Jeanette Winterson Quotes

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

Guys should be doing laundry, doing dishes.

I've always said I have nothing against a woman doing anything a man can do as long as she gets home in time to cook dinner.

In the last 25 years, we've convinced ourselves and a majority of the country that women can do what men can do. Now we have to convince the majority of the country - and ourselves - that men can do what women can do. ... Let's face it: until men are fully equal inside the home, women will never be really equal outside it.

The kind of man who thinks that helping with the dishes is beneath him will also think that helping with the baby is beneath him, and then he certainly is not going to be a very successful father.

Machismo makes no provision for preparing lunch, doing the laundry, or minding the baby.

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

The emancipation of women will only be possible if the traditional world of men also changes.

Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing "real" men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw.

The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work.

Housekeeping in common is for women the acid test.

Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

I'd like us to deliver a little message to all the men still out there who think it's the '50s, and coming home simply means watching television with a beer.

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

Over my lifetime, women have demonstrated repeatedly that they can do anything that men can do, while still managing traditional women's work at the same time. But the same expansion of roles has not been available to men.

My hunch is that probably men are doing more both outside the home and inside the home.

On the whole, as we readily acquiesce in the acknowledgment that the field and the cabinet are the proper spheres assigned to our Masters and our Lords, may we also deserve the dignified title and encomium of Mistress and Lady in our kitchens and in our parlours.

In my generation, if a man washes the dishes, the older women still tend to cluster around and coo and thank him and praise him. But if a woman washes the dishes, it's business as usual, even if both man and woman have tough office jobs.

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

And, over the last thirty years we have seen men's participation in both housework and childcare has increased and women's have stayed at about the same.

What is interesting to me is looking at how male and female writers depict men who, come in behind to fill those domestic duties, deal with personal and cultural lack of respect for doing what is lingeringly perceived as 'women's work.'

No, feminism isn't 'over.' We need it not only to challenge injustice but because the whole gender expectations thing is bad for men, too.

I've always felt heroic about my life... As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn't think that was the case at all. My parents didn't treat me as a girl.