Housewife Quotes

“Some women marry houses.”
― Anne Sexton

“If she wasn't careful, she'd slide without a ripple into the gently flowing stream of her old life, pulled back under the current without a wimper of protest. Another housewife lost in the flow.”
― Kristin Hannah, On Mystic Lake

“Home is the first point of investment. The first and most important thing to invest in is your home. Make sure your house is in good condition physically and energetically, make sure you’re paid up on the household bills, make sure you’re stocked up on supplies and food, make sure your home is furnished to your style and comfort, make sure you’ve got nice plants to clean the air, nice art, nice crystals and essential oils, nice things that promote your wellbeing…. Make sure your garden is growing nutritious plants. Invest in your household and your family because they have the greatest Return on Investment. And your investment in your home will be a magnet for many other different kinds of investments.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic

“None of this was part of the plan all the girls I'd grown up with had been given. Not a written plan, unless the book about Cinderella counted. The plan was in the water we drank, the air we breathed. It was poured into the pavement on the streets we called home. Marry a nice man, one who was a good provider, and live happily, or at least comfortably, ever after.

Safe to say I'd followed the plan. I'd married a banker. Had a baby. But the plan had failed me. It left me alone huddled in a window seat with every emotion I'd refused to let myself feel seeping through my pores until the air in my bedroom was heavy with sadness and angst and confusion. (p. 235)”
― Julie Mulhern, The Deep End

“The kitchen is your natural setting as a woman and you should look beautiful, not bedraggled, in it. Whether you go to work or work at home- or both- take advantage of the opportunity the kitchen offers for expressing your wifely qualities in what you wear. Pinafores, organdies, and aprons look wonderful, as do gay cotton wrap-arounds that slip on over your dress while you make breakfast.

Too much attention is paid to kitchen equipment and decor; too little to what is worn in this setting. Why look like Cinderella's crotchety stepmother when you can be a lyrical embodiment of all that a home and hearth means!”
― Anne Fogarty, Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife

“The preparation of food also serves the soul in a number of ways. In a general sense, it gives us a valuable, ordinary opportunity to meditate quietly, as we peel and cut vegetables, stir pots, measure out proportions, and watch for boiling and roasting. We can become absorbed in the sensual contemplation of colors, textures, and tastes as, alchemists of the kitchen, we mix and stir just the right proportions.”
― Thomas Moore

“Call it arrogance or male chauvinism, the male ego just doesn’t allow a woman to participate in key issues in family. Men seldom realize that it’s the housewife who has the most difficult job in the world: waking up early, preparing breakfast, getting the children ready for school, preparing lunch, cleaning up the mess at home and so much more. Even before they can some rest, the doorbell would ring and the children are back from school. Then, the routine again, and by the end of the day, they were tired. Women in the family are the last to sleep and the first to wake up. Sometimes, even during a crisis in the family or when there is a dispute, it’s the lady of the house that stands rock solid to calm things down and face challenges head on.”
― Jagdish Joghee, The Colour of Love: Trumpets and bugles, there was music all over...

“I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. What we fear is not so much our energy may be leaking away through small outlets as that it may be going “down the drain.” We do not see the results of our giving as concretely as man does his work. In the job of home-keeping there is no raise from the boss, and seldom praise from others to show us we have hit the mark. Except for the child, woman’s creation is often invisible, especially today.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“In English she is known as a “Housewife”! In Arabic, she is known as “Rabbaitul Bait” or “The Queen of The House”
― Readbeach.com

“She felt lately as though she had served her purpose, done her job, and been dispensed with, not only by her children, but by her husband as well.”
― Danielle Steel, Answered Prayers

“COOKBOOK FOR
THE MODERN HOUSEWIFE

The cover was red with a subtle crosshatch pattern and distressed, the book's title stamped in black ink- all of it faded with age. Bordering the cookbook's cover were hints of what could be found inside. Alice tilted her head as she read across, down, across, and up the cover's edges. Rolls. Pies. Luncheon. Drinks. Jams. Jellies. Poultry. Soup. Pickles. 725 Tested Recipes.
Resting the spine on her bent knees, the cookbook dense yet fragile in her hands, Alice opened it carefully. There was an inscription on the inside cover. Elsie Swann, 1940. Going through the first few, age-yellowed pages, Alice glanced at charts for what constituted a balanced diet in those days: milk products, citrus fruits, green and yellow vegetables, breads and cereals, meat and eggs, the addition of a fish liver oil, particularly for children. Across from it, a page of tips for housewives to avoid being overwhelmed and advice for hosting successful dinner parties. Opening to a page near the back, Alice found another chart, this one titled Standard Retail Beef Cutting Chart, a picture of a cow divided by type of meat, mini drawings of everything from a porterhouse-steak cut to the disgusting-sounding "rolled neck."
Through the middle were recipes for Pork Pie, Jellied Tongue, Meat Loaf with Oatmeal, and something called Porcupines- ground beef and rice balls, simmered for an hour in tomato soup and definitely something Alice never wanted to try- and plenty of notes written in faded cursive beside some of the recipes. Comments like Eleanor's 13th birthday-delicious! and Good for digestion and Add extra butter. Whoever this Elsie Swann was, she had clearly used the cookbook regularly. The pages were polka-dotted in brown splatters and drips, evidence it had not sat forgotten on a shelf the way cookbooks would in Alice's kitchen.”
― Karma Brown, Recipe for a Perfect Wife

