Doing Housework Quotes & Sayings

Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity. — Erma Bombeck

When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework. — Sheryl Sandberg

I take pride in taking care of all the housework so that my wife, who works as a designer for Martha Stewart, won't need to sacrifice any of her leisure time when she gets home. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

A 'harmonized' life these days sounds like a tall order. Between housework, homework, workwork, and busywork, there are perpetually too many things to do, and not enough time to find that mythical balance. Nothing is more frustrating than feeling like you're doing doing doing but getting nothing truly done that you really want. — Jack Canfield

My mother made me do all the housework as a boy. I still do it, even in hotels. — Ernest Borgnine

Marrying Gretchen is a good idea, darling; I would enjoy bringing her up. Teaching her to shoot, helping her with her first baby, coaching her in how to handle a knife, working out with her in martial arts, all the homey domestic skills a girl needs in this modern world. — Robert A. Heinlein

The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they'd never clean anything. — Dave Barry

No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father's labor purchased the family's provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework.

The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands' wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since. — Stephanie Coontz

Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn't likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn't remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance. — Erma Bombeck

Housework can kill you if done right. — Erma Bombeck

My parents were very well-off, but we didn't have a crazy-huge house. We didn't have thousands of workers and staff; it was just my mum doing the majority of the housework. We didn't have nannies. I wasn't brought up in any sort of extravagant way. — Petra Stunt

Housework is like cleaning fish. No matter how often you do it, it still stinks. — Thelma Harper

In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework. — Lynn Coady

Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine. — Barbara Kolb

As they passed the rows of houses they saw through the open doors that men were sweeping and dusting and washing dishes, while the women sat around in groups, gossiping and laughing.
What has happened?' the Scarecrow asked a sad-looking man with a bushy beard, who wore an apron and was wheeling a baby carriage along the sidewalk.
Why, we've had a revolution, your Majesty
as you ought to know very well,' replied the man; 'and since you went away the women have been running things to suit themselves. I'm glad you have decided to come back and restore order, for doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City.'
Hm!' said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. 'If it is such hard work as you say, how did the women manage it so easily?'
I really do not know,' replied the man, with a deep sigh. 'Perhaps the women are made of cast-iron. — L. Frank Baum

I don't really know why it matters so much. Ian could be better at talking than me, or cooking, or working, or housework, or saving money, or earning money, or spending money, or understanding books or films; he could be nicer than me, better-looking, more intelligent, cleaner, more generous-spirited, more helpful, a better human being in any way you care to mention ... and I wouldn't really mind. Really. I accept and understand that you can't be good at everything, and I am tragically unskilled in some very important areas. But sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don't know why. — Nick Hornby

To be a living sacrifice will involve all my time. God wants me to live every minute for Him in accordance with His will and purpose, sixty minutes of every hour, twenty-four hours of every day, being available to Him. No time can be considered as my own, or as "off-duty" or "free." I cannot barter with God about how much time I can give to serve Him. Whatever I am doing, be it a routine salaried job, or housework at home, be it holiday time and free, or after-work Christian youth activities, all should be undertaken for Him, to reveal His indwelling presence to those around me. The example of my life must be as telling as my preaching if He is to be honored. — Helen Roseveare

Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom's Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room. — Anna Garlin Spencer

Which brings us to a little book that may provide a clue to the cure. My wife got it as a gift from a friend. It is titled Porn for Women. It's a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework. There's a picture of a well-cut Adonis, and he's loading the washing machine. The caption reads: "As soon as I finish the laundry, I'll do the grocery shopping. And I'll take the kids with me so you can relax." There's another hunk, the cover guy, vacuuming the floor. A particularly athletic-looking man peers up from the sports section and declares, "Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we'll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair". Porn for Women. Available at a marriage near you. — Anonymous

I watched my mother waste her life on housework and swore I'd never do that. Dave does the cooking. — Siobhan Fahey

If we're going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we're going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power - one that no longer contains either the super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs - to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history. — David Graeber

There's plenty of housework to be done here on Earth, and our commitment to it must be steadfast. But we're the kind of species that needs a frontier - for fundamental biological reasons. Every time humanity stretches itself and turns a new corner, it receives a jolt of productive vitality that can carry it for centuries. — Carl Sagan

Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework. — Francoise Sagan

No amount of flowers or pretty compliments could ever measure up to a man who did housework. — Karin Slaughter

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. — Simone De Beauvoir

I do my housework in the nude. It gives me an incentive to clean the mirrors as quickly as possible. — Maxine

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. — Quentin Crisp

A marriage is hard work and sometimes it's a bit of a bore. It's like housework. It's never finished. You've just got to grit your teeth and keep working away at it, day after day. — Liane Moriarty

While I think men and women are equal, they are also different and I think it's inevitable and I don't think it's a bad thing at all that we always have, say, more women doing things like physiotherapy and an enormous number of women simply doing housework. — Tony Abbott

World." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework - Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It — Sinclair Lewis

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Want to be an AWESOME mom?
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
TAKE TIME FOR YOURSELF
and REWARD YOURSELF
Vent and cry if you need to. Say how you feel. Ask for help. Stop comparing yourself to other moms. Walk away from senseless toxic drama. Forget about the housework. Escape from reality every now and then. Take a hot bath. Take a nap. Lose yourself in a book. Pamper yourself. Go to the spa. Buy something for YOU. Go out to eat. Order in. Have a few drinks. Go out with the girls. Plan a date night. Go see a movie. Dance the night away. Celebrate LIFE. Celebrate YOURSELF. It's NOT selfish. It's necessary and important. — Tanya Masse

