Quotes About Domesticity

She cracked a window and put on some stew.

In her minds eye she sat there, in the domesticated golden sunlight on the velvet sofa, lapped around by carpets and books and mahogany, solitary and content, as if, in fact, cloistered.

I watched a lot of television as a kid, and the suburbs to me - that was exotic! Like, a mom and dad who lived in the same house and had jobs and cooked breakfast at the same time every morning and did laundry in a washing machine and dryer? That was like, 'Woah! Who are they? How do you get to be like that?'

There's nothing quite like sitting watching the telly on a Saturday night. It has such a nice, homely feel.

I really like watching TV at home.

We had a cistern for water. My grandmother churned butter and made lye soap. She and my mother did the washing in a wash kettle outdoors, using a fire to heat the water. That's the way they did the wash until the 1950s.

I'll make a horrible housewife. It's not like I'm disgusting, but I'm pretty bad about having a drink or eating something and then leaving the plate and rushing to go.

I don't really go to clubs anymore. I'm actually quite settled. Living in Highgate with my dog and my husband and my daughter! I'm not a hell-raiser. But don't burst the bubble. Behind closed doors, for sure, I'm a hell-raiser.

After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.

What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.

I've always been a homemaker, like, I like creating spaces. Even if I stay in a hotel, I'll unpack, I'll put my books out, I'll put my camera out, I'll throw a sweater over the lamp to get better light. I am a homemaker.

I resigned myself quite contentedly to the life of a vegetable. I went to cooking school in the morning, had lunch with friends, sat in the sun with other pregnant ladies, talked, gossiped, did everything in short that's in the books including laying out my husband's slippers and smoking jacket. (I'm serious I assure you.) And the funniest part of all is that I liked it.

A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?

Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.

Also, I used to think that one day I might get someone to iron my shirts, but the truth is I really like doing them myself.

featured a sample of women's magazine article headlines from the 1950s: "Have Babies While You're Young," "Are You Training Your Daughter to Be a Wife?" "Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young," and "The Business of Running a Home"—a collection unsurprising to post-Boomer generations accustomed to hearing about the domesticity of the past.

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

I like to do things in bed. I fold the laundry on the bed. Food tastes better to me when I'm under the covers. Bed is the only place to read, the best place to talk on the phone.

The one small room the house contained was scoured as a seashell. There was a table, a chest, a bedstead with a faded quilt, a spinning wheel, and a small loom. A few ancient kettles hung about the clean-swept hearth. From a square of sunlight on the floor an enormous yellow cat opened one eye to look at them.

But the dust! And the clutter! My housewifely and scholarly instincts were equally offended.

Any man with a grain of sense knows that marriage is the only way, these days, to acquire a full-time maid who works twenty-five hours a day, with no time off and no pay except room and board. (p9)

And while I ate muffins—things I had never been able even to look at in London, but now swallowed with complacence,—and Pincher sat in front of me watching every mouthful, just as though he hadn't had an enormous dinner a few minutes before, and the cat, finished with Knobbie's ears, deftly turned her over and began tidying her stomach, I did feel that my feet were set once more in the path of peace, and that all I had to do was to continue steadily along it.

I've been trying really hard to be more domesticated. It's not in my nature to clean and cook, and so I've been really good about it.

A man who cooks is very sexy. A woman who cooks is not that sexy. Because it's associated in our mind to the domestic cliche of the woman.