“The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who respects his oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared victuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and resigns himself to it as he might resign himself to being shaved by a paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher level of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the first importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for the skill that is wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere else is there more striking tendency to throw the whole business of training the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the whole business of instructing them in morals and religion upon so-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and caring for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and other such professionals, most of them mountebanks.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

“In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools.”
― Helen Brown, After Cleo

“I am not ascare to die. I am only ascare that after death I be alone. Maybe because of suicide, I go to the hell? If hell all hot and crowded and noiseful, like Christian minister on TV say, then I not care because it will be just like India. But if hell cold and quiet, with lot of snow and leaf-empty trees, and people who smile with string-thin lips, then I ascare. Because it seems so much like my life in Am'rica.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Story Hour

“Bread, however, is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house ready cooked, it is always at hand, and needs no plate and spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam, or margarine, according to the length of purse of the mother, they never, tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands, and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals in the day. Dinner may consist of anything from the joint on Sunday to boiled rice on Friday. Potatoes will play a great part as a rule, at dinner, but breakfast and tea will be bread.”
― Maud Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week

“The survey of the time spent in the home by most housewives established that, on average, they worked 75 hours a week, with overtime on Saturdays and Sundays. This did not take into account that a number of women were also doing part or full-time work outside the home.”
― Marguerite Patten, Post-War Kitchen : Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1945-54

“When your husband's eyes light up as he comes in at night, you're in sad shape if it's only because he smells dinner cooking.”
― Anne Fogarty, Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife

“The house sits on a gentle curving street that ends in a cul-de-sac. The surrounding houses are all equally attractive and well maintained, and relatively similar. People who live here are successful and settled; everyone's a little bit smug.”
― Shari Lapena, A Stranger in the House

“To some "housewife" has become a dirty word.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“Her home is her earthly lot, the expression of her social worth, and her intimate truth. Because she does nothing, she avidly seeks herself in what she has.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“But at night, when Nori sat at the kitchen table to eat the dinner that had gotten cold because he'd come home late once again from another company gathering, she waited for something to come, some insight, some feeling. As she watched him with his eyes locked to his rice bowl, she wanted to shake him, because in all her life she had never expected this kind of loneliness. Around that time, someone had handed her a cult pamphlet as she came out of the grocery store. On the flimsy cover, a middle-aged housewife was pictured as half skeleton and half flesh. On the bottom of the page it said, "Every day you are closer to your death. You are half-dead already. Where does your identity come from?" She tossed the pamphlet away almost as soon as she got it, but the picture stayed with her for a long while.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“I think you've told me thank you more in the last day than anyone else has in years. It's like--when there's a stack of dishes, if my husband actually does them , I tell him thank you. But when I do them, no one thanks me, because it's not something nice I did for someone else. It's just what I was supposed to do all along.”
― Kiersten White, Mister Magic

“What's the point of getting educated if you're going to end up stuck as a housewife?"
Jane's heard that one before. Some people find it hard to accept that housework is preferable to inflexible deadlines and bosses with no respect for personal boundaries. But after spending too many late nights making slides for men who talked shit about her in the break room, she's glad she's left that life behind. "Because I get to spend half my day shopping and watching TV.”
― Sophie Wan, Women of Good Fortune

“She's my lifeline; my tether to the world. She finally knows all my secrets, except one; that I am madly in love with her.”
― Hazel Blackwood

“Like married life itself, wife-dressing is pretty basic. It requires frank understanding of yourself, a healthy attitude toward your new responsibilities, a willingness to learn from experience, and a buoyant elation about being alive.”
― Anne Fogarty, Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife

“Women should occupy their time with things that suit their sex; cooking, cleaning, knitting, and beauty tips. Countless are those times when a woman is denounced for doing something for the mere reason that it is not for the ladies to do; says who? I got no memo detailing who does what and why.”
― Fatima Mohammed, Tear the Veil 1: 19 Extraordinary Visionaries Help Other Women Break their Silence by Sharing their Stories and Reclaiming their Legacy!

“There is great power in a housewife. Do not disregard the feminine.”
― Adrienne Posey

“He treats me like his property. But it’s all fine. I have my ways to escape from the prison he designed for me.
He likes his girls proper and innocent. Oh, hubby dearest. You haven’t a clue in the world. You’re going to regret underestimating me.
While he’s deep in dreamland, I have other things on my mind.
Blood. Revenge.
Murder.
At night is when I unleash all of my vulgar thoughts on paper.
At night is when my fantasies come alive.
At night is when I write.”
― Dolores Lane, Bloody Fingers & Red Lipstick

“I made him look bad. Because a wife who makes her own money? A wife who applied herself and became a published author? That is the worst thing a woman could ever do.
Because men are supposed to bring home the bread.
Women are just supposed to be pretty.”
― Dolores Lane, Bloody Fingers & Red Lipstick

“Why would you want to work when you don't have to?
"At some point, you have to do things for yourself," Jane says to Mei. "You'll understand once you've been worked like a dog and can't even keep track of which days you've showered."
... Mei takes this in. "It's so weird. You get good grades in high school so you can get into a good college. Then you go to a good college so you can get a good job. I thought that was the endgame."
Jane laughs. "That's the endgame of your youth. Then you start learning all those things you were working so hard for don't actually make you happy...”
― Sophie Wan, Women of Good Fortune