Housework Quotes

There is satisfaction in seeing one's household prosper; in being both bountiful and provident.

[On women's role in the home:] Every wife, mother and housekeeper feels at present that there is some screw loose in the household situation.

I think it's just different to get married for a woman than it is for a man. The amount of work to overcome certain gender roles in the partnership - just the expectation of housework, kid-work, whatever it is.

For women the wage gap sets up an infuriating Catch-22 situation. They do the housework because they earn less, and they earn lessbecause they do the housework.

I always thought a yard was three feet, then I started mowing the lawn.

Remember, 'No one's more important than people'! In other words, friendship is the most important thing--not career or housework, or one's fatigue--and it needs to be tended and nurtured.

And just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women's work at home, while only the doing of little things, like the golden gleam of sunlight runs through and brightens all the fabric of civilization.

Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.

Domesticity was meat and drink to Mouse, and she liked taking care of people. She had done it for so long that it had become a habit with her.

The liberation of women from exclusive domesticity did not originate in feminist books, or a war, or a big inflation, although they contributed to its progress. The rising enrollment of women in the paid labor force is a straightforward consequence of the industrial revolution of two hundred years ago.

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.

There are two kinds of people in the world - those who have a horror of a vacuum and those with a horror of the things that fill it. Translated into domestic interiors, this means people who live with, and without, clutter.

Spring is the usual period for house-cleaning and removing the dust and dirt which, notwithstanding all precautions, will accumulate during the winter months from dust, smoke, gas, etc.

Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confesssion any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation.

But the majority of mothers work - and are responsible for taking care of the kids and home. And more fathers are spending more time doing child care and housework, and still working long hours. That work-life conflict is weighing on everybody.

Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?

A man's home is his castle, and his wife is the janitor

You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.

It's more pressure on women to - if they marry or partner with someone, to partner with the right person. Because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with your children if you are also doing all of the housework and child care.

Nothing a housewife does is of value in capitalist terms because it does not take place on the market and therefore does not contribute to the Gross National Product.

Mothers, are you so busy with social life, [with projects], with clubs, with working out of the home, or with housework, that you have not time to sit down and talk to your little girls and tell them the things they should know when they are nine, and ten, and eleven, and older? Can you be frank and loving to them so that they in turn can be frank in giving you their confidences?

Is it possible that my sons-in-law will do toilets? If we raise boys to know that diapers need to be changed and refrigerators need to be cleaned, there's hope for the next generation.

Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials -- to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning up--jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. But dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o'clock, whereas the car oil needs to be changed every six months, any day around that time, any time that day.... Men thus have more control over when they make their contributions than women do.

Do not let a flattering woman coax and wheedle you and deceive you; she is after your barn.

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

What I object to is the hyper-fetishized wedding day, the prioritizing of wedding over marriage. I have a real problem with couples spending far more time discussing the seating arrangement or the color of the bridesmaid's gowns than hashing out, for instance, their feelings about how they intend to handle questions of housework, child-rearing, finances and fidelity for the next four or five decades.

Old houses mended, Cost little less than new before they're ended.

I met an American woman and got married so I had to get a job.

The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.

There is the problem of unpaid labor, such as housework, which represents millions and millions of unsalaried work hours and on which masculine society is firmly based. To put an end to this would be to send the present-day capitalist system flying in a single blow. Only we can't do it by ourselves; there have to be other kinds of attacks on the system. So a certain alliance with revolutionary systems is necessary, even masculine ones.

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.

Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization.

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

I was not too stupid to learn, but too smart. Some instinct must have warned me that a woman accomplished in the domestic arts is frequently enslaved by them.

It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.

What is the problem of women's freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity--housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.