Spin-Cycle Guru

By Andrea Sachs

You might imagine that the author of a book called Laundry is a poor drudge chained to her Maytag. Not so. Cheryl Mendelson has worked as a philosophy professor and a corporate lawyer. Her first book, Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House, was a surprise best seller. Her latest expands encyclopedically on the art and technical tricks of sorting, cleaning, drying and ironing clothes and linens. TIME met with Mendelson:

What made you give up law to become a housework expert? I began to feel very wistful and nostalgic and think there was a great deal to [housework]. Also, I thought that the women who had done it were so misunderstood. I adored them. They were my heroes--my grandmothers and my aunts who taught me.

In your new book, you wax poetic about doing laundry. Why? It may be that part of my pleasure is the pleasure of the released prisoner. I remember very well what it was like in my childhood in a very backward part of the country [Appalachia]. We had this tub with a wringer, and it was an ordeal. The day my mother did wash, she was irritable because she was tired and she hated it. The rain would come, and the wash wouldn't dry. So when you finally have these machines and all you do is make decisions and push things, or you wash something out by hand with a nice-smelling soap, this is pleasure. In a life in which most of our activity is cerebral, physical work is a great relief and pleasure.

You caught flak from some feminists for Home Comforts. Did they think you were trying to put women back in the kitchen? They would say it without even opening the book. I try to say that all these things are extremely valuable and there's absolutely no reason why a man can't do them as well as a woman. A sharing of the housework is what we've got to have.

Why don't more men pitch in? That's a million-dollar question. It's possible that in the younger generations there is movement, although I must say that the more profound movement seems to be toward both sexes doing no housework.

What's so important about housework? If you want to have a democratic society in which people are capable of voting rationally and governing their own fates, you really are imagining a society in which the private home plays a pre-eminent role. But you have a whole generation of people who basically do not know what it is to center their lives in a private home. They don't eat at home. They don't entertain at home. They have no center where they reconnoiter and refine what they think. The economic pressures that the middle class is under are making this worse.

Do you do all your own cleaning now? I don't. I have help one day a week, but I do all the laundry.

How is your husband about housework? He strongly feels that it's half his. He does all the washing of dishes. We try to divide it on the basis of what we each like to do.

Do you have a favorite laundry product? It's a matter of using what's appropriate for the job. All detergents are good. I like simple ones: no softeners, no bleaches. Just plain detergent.