Housekeeping ain’t no joke.

Taken at face value, the line insists that domestic labor is real work—physically demanding, time-consuming, and often undervalued because it is performed in the private sphere and frequently by women. In an Alcott context, it fits her recurrent attention to the moral and practical education that happens through everyday duties: keeping a household running requires discipline, patience, and competence, not merely good intentions. The colloquial phrasing (“ain’t no joke”) adds emphasis and a note of lived experience, pushing back against any romanticized view of home life as effortless or purely sentimental.