Last Roseanne Post

Well, maybe not last forever, but for a while anyway.  I am always interested in other artists creative relationship with politics, and here is a little insight into Roseanne’s:

In the middle of all of this, I kept thinking: If I keep playing these coffeehouses, I’m going to be a radical comic, but I want to be a mainstream comic – or do I?  Then I figured out that I could say everything that I wanted to say by being a housewife.  I could say, “Why don’t men clean things up?”  I worked it out with my sister, evolving this character from just six jokes.

We discovered it one day in a restaurant.  I remembered my Mom and all the neighbor ladies reading Fascinating Womanhood when I was young, and how there was a chapter on manipulating your old man by becoming a “Domestic Goddess” . . . Perfect Wife, Homemker, etc. I said, “What if I say “Domestic Goddess” as a term of self-definition, rebellion, truth telling?”

My Life as a Woman, 1989, pg 172-3