Fabulous Women Don’t Bake Baby Quiches

Last Thursday afternoon, I went to check out my friend Lisa’s new place, into which she had just moved with her boyfriend Joeri. As we sat at the dining table in the well-lit open concept of her De Baarsjes apartment and sipped on our drinks, I marvelled at just how put together her new home was. The spotless kitchen countertop, mid-century style furnishing, a thriving giant monstera plant in the corner with its aerial roots neatly wrapped around a moss pole – everything looked so perfect, like it came straight out of an IKEA catalogue. I told Lisa how impressed I was by all of it, to which she replied, “Oh, no need to compliment me, this is all Joeri’s doing. I am, like, so messy, and hate monstera roots!”, her tone giving away an unexpected hint of pride.

Now, to be completely honest, my friend Lisa isn’t real, and neither is her boyfriend Joeri. (The yuppie De Baarsjes apartment with a giant monstera probably is, though, but that is not as relevant to the story.) What is entirely real, however, is the basic essence of the situation I have described above. So many times, I have heard female friends and acquaintances of mine state that they are bad at cooking, cleaning, decorating, or some other such domestic skill, as if it was some sort of an accomplishment – especially in comparison to their domestically more skilled male partners. But what makes this domestic incompetence, seemingly such a neutral, simple fact, something to brag about?

The Pressure to Be a Homemaker

The answer to this question lies in the complex relationship between womanhood and domesticity. Anyone who was raised as a woman has, at one point or another, felt the pressure to be good at domestic labor – from family members, relatives, teachers, even strangers. Even our social media feeds are bombarded with images of picture-perfect domestic femininity, with influencers like Nara Smith or Ballerina Farm baking bread from scratch in spotless kitchens and taking care of their many young children. Domesticity is the central act of the performance that is Western femininity – it is what we, women, are expected to do and to embody. 

This tight link between womanhood and domesticity is not without a purpose, but women are not the ones that it serves. In one way or another, women are the ones carrying out the majority of domestic labor in a household. In conservative areas, it is common for women to abstain from paid work altogether, fully dedicating themselves to the home. Even in progressive, urban environments, where women pursue careers, and men seemingly equally participate in domestic labor, it is not unusual for women to still be the ones carrying the mental load of household labor: planning what needs to be done and when, reminding their male partners of the tasks they promised to do. This domestic labor, whether physical or mental, is what makes the world run. It enables men to focus on their paid work and children to grow up in stable environments and become productive members of society. Still, it is underappreciated, and severely undercompensated. According to the International Labour Organization, if women’s domestic work was fairly financially compensated, it would amount to as much as nine percent of the entire global GDP. And yet, women everywhere perform this work entirely for free, many dedicating themselves to it and becoming completely financially dependent on their male partners.

The belief that domesticity is an inherent part of femininity, and that domestic labor is “women’s work”, normalizes this huge injustice. It cuts a pretty sweet deal for men, and the society as a whole, turning millions of women into unpaid workers that sustain the world without even being aware of the significance of what they do, and no possibility to opt out of it. But, many women are becoming aware of this. Rejecting the societal pressure to perform domestic labor, to be good at it, may just be their first step towards eradicating this injustice.

To Have Your Quiche Delivered, and Eat It Too

Now let’s return to Lisa, my fictional friend. Lisa was born and raised in the Netherlands, a country famous for its progressive values. Yet, she still felt the pressure to conform to the traditional image of femininity growing up, albeit not as intensely as she might have if she had been born elsewhere. She learned early on from family and from school that men and women should be equal, but the patriarchy still seeped through the cracks – old movies and television shows, the jokes of her grandparents, the way in which her mother always seemed to know where that one pair of her brother’s socks was, while her father never did. She went to a research university to study the humanities (which is, of course, how she and I would have met had she been real), and learned everything about gender theory and representation, reading Judith Butler and Laura Mulvey cover to cover.

And now, she has moved in with her boyfriend. She knows all about the injustice of female domestic labor – that she is expected by society to perform it, to dedicate herself to the house while Joeri works for the both of them, no income of her own. She also knows that she will not subject herself to that, and that Joeri would not want her to; she is an independent young woman who is an equal to her male partner. But how does she make sure that the patriarchal patterns, the injustices she witnessed growing up, do not seep through the cracks of her new household like they did in her parents’? By letting everyone know that her and Joeri are different, of course. So when I compliment her home, and she tells me that it’s “all Joeri’s doing”, she is not simply stating that she is bad at decorating, or taking care of plants. What she is really saying, however, is that she refuses to perform the role of homemaker that the world keeps pushing on her. To her, domestic incompetence is not simply a lack of skill: it is a signal of emancipation. 

