domesticity

English

Etymology

domestic +‎ -ity

Noun

domesticity (countable and uncountable, plural domesticities)

1. Life at home; homelife.
   • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 131:

     The Neolithic of 8000 to 6000 B.C. is in the sign of Cancer, a feminine sign associated with domesticity, retentiveness, and sentiment.

2. (in the plural) Domestic chores; housework.
   • 1891, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, volume 1, London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., page 29:

     Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.

3. Affection for the home and its material comforts.
   • 2017, Susan Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity:

     As we have seen, Browning renovates her life-after-divorce by framing her domesticity in increasingly autoerotic terms. With her sensuous boudoir, lust for furniture, love affair with houses, and espousal of baked goods, hers is an appetitive domesticity geared to self-pleasure.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:domesticity.

Synonyms

• comfort, family, materialism

Antonyms

• business, society, worldliness

Translations

affection for the home

• Catalan: domesticitat f
• Finnish: perhe-elämä (fi), kotimaisuus (fi)
• Polish: domowe zacisze n
• Spanish: domesticidad f