Why is a woman’s work never done?

Margaret Thatcher cooking in the kitchen of her Chelsea flat for the benefit of the cameras, a week before making her challenge for the Conservative party leadership in 1975. Photograph: taken from picture library

Your article (Lost to the virus, 30 March) and the subsequent letter about women at home “not working” (1 April) reminded me of the 1971-72 television series Budgie, written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. In one episode, the Soho gangster Charlie Endell (played by Iain Cuthbertson) declared proudly: “Mrs Endell, since the day I married her, has not done a stroke of work – except cooking, cleaning, and bringing up the kids.”
Rosemary Johnson
Byfield, Northamptonshire

• In the 1970s, when feminism was working well, before it lost its way, we referred to women who stay at home as “women who don’t work outside the home”. In other words they had one job, unlike women who “work outside the home”, having two jobs. Then along came Thatcher.
Margaret Davis
Loanhead, Midlothian

• Maybe the hurried “census” carried out in 1939 got it right by defining wives as undertaking “unpaid domestic duties”.
Brian Saperia
Harrow, London