Housework never really bothered me... what bothered me about it

Hear the words of Alice Munro, the teller of quiet truths and the chronicler of women’s hidden lives: “Housework never really bothered me... what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life... when you’re a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn’t the fact that you do the laundry.” These words are not a complaint about laundry or sweeping or dust. They are a revelation of something deeper, a cry from within the walls of countless homes: that the greatest burden is not labor itself, but the expectation that one’s entire existence should be confined to it.

For in every age, women have carried the weight of housework. To cook, to clean, to wash, to mend—these are tasks that bind the body to rhythm and repetition. Munro confesses that she did not despise such work; it was not the laundry that crushed her spirit. Rather, it was the demand that she be defined by it, as though her worth were measured only by the tidiness of a room, the warmth of a meal, the shine of a floor. Here lies the heart of her wisdom: that what diminishes the soul is not toil itself, but the loss of space—the space to dream, to think, to create.

This truth has been written in the lives of many. Consider Sylvia Plath, poet of fire and sorrow, who wrestled with the suffocation of her domestic roles. She loved her children fiercely, tended to her home faithfully, yet raged inwardly at the stifling expectation that her greatest labor was to be invisible. Her poetry broke through those walls, becoming her weapon against erasure. Like Munro, she revealed that the true anguish of women was not the weight of chores, but the constant interruption of self—the denial of uninterrupted time to pursue thought, art, or growth.

Munro herself chose another path. She wrote in secret moments—while children napped, while pots simmered, while laundry dried on the line. Out of those fragments of time, she built stories that later won the Nobel Prize. She proved that even in the midst of domestic expectations, the flame of creativity could endure. Yet her words still remind us of the cost: that the labor of housework is not the enemy, but the prison of expectation that it must be the whole of a woman’s life.

Let us then see the broader teaching: every human soul requires space—the sanctuary of time unbroken, the freedom to dwell in thought, the quiet to pursue its own calling. To deny this is to suffocate not only women, but any person shackled by the world’s narrow demands. For how many men, too, are pressed into roles where they are allowed no silence, no freedom to dream, only the grind of labor without reflection? Munro’s words speak to all who long for more than duty: that to be human is to need room for the inner life.

The lesson is sharp and clear. Do not measure a person’s worth by the work they do in the home or beyond it. Respect the tasks, but never reduce a life to them. Give yourself and others the gift of space—time to think, to read, to wander, to create. Guard it fiercely, for it is in these moments of stillness that the soul expands, that visions arise, that one’s true life is lived.

Therefore, O listeners, do not despise the laundry, but do not surrender your whole existence to it either. Fulfill your duties with grace, but claim for yourself the sacred ground of uninterrupted time. Let no voice tell you that your life must be swallowed by chores, or by any one role. Instead, carve out the space where your spirit may breathe, and there plant the seeds of your truest self. For in that space, you will find the freedom that lifts you beyond expectation, and the strength to create something enduring.