Mindful living is an art. You do not have to be a monk or living in a monastery to practice mindfulness. You can practice it anytime, while driving your car or doing housework. Driving in mindfulness will make the time in your car joyful, and it will also help you avoid accidents. You can use the red traffic light as a signal of mindfulness, reminding you to stop and enjoy your breathing. Similarly, when you do the dishes after dinner you can practice mindful breathing, so the time dish washing is pleasant and meaningful. You do not feel you have to rush. If you hurry, you waste the time of dish washing. The time you spend washing dishes and doing all your other everyday tasks is precious. It is a time for being alive. When you practice mindful living, peace will bloom during your daily activities. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I enjoy doing housework, ironing, washing, cooking, dishwashing. Whenever I get one of those questionaires and they ask what is your profession, I always put down housewife. It's an admirable profession, why apologize for it. You aren't stupid because you're a housewife. When you're stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare. — Tasha Tudor

Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her cleaning lady. A holiday with Theo and the children represented two weeks of domestic and maternal drudgery. — Amanda Craig

Machines help us do things more quickly and efficiently, but they can also destroy some community activities. Machines can also throw the weakest people out of work and this would be sad, because their small contribution to the housework or cooking is their way of giving something to the community. People who are capable of doing things very quickly with the help of machines become tremendously busy, always active, in charge of everyone - a bit like machines themselves. — Jean Vanier

I'm one of nine sisters. My parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin. My father didn't believe in girls doing farm work. Girls did housework, and he hired young men to do farm work. I would have preferred to be outside. — Diane Hendricks

Proverbs 7:11-12 - These verses describe, of all things, an adulteress. She is doing the opposite of the wise homemaker who tends to her house and housework. She is "out there," walking the streets, instead of being at home. "Her feet would not stay at home. At times she was outside, at times in the open square, lurking at every corner. — Elizabeth George

No one likes doing chores. In happiness surveys, housework is ranked down there with commuting as activities that people enjoy the least. Maybe that's why figuring out who does which chores usually prompts, at best, tense discussion in a household and, at worst, outright fighting. — Emily Oster

It occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over. — Haruki Murakami

Who knows what light housework means? One nun's light could be another nun's penal servitude. — Maeve Binchy

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. — Sheryl Sandberg

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space. — Joyce Carol Oates

On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur. — Evelyn Underhill

[W]hether it is debates over men sharing housework and child-rearing, the 'crisis' of marriage and behind that the broader crisis of male-female relationships in adjusting to social change, or the increased sympathy for (or at least tolerance of) lesbian and gay demands for equal legal rights, all these developments in heterosexuality are usually approached and conceptualised in piecemeal form and rarely provoke any debate about the changing nature of heterosexuality itself. — Richard Dunphy

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you. - Erma Bombeck — Lynn Kellan

You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin. — Kate Millett

Advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework. — Mary Frances Berry

We grow up going to school, where you get a gold star, you get the A-plus," she says. "At work you're constantly being evaluated. Then you become a homemaker and suddenly nobody is giving you feedback. Suddenly no one is paying attention to what you're doing. Blogging is a way to get this validation from other people. You put up a recipe and people go, 'Hey, that's a great photograph.'" Clearly blogs can give emotional value to housework. But if a blogger is actually making money from a blog, even a little bit of money, it cane make the blog even more validating. — Emily Matchar

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

You ain't old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen or cut up vegetables. Had this big starch mango tree when I was small. Anytime I set myself to climb it, there was always a woman passing by to yell at me and tell me to get down. Asked me why I leaving my poor mother to do all the housework. I never got to the top. It was like God was always watching, ready to send another hag to tell me down. Then, one day, they cut down the tree. — Kevin Jared Hosein

My earliest memories of my mom were of her multi-tasking - preparing dinner while checking on homework and housework; clearing the dinner plates while setting out bowls for breakfast; making sure we ate our breakfast while lining up bread, lunch meats, apples, and snacks assembly-line style so we could make our lunches. — Christine Pelosi

Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men - cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? I was going to say that perhaps women are born with a cooking gene until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world - who are given the fancy title of "chef" - are men. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She was fairly good at any kind of housework not demanding brains. Nobody could say why some of Ossian Popham's gifts of mind and conversation had not descended to his children, but though the son was not really stupid at practical work, Lallie Joy was in a perpetual state of coma. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

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. — Toni Morrison

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain. — Fawn M. Brodie

My girlfriend is much better than I am at working hard then resting, and she demands that from me, too. She insists on having time when we don't do anything. We leave the housework and watch a movie. — Cynthia Nixon

longitudinal study of people over age 75, conducted over a period of 21 years by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, looked at whether activities from playing cards to swimming to doing housework affected cognitive ability. Almost none of the physical activities had any effect on dementia rates except for one: partner dancing, which lowered the risk by 76 percent. No other activity came anywhere near being as effective at protecting people from cognitive decline!3 — Christiane Northrup

The cruel irony of housework:
people only notice when you don't do it. — Danielle Raine

Housework hassles go on, are never resolved, and will probably extend into the afterlife ('Why am I the one who takes the clouds to the dry cleaners?'). — Marni Jackson

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America. — David Laskin

Housework would never be her crowning achievement, the life's work for which she'd be known. — Gail Anderson-Dargatz

To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs. — Chuck Palahniuk

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Women work overtime, do double triple duty, juggle ten balls at once
children, careers, husbands, schoolwork, housework, church work, and more work
and when one of the balls drops, we think something is wrong with us. — Susan L. Taylor

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. — Brigid Schulte