Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn French

French’s line snaps shut like a trap: you can roll your eyes at domestic trivia all you want, but the sink is still waiting. The opening complaint - feminism reduced to a chore chart - skewers a familiar pattern in public debate, where structural critique gets domesticated into lifestyle management. It’s not that dishes are beneath feminist analysis; it’s that the conversation often becomes a way to avoid everything else. Who cares about hiring discrimination or reproductive autonomy when we can litigate sponge logistics?

Then French pivots, and the pivot is the point. “So do I. But…” concedes the impatience while refusing the escape hatch. The “damned dishes” land as both punchline and indictment: the mundane is precisely where power hides because it’s continuous, repetitive, and socially enforced. Liberation can be theorized in seminars, but inequality keeps showing up at 7:30 p.m. after dinner, when someone is tired, someone is busy, someone’s work is treated as optional and someone else’s as inevitable.

The word “always” is doing heavy lifting. French is pushing back on a strain of second-wave feminism that, at times, wanted to vault straight to the grand narrative - patriarchy, capitalism, the state - without dwelling in the stubborn microeconomics of home life. Her subtext is blunt: if a movement can’t account for the unglamorous labor that keeps bodies and households running, it will keep reproducing the very hierarchies it’s trying to dismantle. The dishes aren’t a distraction; they’re evidence.