Do you know the difference between single and double damask? The correct distance between place settings at the dinner table? In the 21st century, you might imagine such questions are quaint reminders of a world in which men were men and women were clones of Martha Stewart. But you would be wrong. The housewife is on her way back, a trend confirmed by a publishing phenomenon in the US, where a modern version of Mrs Beeton is a runaway best seller. In Britain, women's magazines and weekend supplements are suddenly full of articles about the return of housework, characterising it not as the secret vice of intelligent women but something even scarier - a secret virtue.

Investment bankers and property consultants confess, a little shame-facedly, that they long to return from the office and get on with the dusting. "There's nothing more soothing than coming home after a day's work and doing a basket full of ironing," says one. Cheryl Mendelson, the American author of Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House, says that for years she felt she had to conceal such cravings. Not any more: 200,000 people have already staggered out of bookshops in the States clutching her 884-page volume. Her enthusiasm for knitting and making mental lists of when the carpets are due to be shampooed is now proudly out in the open.

It couldn't happen over here, could it? Think again. British housewives will soon be able to come out of the closet, thanks to Nigella Lawson. Already famous for her cooking and her cosmetic tips, Lawson's next book is entitled How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Her line is that you do not need to aim for perfection, and she boldly includes a photograph of a cake with a cracked top. Yes! Even beautiful columnists and food critics can make little mistakes! Indeed, for your domestic goddess, such charming home-made touches attest to her ease and confidence in the kitchen.

Lawson's title is at least a little bit ironic, which is more than can be said for Mendelson and her intensive programme to fill women's lives with sorting laundry, mopping floors and washing cats. (It doesn't matter that they hate water. They're unhygienic, for God's sake!) It's hard to see how Mendelson's best-selling regime is going to help women who already feel stressed and exhausted by the effort of combining motherhood, a career and housework. Marjorie Garber, an American academic celebrated in the past for her wry analyses of cross-dressing and bisexuality, goes even further, suggesting in a new book that our connection to our homes is positively erotic - a subject taken up and given serious consideration over four pages in this week's New Yorker.

So is housework the new sex, as the magazine Red asks on its cover this month? Are women getting an erotic frisson out of scrubbing sinks and spraying room freshener in newly dusted sitting rooms? Garber thinks so, suggesting that property is what the over-50s turn to when their enthusiasm for bodies becomes embarrassing. She suggests that prospective purchasers approach buying a house or apartment with a mixture of lust and shame, although this probably says more about her private insecurities than anything else. Few women have actually confessed that they get off on the scent of furniture polish instead of sweat and pheromones.

But that is not the point. The new housewife, as we might call her, is nothing to do with real life and everything to do with fantasy. And the question that is not being addressed is: if housework really is the new sex, why are men so reluctant to do it? I don't see them clamouring to starch sheets or getting erections at the prospect of dusting lampshades. Some do admit to being turned on by the sight of Annette Bening manically vacuuming in her underwear in American Beauty. But the point of the scene is that Bening is not a housewife but an estate agent, cleaning up one of the houses on her books in the hope of cleaning up metaphorically on its sale.

The word scrubber, which used to describe a woman performing that function, is now universally taken to mean a working-class woman who is sexually promiscuous. Another noun which derives from a domestic context, slattern, suggests a woman who does her work lazily and incompetently, as well as implying sexual availability. If there is a link between housework and sex, it involves class, disorder and sexual incontinence rather than Martha Stewart or Delia Smith in sparklingly clean kitchens.

So what lies behind this apparently concerted attempt to make housework sexy, exciting and fulfilling? One clue is the way women are suddenly being treated as housework virgins, previously unaware that butter should be kept in the fridge or why human beings need to eat breakfast. Since most of us have been grap pling with these tricky problems since childhood, it is obvious that what we are really being offered is a fantasy about a more traditional, and inevitably more gendered, way of life. Mendelson's index includes an astonishing 56 entries for laundering and laundry, and entire chapters on ironing and vacuuming. She tells readers how to put away linen and supplies three methods (with diagrams) of folding socks.

At first sight, it throws an ironic light on Shirley Conran's famous remark that life is too short to stuff a mushroom. But it seems unlikely that working women, already short of time, are about to squander it on cleaning ovens, washing the fridge every week, making their own clothes and learning how to turn napkins into amusing shapes. What is going on here is an outburst of nostalgia, which would be harmless enough if it did not contain subliminal messages about femininity and what women ought to be like. Less benignly, it also suggests that we live in cultures which have recognised the inefficacy of bullying women back into the kitchen and have consequently adopted a new method - seduction.

The message to working women is that you'd like it if you only tried it - or tried more of it, for every survey ever carried out confirms that men are still not doing their share of domestic chores. Some commentators even claim that men simply aren't biologically programmed to look after homes, as though ironing and cleaning those stubborn limescale stains off the loo are natural female functions. If that is the case, then some of us clearly lack the ironing gene; when a TV crew wanted to film me at home to make some arcane point about domesticity, one of them had to go up into the loft and bring down the ironing board left behind by the previous (male) owner of my house. The novelist Alice Walker seems to have a similar problem, thanking a couple of women in the acknowledgments to one of her novels for "representing the Goddess in my household". This is what the rest of us call employing a cleaner; it may be the first instance, dating back to 1992, of the current trend for recasting domestic drudgery as sacred duty. And sacred duties, as we all know, are performed out of love rather than money; as Marx pointed out in the 19th century, the world depends on unpaid domestic labour, an injustice that has yet to be redressed. Housework remains a low-status, badly paid, working-class occupation, when it is remunerated at all.

Yet the new breed of domestic goddesses and happy housewives are middle class to the core. Whether they pose fetchingly at home, surrounded by fresh herbs and bottles of balsamic vinegar, or go into rhapsodies about marketing (shopping to you), they assume they have choices. They have very little in common with mothers on council estates in Leeds or poor women in housing projects in Chicago, where Mendelson's advice to employ a "bonded maid service" must read like a bad joke. The truth about housework is that most of it is dull, repetitive and unrewarding: women's work, in other words. Feminism came along and said so, and many housewives gladly took the message to heart, allowing dust balls to accumulate under the beds and waiting to clean out the fridge until mould began to grow. What they discovered was that many traditional household chores are simply a way of filling up time, as well as filling up minds with trivia. No sensible human being, with an averagely interesting life, needs to sew her own napkins or dry dishes by hand.

But some housework is unavoidable, and there's the rub. Housework can be made more palatable in two ways, either by pretending it's fun or suggesting that it's somehow more womanly. "My own experience," writes Mendelson, "convinces me that there is still no other way to make a good home than to have attitudes toward home and domesticity modelled on those of [a] traditional woman." So there you have it: real women love housework. Let's hope they think it's worth it when they finally expire, as a friend's mother did, stretched across the bed with a duster in her hand.