Diana Gabaldon Quotes

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

Not only is women's work never done, the definition keeps changing.

Women work and feel like they have to take care of so many details. Sometimes they don't get much help from their husbands.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

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

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.

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

Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids.

Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a 'leisure gap' between them at home. Most women work one shift in the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home.

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

Women should do kitchen work and take care of babies.

A lot of women feel like they put their ambitions on hold sometimes because they do hold down the household and that's something that has to change.

Guys should be doing laundry, doing dishes.

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.

As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

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.

Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity.

Women are dirt searchers; their greatest worth is irradicating rings on collars and tables. Never mind real-estate boards' corruption and racism, here's your soapsuds. Everything she is doing is peripheral, expendable, crucial, and non-negotiable. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

And just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women's work at home, while only the doing of little things, like the golden gleam of sunlight runs through and brightens all the fabric of civilization.

[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.

Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.

The definition of woman's work is shitwork.

We are still proprietary over the domestic realm even as we take over new professional realms, and that is a real problem.

Women spend 30 percent more time doing household chores. No surprise. But women also spend more time volunteering in their community. And if you add up all of the hours of non-leisure time, women are working more than men. So I thought that was very interesting, and I was surprised about the voluntarism piece, but when you think about it, it makes sense.

When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.