SOURCE: O'Malley, Lurana Donnels. “Pressing Clothes/Snapping Beans/Reading Books: Maria Irene Fornes's Women's Work.” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 4 (1989): 103-17.

In the following essay, O'Malley explores Fornes's representation of women's attitudes toward housework in Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, and The Conduct of Life, concluding that Fornes views housekeeping as a positive, ritualized act of “self-knowledge and love.”

Barbara Walker, in her autobiographical The Skeptical Feminist, explores women's predetermined roles in a patriarchal society. She writes that the slotting of women into the traditional modes of mother/homemaker/wife is an insidious form of enslavement by the male wishing to assert a false dominance. This enslavement includes a steady schedule of repetitive and unrewarding tasks or jobs, commonly called “women's work.” Walker states that although men have traditionally regarded such duties as natural pleasures of the woman,

the real reason women undertake the demanding and demeaning tasks...