Killing Your Own Domestic Goddess
By: Shoshana Kaufman
Tags: Life Lessons, Virginia Woolf, Feminism, Writing, Women

Killing Your Own Domestic Goddess

Get rid of her before she ruins your writing.

Photo by Grass America on Unsplash

In 1931, Virginia Woolf gave a speech before a branch of the National Society for Women’s Service later published as “Professions for Women.” The society had asked her to talk about possible professions for women, a fairly new concept at the time. In it, she talked about killing “the Angel of the house.” She meant a ghostly presence who whispered in her ear and told her not to write anything shocking about women’s emotional lives or sexuality because men might be upset by such honest revelations. The phantasm was a personification of the Victorian feminine ideal, whose main occupation was to make everyone feel comfortable and unthreatened. She would whisper to the young Virginia things like,

“My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.”

Woolf had to do battle with this nagging, unwelcome domestic tyrant. She finally won. What did she do? In her own words,

“I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me.”

In the twenty-first century, we professional women writers don’t have to worry about this annoying presence in our heads. Women writers of the twentieth century killed her for us. We no longer become anxious about offending people with our writing. If we do, we just have to pick up a book by Margaret Atwood or Gloria Steinem to remind ourselves that the old hag is still dead. Some of her sons are still alive, however, and they can still cast a chill over our writing lives by complaining that our biased, feminist, anti-male pronouncements go too far, but society is now much more on our side than theirs.

So what is threatening us today? It’s not internet trolls or incels so much as this other “angel” or “goddess” who lives in our heads: the one who distracts us from our writing by urging us to bake holiday cookies, make homemade Halloween costumes, and reorganize our closets. This toxic lady publishes numerous magazines that urge us to redecorate our homes with their collection of floral rugs and cushions. She is an Instagram influencer who stalks us online and makes us feel bad about our bodies and convinces us to order her special slimming formula along with her line of flattering exercise outfits. She is our “friend” on Facebook who boasts about the new home business she has just started sewing feather-trimmed face masks.

If we listen to these presences, we will feel inadequate, go into debt, and have to give up writing because we are too busy baking artisanal bread, making custom drapes, or watching yoga videos.

Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash

We have to kill the persona of the domestic goddess if we want to have space, the time, the energy to write. What destroys creativity is not doing housework, but interruptions. If we don’t have an uninterrupted zone of stillness and mental quiet, we will lose our train of thought and our writing will suffer.

And this malign goddess is relentless. She harasses us when we pass by a mirror, reminding us to do our hair or put on makeup. She interrupts our online research in the form of pop-up ads for anti-aging serum or email notifications about the latest recipes. In short, she just can’t leave us alone. She doesn’t want us to write. She wants us to distract ourselves with superficial concerns so that we accomplish nothing so that she and her male allies will not feel threatened by our outspokenness or our financial success.

Don’t let her win.

Be your own woman. Bake bread if you like. Sew your own clothes. Keep your closets as organized as you please. Definitely watch a few yoga videos. But if you want to be a writer, carve out space and time for writing. Start with ten minutes a day as the brilliant Shaunta Grimes recommends. Make it a priority. Insist on the absolute sanctity of your writing time and tell your family not to bother you.

Your inner Virginia Woolf will thank you.