"The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters - from what to do with the crumbs to the grocer's telephone number - a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him"
About this Quote
“Carefully cultivated ignorance” is a surgical phrase: Eastman isn’t describing incompetence, she’s diagnosing strategy. The average man in her line isn’t hapless; he’s an active gardener of not-knowing, pruning his domestic awareness until it looks like nature. That’s the trick the quote exposes. Household labor is made to seem like a set of tiny, disposable details - crumbs, phone numbers, errands - yet those details are the infrastructure of daily life. Treat them as beneath notice and you don’t just dodge chores; you dodge accountability.
The brilliance is in the tonal bait-and-switch. Eastman gives the behavior a friendly mask - “cheerful inefficiency” - the way society often rewards men for being “bad at” things women are expected to master without applause. “Cheerful” implies no malice, only a grin. That grin is the cover story. “Protects him” is the tell: protection from what? From time lost, from mental load, from dependence acknowledged, from the adult reciprocity that would make domestic work visible as work.
Context matters. Eastman, a lawyer and a major feminist thinker of the early 20th century, was writing in an era when women’s entrance into public life collided with the stubborn privatization of housework. Her sentence reads like a legal argument smuggled into social satire: intent (cultivated), mechanism (inefficiency), benefit (protection). It indicts not individual men so much as a culture that teaches obliviousness as a gendered privilege - and calls that privilege what it is: an escape hatch.
The brilliance is in the tonal bait-and-switch. Eastman gives the behavior a friendly mask - “cheerful inefficiency” - the way society often rewards men for being “bad at” things women are expected to master without applause. “Cheerful” implies no malice, only a grin. That grin is the cover story. “Protects him” is the tell: protection from what? From time lost, from mental load, from dependence acknowledged, from the adult reciprocity that would make domestic work visible as work.
Context matters. Eastman, a lawyer and a major feminist thinker of the early 20th century, was writing in an era when women’s entrance into public life collided with the stubborn privatization of housework. Her sentence reads like a legal argument smuggled into social satire: intent (cultivated), mechanism (inefficiency), benefit (protection). It indicts not individual men so much as a culture that teaches obliviousness as a gendered privilege - and calls that privilege what it is: an escape hatch.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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