Look Homeward, Angel
SIDAK, MELINDA LEDDEN
Look Homeward, Angel Cheryl Mendelson brings Mrs. Beeton's Household Management up to date. BY MELINDA LEDDEN SIDAK It is a paradox of our time that even as the average size of American houses...
...How does a nearly nine hundred-page guide to everything you could want to know about maintaining a home—from the type of fabric best for dish cloths to the chemistry of cleaning solutions—wind up on the bestseller list...
...There is one woman, a very well-known public figure, feminist, intellectual, you know...
...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...
...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...
...Housekeeping actually offers more opportunities for savoring achievement than almost any other work I can think of...
...Focusing on her education and career, Mendelson for many years supMelinda Ledden Sidak is a housewife and writer in suburban Washington, D.C...
...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...
...It's a craft and I think all crafts deserve respect...
...Home Comforts, more than the presidential race, is what everyone is talking about...
...According to Mendelson, the same holds true for housekeeping...
...It was this gap that Mendelson set out to remedy...
...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...
...What it also reflects, however, is a sort of revival and restoration of traditional verities...
...When she decided she no longer wanted to live in an untidy home that felt like a hotel, she knew what to do...
...Celebrity and noncelebrity women are coming out of the closet about their passion for domesticity...
...Far from being mindless, repetitive drudgery unfit for anyone with a college degree, housekeeping—as Men-delson's manifesto reminds us—provides a wealth of cognitive challenges...
...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...
...Cheryl Mendelson is a prototypical high-achieving baby boomer, with a doctorate in philosophy and a Harvard law degree...
...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...
...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...
...By virtue of the low esteem into which housekeeping has fallen, Mendelson shoulders a task that would never have occurred to Isabella Beeton...
...The example of this approach that delighted me the most is her "broken window theory" of neatening...
...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...
...Beeton's Book of Household Management, is being reissued in Britain this month and in this country later this year...
...Housekeeping comprises the ability to find, evaluate and use information about nutrition, cooking, chemistry and biology, health, comfort, laundry, cleaning and safety...
...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...
...There's even a religious revival, as more and more people discover that material acquisition can't satisfy our deepest longings...
...Being perceived as excessively domestic can get you socially ostracized...
...Bette Midler confided to Oprah, "I don't see why people put down housekeeping...
...Mendelson is the recipient of a stream of confessions from the previously closeted...
...Housekeeping is a forgotten craft, its secrets lost and its routines denounced as drudgery...
...Rather, Home Comforts is the modern successor to the venerable 1861 classic Mrs...
...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...
...Applied to crime, the theory holds that a single broken window that goes unrepaired signals that no one cares and encourages further vandalism...
...Her model was neither the hinting Heloise nor the project-obsessed Martha Stewart...
...And, as she correctly states, of all professionals, "it is actually lawyers who are most familiar with the experiences of unintelligent drudgery...
...The book has already gone into its seventh printing and sold more than 160,000 copies...
...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...
...I do it all myself.'" Even more striking, Mendelson's venerable predecessor, Mrs...
...I get phone calls from people, famous people...
...You need to exercise creative intelligence to solve problems and devise solutions...
...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...
...The typical how-to manual does well if it sells 20,000 copies...
...It's now okay to acknowledge that children do best with a mother and father married to each other...
...I think all of us have tasted life with the home part reduced, and we don't like it...
...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...
...As she explains, I belong to the first generation of women who worked more than they stayed home...
...She says: 'Cheryl, I've never had a cleaner in my life...
...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...
...The comprehensive housekeeping manuals popular in the nineteenth century had been transformed into either random collections of housekeeping "hints" or arts-and-crafts projects...
...My Secret Life” sets the tone for the rest of the book, all of which is characterized by wonderful, entertaining writing...
...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...
...BY MELINDA LEDDEN SIDAK It is a paradox of our time that even as the average size of American houses has risen, our ability to care for our homes has declined...
...Beeton's Book of Household Management, a thousand-page encyclopedia of cooking and housekeeping...
...pressed her true nature...
...She brings the mindset of a public policy wonk and applies it to running a house...
...This uplifting quality of Home Comforts is what drives the book's unexpected success...
...Mendelson doesn't simply tell you how to dust furniture and vacuum the carpet...
...The domestic equivalent of an unrepaired broken window can result in a chain reaction that eventually sees the home in complete chaos...
...Why Home Comforts has struck such a responsive chord is almost as interesting as the book itself...
...What, then, explains the popularity of Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House...
...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...
...Most people today can admit that a mother and a day-care center are not interchangeable...
...Luckily, she had grown up on a farm and received a thorough education in housekeeping from her two grandmothers...
...And now the success of Cheryl Mendelson's book reminds us once again that there's no place like home...
...These routines echo the rhythm of life, and the housekeeping rhythm is the rhythm of the body...
...Each of its regular routines brings satisfaction when it is completed...
Vol. 5 • March 2000 • No. 26
