For Valentine’s Day last year, my mother sent me a book. Not a book overtly about love. A book about housekeeping.

Coming from a woman who abhors housework, this was a curiously freighted gift. My mother grew up in the golden haze of the 1950s, one half of a Dick-and-Jane brother-sister duo, with a doting father and a disciplinarian mother who, despite a full-time schedule of professional social work, somehow managed to cook two hot meals a day for her family and keep her house impeccable.

My father, on a visit to my mother’s family, was chastened by his future mother-in-law late one night in her kitchen. He had been hoping for a midnight snack; he was tartly informed that, after dinner, the kitchen was “closed” until breakfast.

Small wonder, then, that my mother skipped off brightly into college and marriage with no idea how to cook, much less clean house. Forced to learn, she eventually figured out both, but grace under pressure was never her homemaking style. As soon as she could afford it, she hired professional help; the same energetic, efficient woman has come, every Friday, to clean my parents’ house for more than 20 years. This woman eventually became a dental hygienist and quit cleaning houses — except my mother’s. When another longtime client asked why my mother was thus favored, the reply was simple: “She needs me.”

My siblings and I grew up doing chores, but these did not include major cookery or serious scrubbing. College was my training ground; the filth that results from living with a passel of similarly ignorant roommates was a salutary shock to the household. But while I have learned to enjoy the rewards of cooking, I have yet to find deep satisfaction in cleaning. Good food, it seems, makes up for the drudgery required before and after. Shining mirrors and spotless carpets still fail to entrance.

My housewifely disinterest did not go unnoticed. So Valentine’s Day arrived with Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House. Within its pages, I would find domestic bliss. Or at least a swell doorstop; printed like a cookbook, with two columns of text per page, the book weighs more than two pounds. But Home Comforts is so much more. It is, according to the blurbs on front and back, not just “to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food” but the “bible of good housekeeping.”

In fact, it is a complete manual to domestic godhood. With instructions in everything from grocery shopping (“Shop first for inedibles”) to laundry (“Hot water gets clothes cleanest”) to overall cleanliness and comfort (“60º F is a comfortable sleeping temperature”), Home Comforts is a manifesto, an unabashed call to mops and pails. When you care for your house as Mendelson thinks you should, your dwelling will cease to be an abode and become instead that great good thing: a home. “(The) sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being,” Mendelson asserts. For Mendelson, a house that is not a home is either lifeless or, worse, a hovel. And the souls of the inhabitants are as stained as their dishtowels: “People who think badly of themselves take these feelings out on their homes.”

Home Comforts, which came out in 1999, has gone into its second paperback edition and spun off a subset sequel titled Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Linen. But Mendelson’s books are merely two of the more prominent publications in what amounts to a veritable pulpfest of products devoted to making our lives simpler, better, more organized, and a heck of a lot cleaner. More than 100 “shelter magazines,” or rags about the riches of homemaking, are published in this country, ranging from Better Homes and Gardens to Domino; 40 were launched in 2002 alone. Powell’s, my local bookstore behemoth, features an entire display of books about getting tidy; titles include Cleaning Plain & Simple, The Complete Clutter Solution, Organizing for Dummies and Confessions of an Organized Homemaker. Even my local community college offers a class called “Making Your Home a Haven.” Nobody, it seems, has a clue about managing personal space. We need people like Martha Stewart, and Cheryl Mendelson, and the editors of the Dummies series, to figure it out for us.

Unlike that upright Victorian Mrs. Beeton, who wrote earnestly about housekeeping in an era when few middle-class women expected to do anything else, none of these books can afford to plunge right into dishwashing and diapers without apologies. Mendelson’s author blurb gives it away: “Cheryl Mendelson is a Harvard Law School graduate, a sometime philosophy professor, a novelist . . . and a homemaker by choice.” Is there any doubt about the order in which she chose — chose, mind you — to try out these various careers? Is there any doubt that she felt compelled to list those careers (writer! philosopher! Harvard!) to prove that she is indeed a modern woman? Men may buy those books on organizing the home office, but it’s women, by and large, who are stuck thumbing through the chapters on dusting and scrubbing, still trying to figure out how having it all became having to do it all.

“Forty years after feminism promised to free women from drudgery, we are still talking about housework,” writes Lisa Belkin in a 2006 New York Times article. Some women, like Mendelson, have embraced it. Others are still refusing to do it. Most compromise. Belkin points out that American women, whether married or single, spend twice as much time doing housework as their male counterparts, and that housework is such a bucket of contention that marriages can trip over it. In the opening chapter of Home Comforts, a confessional titled “My Secret Life,” Mendelson admits that her first marriage dissolved amid tearful arguments over not just who cleaned house but whether housecleaning was worthwhile at all. Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestselling 2001 exposé of the working underclass, Nickel and Dimed, includes the personal reflection that hiring someone to clean your house shows not just financial privilege but a lack of moral fiber: “Partly this comes from having a mother who believed that a self-cleaned house was the hallmark of womanly virtue.” Making your house a home — whether that house is a studio apartment or a suburban mansion — shows not just respect for cleanliness but respect for yourself.

It goes almost without saying that in my house, I do the cleaning. My disgust with dirt, it turns out, is stronger than my hatred of housework. But my cleaning habits are minimal; I do not, like one mother described by Belkin, run a white-gloved finger along surfaces, looking for dust. Only once have I felt the warm glow of housekeeping, and that was when I filled the kitchen sink with bleach, walked away for 10 minutes, and returned to find gleaming enamel worthy of Mr. Clean. This, I remember thinking, is what housekeeping should be like: swift, easy, and sparkling. Just like on TV.

As a child of the 1970s, I was raised in the pleasantly naïve belief that gender roles were dead. The seminal album of those days was the children’s record “Free to Be . . . You and Me,” an aspirational collection of songs and stories that assured listeners it was all right to cry, and OK for boys to have dolls, and perfectly acceptable for girls to beat boys in footraces. It also had Carol Channing rasping through a routine about housework. “Nobody smiles doing housework,” she declared. “Housework is just no fun.” Happy housecleaning moms on TV? They’re getting paid to smile. “Little boys, little girls,” Channing urged, “make sure, when there’s housework to do, that you do it together.” A generation later, we’re still trying to put that “together” into action.

Mendelson knows she can’t do it all; she might be professor and philosopher and writer and homemaker and wife and mom, but not all day, every day. A 2006 New York Times Q&A with magazine editor Bonnie Fuller asked about the impossibility of being the perfect career mom. Fuller blithely admitted that she doesn’t bother with housework: “Your house doesn’t have to be clean . . . Dishes can pile up in the sink.” What neither woman mentions is that their incomes and marriages afford them the luxury of choice. They are not obligated to do it all, and so they don’t. Mendelson lures readers with the idea that they, too, can choose to be fabulous homemakers. But for most of us, that choice was never more than a fable.

By giving me Home Comforts, my mother was simply trying to be homey and comforting herself. I cannot resent her practical gift. Still, this is the same woman who, 25 years ago, gave me a copy of “Free to Be . . . You and Me.” The old gift pointed toward the great wide open; the new one looks resolutely inward. “It is your housekeeping,” Mendelson writes, “that makes your home alive, that turns it into . . . the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.” Home, it seems, is us.