Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Amanda Foreman for the Wall Street Journal. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Illustration credit: Thomas Fuchs

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Ever since Adam and Eve rejected nudity as a lifestyle choice, women have wondered how it is that men always wriggle out of doing the laundry. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, has done the world a favor by telling men to be “a real partner” in family life and not just the BBQ guy on weekends. Whether they will heed her call and actually do an entire laundry cycle on their own remains to be seen.

In the eyes of Procter & Gamble, the “Laundry Spring” has already taken place. Last year P&G turned its back on 66 years of cheerful stereotyping and approved a Tide commercial that featured (gasp) a male actor, albeit a gorgeous, hunky one who caressed his laundry like a pro.

Before Ms. Sandberg gets all the credit for pointing out the obvious, it’s worth recalling the lessons offered by Blanche Ebbutt in her popular marriage manual “Don’ts for Husbands,” published in 1913. At the beginning of chapter 2, Ebbutt warns, “Don’t think that if you married merely to get an unpaid housekeeper that position is going to satisfy your wife. She could have obtained a good salary as a professional housekeeper to any other man if she had wanted to: she married for other reasons.”

Returning to this theme in Chapter 3, Ebbutt seems to be speaking from the heart when she declares: “Don’t be unsympathetic if your wife’s worries seem to you to be trivial. You haven’t tried to run a house with tiresome servants and ailing children, and you don’t realize what a strain it is at times, and how molehills become mountains, because there are so many of them piled on to each other.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Amanda Foreman is the author of the award-winning best seller, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (HarperCollins UK; Random House US), and A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided (Allen Lane UK; Random House US). She lives in New York with her husband and five children.

She is the daughter of Carl Foreman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of many film classics including The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, and The Guns of Navarone. Amanda was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in England. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York. She received her doctorate in Eighteenth-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998.

In addition to regularly writing and reviewing for newspapers and magazines, Amanda Foreman has also served on a number of juries including The Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Prize and the National Book Awards. A World on Fire has been optioned by BBC Worldwide. To check out all of her WSJ articles, please click here.