Quotes About Domesticity

The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.

I can take care of a house, and some people I meet, I think, 'You don't even know how to make a bed.'

Washing the men's clothes, caring for their rooms, serving them at table, listening to their orations, but themselves remaining respectfully silent in public assemblages, the Oberlin "coeds" were being prepared for intelligent motherhood and a properly subservient wifehood. (Flexner 1959:30)

Can we talk now?" she asked. "Nay, we need to . . . load the dishwasher." He padded into the kitchen and took his time rinsing everything in the sink before stacking it into the machine. He even scrubbed the pot he'd warmed the soup in. When he closed the dishwasher, she was waiting there, holding a mop. She offered it to him. "Do you want to clean the floors now? And sweep the porch? I think the antlers on the moose head need polishing.

I've married a man who owns nine cows, said Jinjur to Ozma, and now I am happy and contented and willing to lead a quiet life and mind my own business. Where is your husband? asked Ozma. He is in the house, nursing a black eye, replied Jinjur, calmly. The foolish man would insist upon milking the red cow when I wanted him to milk the white one; but he will know better next time, I am sure.

I could be a housewife… I guess I've vacuumed a couple of times.

Aprons don't hold us back-- they take us back

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

Si eres una hembra y tenías talento, la vida resultaba una trampa, no importaba el camino que eligieras. O te sumergías en la vida doméstica (y tenías fantasías a lo Walter Mitty para fugarte) o suspirabas por la vida doméstica en todo tu arte. Nunca podías escapar a la condición de hembra. El conflicto estaba escrito en tu mismísima sangre. Miedo a volar

Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel reading, theatre going, card playing and formal visits … The custom of turning wives into ladies 'languishing in listlessness' as ornamental status objects spread downwards through the social scale. 4

Scholars of English literature have tried to chart the construction of domesticated femininity, although there is a certain confusion as to whether the new domestic woman was the epitome of bourgeois personality, or was an ornament shared by the middling ranks and the landed.

At 2, I start preparing fish or chicken for dinner. I don't drive. I don't have hobbies. I have no desire to travel.

I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.

It is funny, the things you miss about a more conventional lifestyle. I miss seemingly mundane tasks, like cleaning the kitchen, moving my furniture around to achieve just the right look, and checking the mailbox. I miss making my bed in the morning before work.

It was as if someone had called to this boom of babies sired by the domesticity-starved veterans of World War II, "Ye shall be as gods." And they believed it. Because they were told it all the time.

Ironing was an act of annihilation in which wrinkles would die and give way to order: something she required more than anything.

Then the fire was shining on the hearth, the cold and the dark and the wild beasts were all shut out, and Jack the brindle bulldog and Black Susan the cat lay blinking at the flames in the fireplace. Ma sat in her rocking chair, sewing by the light

To be a wife was to cook. Not to eat—that was a different matter entirely—but to cook.

At Cornell she had discovered that domesticity had a brain; here, in the beloved, safe home that was entirely hers, she was learning that it had a heart.

I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.

had been happy to play the part of a Brontë heroine if it meant she wouldn't have to learn how to cook.

I lead a simple life. I feed the fish. I walk the dogs. I cook dinner. Occasionally I take a meeting.

There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.

The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.