"Not only is women's work never done, the definition keeps changing"
About this Quote
A good sports line can do two things at once: land fast, then keep landing after you think you got it. Copeland’s twist on the old proverb “a woman’s work is never done” doesn’t just modernize it; it exposes the rigged mechanics underneath. The first half nods to the familiar grind of domestic and care labor. The second half is the gut punch: it’s not only endless, it’s unstable. The job description isn’t written in pencil; it’s rewritten mid-shift.
That “definition” is doing a lot of work. It points to the invisible management of expectations that follows many women through home and workplace: standards that ratchet upward, boundaries that blur, and responsibilities that quietly migrate to whoever is most reliable. Clean isn’t clean enough, “helping” becomes “handling,” flexibility becomes availability. When the goalposts move, failure becomes easy to manufacture and success becomes hard to measure. That’s how exhaustion turns into a personality flaw rather than a structural problem.
Coming from an athlete, the line carries extra bite because sport is supposed to be the cleanest arena of rules, roles, and scoreboards. Copeland is essentially saying: imagine playing a game where the clock never stops and the rules committee keeps editing the rulebook while you’re on the field. It’s a compact critique of how gendered labor persists not only through workload, but through the constant renegotiation of what counts as enough.
That “definition” is doing a lot of work. It points to the invisible management of expectations that follows many women through home and workplace: standards that ratchet upward, boundaries that blur, and responsibilities that quietly migrate to whoever is most reliable. Clean isn’t clean enough, “helping” becomes “handling,” flexibility becomes availability. When the goalposts move, failure becomes easy to manufacture and success becomes hard to measure. That’s how exhaustion turns into a personality flaw rather than a structural problem.
Coming from an athlete, the line carries extra bite because sport is supposed to be the cleanest arena of rules, roles, and scoreboards. Copeland is essentially saying: imagine playing a game where the clock never stops and the rules committee keeps editing the rulebook while you’re on the field. It’s a compact critique of how gendered labor persists not only through workload, but through the constant renegotiation of what counts as enough.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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