Evan Esar Quotes

I do not devalue the role of a maid or nanny, or the stereotypical roles that some members of our family have actually done to feed our families in real life.

No laborer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -- except the housewife.

The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.

Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.

Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home.

Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.

Our economies are built on the backs of all this unpaid labor that women do.

...well, if women's work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn't being accomplished at any given moment?

Most men I know rely on women to do all the literal dirty work.

Some readers tell me, 'We always treated our maid like she was a member of the family.' You know, that's interesting, but I wonder what your maid's perspective was on that.

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

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

My mother was a housewife. My father was a garment worker.

I started working when I was seven and I was working for five dollars a night at the Met.

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

Here live women, the mothers of many children, who work at night. These women have never rested. They do not know what an unburdened hour is. Five nights a week for ten hours they work for a quarter an hour at midnight.

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.

Housewives run the home and sacrifice a lot, but many people forget that.

Guys should be doing laundry, doing dishes.