It is not just individuals like Lisa (and my actual friends that she is based on) that do this. Depictions of domestic incompetence as markers of female emancipation pervade contemporary media, with the best example I can think of being Sex and the City. This cult television series from the early 2000s follows a group of four friends, Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha, all single women in their thirties navigating their romantic and sexual lives in New York City. They are portrayed as emancipated, modern women who have it all: close friendships, colorful social lives, successful careers. The only thing they lack, perhaps, is fulfilling long-term romantic relationships, but the viewer is made to wonder if they even need those to begin with, as they find joy in their independence episode after episode. And yet, all four women are completely helpless when it comes to traditionally feminine domestic tasks, especially cooking. 

Although their domestic incompetence is sometimes the butt of the joke, most often it is portrayed as a point of pride, as a proof of their emancipation. For example, in one of the episodes of the third season, the four friends have drinks at Samantha’s to celebrate her new fancy apartment, professional success and, according to Carrie’s voiceover narration, “general fabulousness”. When Samantha brings out a tray of baby quiches, Miranda is surprised, thinking that her friend baked them herself. To this, Samantha responds, almost as if insulted by this assumption: “Oh, hell no, I had them delivered!”. Later on, the friends raise a toast to having it all – great apartments, great jobs, great friends, great sex. Accomplished and independent, they don’t need to slave away in the kitchen when they want to have baby quiches, they can simply order them.

Another Thing That Women Cannot Do

I do not doubt that allowing women to feel free to be domestically incompetent is an important step towards freeing them from the pressures and injustices of patriarchy. As a woman, stating openly and without shame that you lack domestic skill feels empowering because this statement is a subversion of age-old gender roles, a challenge to patriarchy and the expectations it forces onto you. I do wonder, however, is domestic incompetence really a sustainable way of achieving real liberation? 

The kind of empowering domestic incompetence that the women of Sex and the City have is not a given, but a privilege. Samantha’s unwillingness to cook is seen as liberating only because she is a rich New Yorker who has the financial means to order unlimited baby quiches whenever she wants to, which is something that poor women, or women from rural areas, would not be able to do. And, if something that is meant to be liberating to women is not available to all kinds of women everywhere, it is, arguably, not liberating at all. 

Besides, how empowering is it really to not be able to depend on yourself? Being a messy single woman may sound like it defies a traditional image of femininity, but at the end of the day, it just means living in an unclean, uncomfortable environment. Being a woman who doesn’t know how to cook in a relationship with a man who does may sound like a reversal of patriarchal roles, but in reality it just means surviving on instant noodles whenever your partner gets sick or goes away on a trip. This sounds a lot like what men tend to do: refusing to perform domestic labor, dismissing it as something elementary and frivolous, all the while taking for granted that the women in their lives – their wives, mothers, girlfriends – will do it for them. 

Even under patriarchy, not all domestic tasks are thought of as inherently feminine. There are a few that only men are believed to be capable of, such as repairs, moving heavy furniture, or opening jars – in short, anything that is infrequent and requires technical skill or strength which women are told they do not possess. Perhaps, by highlighting incompetence in cooking or cleaning as something worthy of pride, we are simply adding those domestic tasks to the list of things that women can’t or shouldn’t do. It seems to me that depending on men to cook and clean for us may not be any different than expecting them to fix our plumbing or build our IKEA furniture: not at all empowering and, in fact, restricting. It may make us feel like we traded roles with men for a little while, but it won’t eliminate the patriarchal system that assigned us the roles in the first place. 

Go Back to the Kitchen (to Eat Another One of Those Delicious Quiches You Made!)

Like any other type of labor, domestic labor takes skill, practice, and time. The women who single-handedly run entire households are not just housewives, they are skilled workers whose labor contributes to the society just as much as the paid labor of their husbands. But, they are still victims of patriarchy, many of them performing this labor not by choice, but by coercion. The refusal to perform domestic labor, then, is a way for women to resist this injustice, and the patriarchal system that it upholds. When we joke about not knowing how to cook, or about being messier than our partners, we are not simply trying to be quirky or unusual. We are proclaiming that the gendered expectation to be homemakers holds no power over us, that we refuse to support the patriarchy by our unpaid labor. 

However, as important as it is, this proclamation is not a solution to the inequality of domestic labor, let alone to patriarchy itself. Perhaps, instead of trying to turn gendered expectations about domestic labor on their head, we should try to liberate it from its gendered confines altogether. Regardless of gender, there is so much that domestic skills can provide an individual with: wellbeing, joy, even empowerment. By viewing and practicing domesticity in this way – as something enriching that is necessary to everyone in equal measure – we could free it from its feminine connotations, and women would no longer be expected to carry the burden of unpaid labor. That is why, as independent women, we must know how to cook and clean, but first and foremost for ourselves, not for any (hypothetical) partner or family. We must also, by all means, insist that the men in our lives continue to cook and clean, too.