War & Peace Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer’s line lands like a stage direction: stop looking for the “sex war” in courtrooms, boardrooms, or bedroom bravado and watch where the props never get put away. By calling the home a “theater,” she suggests gender conflict isn’t just fought but performed - scripted into routines that pass as natural: who cooks, who soothes, who keeps track of birthdays, who absorbs the mess without making a scene. The “domestic hearth” is a deliberately old-fashioned symbol, invoking warmth and safety while smuggling in the reality that comfort is usually manufactured by someone’s unpaid labor.

The intent is polemical and strategic. Second-wave feminism often had to argue that private life wasn’t a refuge from politics but its headquarters. Greer compresses that argument into a single image: the domestic sphere as both set and battleground, where power hides in plain sight because it arrives as “help,” “love,” or “just how things are.” The subtext is that formal equality means little if the everyday economy of attention, care, and drudgery remains gendered. You can win rights on paper and still lose the plot at home.

Context matters: writing amid 1970s feminist disputes about marriage, housework, and sexual liberation, Greer needles liberal optimism. The line’s sting is its reversal of scale: the supposedly small world of domestic life becomes the arena that decides everything else. If roles are rehearsed there, society simply watches the same play on a bigger stage.