Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House
by Cheryl Mendelson
Scribner. 884 pp. $35.00
“The streets are paved with brick and are clean as any chamber floor,” noted a 17th-century observer of the famously neat Dutch. As the historian Simon Schama has reminded us, Dutch housewives in that era followed their cleaning rituals with military precision. The steps in front of the house were washed every weekday. Mondays and Tuesdays were devoted to dusting, Thursdays to scouring, Fridays to cleaning the kitchen and cellar. On Wednesdays the whole house got a comprehensive scrubbing.
In the Dutch language, cleanliness mingles with beauty, virtue, and patriotism. A beautiful landscape is referred to as “clean nature.” One 17th-century illustration shows the hand of God emerging from a cloud, holding a scrub-brush. In this conception, housewives, the removers of filth and corruption, kept the Dutch nation an upright and honorable place.
The ideal of cleanliness is—or was—hardly unknown in America, too. For generations, millions of middle-class housewives buttressed their tireless domestic efforts with the sure knowledge that an orderly home was a wholesome home. But then came feminism, and the female obsession with career, and everything changed.
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Cheryl Mendelson grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1950’s. Her paternal and maternal grandmothers—one Italian, the other Anglo-American—taught her how to keep house. They were both traditionalists, albeit from different traditions. The Anglo-American believed that ironing was the queen of the household arts. The Italian believed that beds should be aired out, and never ironed.
But Mendelson left all that behind when, like many women of her generation, she went off to college and then, as she writes here, “threw myself into studying, writing, and an academic career.” A Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester was followed by a law degree from Harvard and excruciatingly long hours as a young attorney. “My apartment was like a hotel room,” she confides. “I did not cook, listen to music, or knit. I hired someone to clean. . . . I felt like a cog in a machine.”
If young women of her generation actively chose this way of life, they were also, in Mendelson’s retrospective judgment, pushed into it. They were pushed first of all by their parents, who “thought that they had nothing to teach us, their children, about housekeeping because our homes were going to be completely different from theirs.” The parents’ assumption was that domestic technology would soon make their own habits obsolete, but in fact the pace of domestic technological change slowed dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. Although a kitchen of 1955 was indeed startlingly different from a kitchen of 1915, today’s kitchen, aside from the presence of a microwave and a few other gadgets, is not all that different from a kitchen of the 50’s.
But another factor was at work as well. In those first years of mass feminism, many mothers abstained in principle from teaching their daughters the arts of housekeeping. Mendelson has a subtle explanation for this. It was not (as conventional feminist wisdom has it) that these mothers devalued or felt trapped by housework but—quite to the contrary—that they valued it so highly. This was, Mendelson notes, their own special realm. In effect, they were telling their daughters: “Housekeeping is my consolation prize; it won’t be fair if you get this and the career too.” But the result was that, to an unprecedented degree, young women entered adulthood without a core knowledge of how to cook or keep a home.
For Mendelson, at least, her new life was unsatisfying. A series of domestic awakenings—during her first marriage, she came home in a rainstorm to find three muddy dogs curled up on her unmade bed, and burst out crying—led eventually to the realization that she actually enjoyed taking care of both things and people. Soon she was collecting old household manuals, and “before long, I had a home once more, and living in it made me feel like a new person.”
The knowledge she has since acquired is compiled in this large and daunting book. There are chapters on how to iron and fold, and there are chapters on what sort of utensils are needed for a well-equipped kitchen. Domestic illiterates, who include just about everybody from the baby boom on down, will learn that potatoes should be stored apart from apples (gases from the former may make the latter sprout) and how to determine the thread count of a shirt (get a magnifying glass and, with the aid of a needle, count off the number of warp yarns in a quarter-inch square, then multiply by eight).
This is not a simple out-of-the-workplace-and-back-to-the-kitchen book. Mendelson writes like a piercing Harvard Law graduate who just happens to be explaining how to clean a bathroom rather than how to conduct a mergers-and-acquisition negotiation, and her index reveals that she has spent her share of library hours with the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. But she does lay down a brilliant and bracing defense of household work as against professional work. If you want boring drudgery, she writes, become a lawyer. Work at home, by contrast, offers at least as many satisfactions as the office—and then some. The “sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease.”
It is hard to know what not to praise in Home Comforts. The vast bulk of it is devoted to encyclopedia-style helpful hints and scientific explanations concerning a vast range of household duties and problems, and makes for consistently wonderful reading. As for the first 50 or so pages, which contain Mendelson’s polemical defense of home, they present a tightly reasoned set of arguments that are reminiscent of the best political rhetoric. We have undergone a social revolution in this country, with changing sexual roles at the heart of it, and in the tumult many important things have been forgotten. While we will never go back to the pre-Revolutionary era, much of the wisdom of the ancien régime—whether it is the superiority of traditionalist baseball stadiums, or the value of traditionally structured families, or the importance of housework—is finally being retrieved. In that sense, Home Comforts is itself part of an extremely comforting trend.
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