Obsessive housework substitutes for emotional and sexual satisfaction

Evidence

It is in this nervousness and resentment that frigid or frustrated women, old maids, desperate housewives, and those condemned by their husbands to a solitary and empty existence are satisfied. I knew, among others, an elderly woman who woke up every morning at five o’clock to inspect the wardrobes and begin rearranging them; it seems that at twenty she was gay and coquettish; closed up in her isolated estate, with a husband who neglected her and a single child, she took to arranging as others take to drink. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1230

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the psychodynamic reading of compulsive domestic labor later in the same chapter’s discussion of woman’s flight from her situation — connects to Beauvoir’s broader ‘bad faith’ framework aligned with Sartre. — connects to: Housework functions as an endless escape from woman’s own self — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1237; Culturally puritanical societies develop obsessive cleanliness as displaced sexuality — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1239; Compulsive hoarding can function as a symbolic substitute for unprocessed emotional wounds — Dolores DeLuce, Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making It in Show…, 167

Broader Connections

• Housework functions as an endless escape from woman’s own self #expands (0.95) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1237
• Culturally puritanical societies develop obsessive cleanliness as displaced sexuality #corroborates (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1239