Women Speak About Housework
This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-2, Mar-Apr 1979)
“HOUSE should not be prisons but bases to get to know the world. It seems ridiculous that women are chained to their houses, their gas-stoves, their curtains and carpets. A housewife is exactly what the word implies – a woman married to a house, and she has to marry the house to somebody else before she can go out to work. The urban housewife makes a religion of housework… How else can you explain washing, cleaning, polishing, even
when everything is spotless! What a waste of women power!”– GERMAINE GREER
Housework is not just a waste of womanpower because it keeps women tied to monotonous drudgery. It is worse – it is unacknowledged as work, unrecognized by society. How often I myself have been guilty of asking women, “Do you work?” when the question should have been, “Are you paid for your work?” or “Do you work outside the house as well ?” The answer too is characteristic : “No, I’m just a housewife”!