Quotes for writers (and people who like quotes) on HOUSEWORK because that’s the mood I’m in

Instead of the usual Sunday quote from a famous writer I thought it wouldn’t hurt to be reminded of the activities that can sometimes get in the way of creativity. (Normal service will be resumed next week after I’ve swept the kitchen floor and prepared a roast ox.)

You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping. Rudyard Kipling

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 BeauvoirAt worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived. Rose Macaulay

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. Vladimir Lenin

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 Berry

If you would like even more quotes from a writer on housework go to this post I published about six weeks ago about the American writer Erma Bombeck who could sweep a room with a glance but rarely with a broom.

Does housework get in your way? Does it stop you writing or reading or getting involved in some other creative activity?

Do you need a clean desk before you can write or does the whole house have to be clean?

We have to feed ourselves along with our families and make sure we have enough clean clothes to go out without people pointing and laughing. We can’t welcome rats, mice and other local opportunists into our homes and where we live should be more or less as tidy as our neighbours at least two days a week. But do we do too much? Not something I’ve ever been accused of – this is not a personal rant – but does it still get in the way of women being the women they want to be?

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