Pride or Pressure

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition.....” Simone de Beauvoir, 1949

Traditional gender roles dictated the notion that women were primarily responsible for maintaining the home. Yet, despite the advent of feminism, women still find themselves doing the majority of housework. Is this a choice, or is it based on tradition? Questions about a woman’s ‘place’ resonate in our culture, and conventional ideas about the home as a feminine space persist. Nevertheless, many women in our society embrace the notion of domesticity, creating liminality between preference and expectation. Statistics show that an increasing number of women of all ages are interested in cooking, cleaning, organising and renovating, ideas for which can be found easily on social media. The unknown narrative in these photographs suggests an ambiguity. Do the subjects feel resentment and boredom or interest and pleasure? The cliché of ‘a woman’s place is in the home’, is used in these staged photographs to deconstruct stereotypes of women as merely housewives. Ultimately, it is women’s choice as to whether they embrace domesticity or question its importance.