Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

“Burning dinner is not incompetence but war” flips a domestic mishap into a battlefield report, and the escalation is the point. Marge Piercy isn’t interested in whether the roast is edible; she’s naming the psychic and political pressure baked into “ordinary” women’s work. The line performs a refusal: it rejects the premise that a scorched meal is evidence of personal failure. Instead it frames the kitchen as a front line where expectations, exhaustion, and surveillance collide.

Piercy’s genius is compression. “Not incompetence” swats away the easy, patronizing diagnosis: you’re bad at this. “But war” replaces it with a systemic explanation: you’re fighting. The subtext is about divided labor and divided selves. When your day is already carved up by paid work, caretaking, and the invisible management of a household, the stakes of dinner become absurdly high. A burned pan isn’t a cute anecdote; it’s what happens when you’re required to be efficient, nurturing, attractive, calm, and grateful all at once.

Context matters. Piercy writes out of second-wave feminism’s insistence that the personal is political, and this sentence is that thesis in miniature. It’s also a critique of how domestic labor is treated as both natural and morally loaded: do it flawlessly, and it “doesn’t count” as work; do it imperfectly, and it counts as character. Calling it war exposes the coercion behind the smiley apron, and turns shame into indictment.