, however, is a sort of revival and restoration of traditional verities. It’s now okay to acknowledge that children do best with a mother and father married to each other. Most people today can admit that a mother and a day-care center are not interchangeable. There’s even a religious revival, as more and more people discover that material acquisition can’t satisfy our deepest longings. And now the success of Cheryl Mendelson’s book reminds us once again that there’s no place like home.

Melinda Ledden Sidak is a housewife and writer in suburban Washington, D.C.