Some of us live where gender roles are less...shall we say...grey? I can understand Miss Blooie's perspective more because I live in such a place and was raised in such a home. Now, the women could do all the men type work~except drive the tractor or run the chainsaw
not because we couldn't, but because we were not allowed at the time~but the men never lifted a finger for any "women's work". Having been raised in such a home and still living in such an area, our ideas and stereotypes may be much more deeply ingrained than maybe other places and person's would be.
Every time my mother and I see a poorly designed piece of equipment, car, roadway, building, parking lot, etc. we will simultaneously say, "Must have been designed by a man." To some folks, that would sound like the worst male bashing in the world, especially since my Dad was incredibly good at building things and doing them sensibly. We got used to that and also to our own faculties for making things easier to work with, use, access, etc. Simple designs that are optimal for easy use.
But, after watching the bulk of things outside our world become more and more ridiculously designed, built, manufactured...and knowing it's not often women in those roles of design, building or in control of manufacturing
in our area....we feel pretty comfortable in lamenting the fault in being in the lap of some man~likely some very educated city fella~ who has never, nor will ever, use the actual tool, building, roadway on a frequent basis, etc. However wrong that assumption may be, we are still comfortable in it.
Call it bigotry, call it what you will, but we aren't often wrong about it when it comes down to finding out who actually created the mess that makes life more inconvenient for all concerned in these parts. And, we get enough of that directed our own way when we set out to do "men's work" around here...repair machines, build things, design a fix for something....but that's soon silenced when we actually repair, build and design just fine. That road runs both ways....we run into the same skepticism about doing man's work as we feel when we view the men's ability to do so-called women's work. I'm always shocked and pleasantly surprised when I meet a man who likes to cook, clean, can up foods, sew, bake, etc., and actually does it well. It's such a complete and total rarity in my life that it's like finding a unicorn in a field of goats...usually that man is a confirmed bachelor.
I, for one, laughed when Miss Blooie described the riding vacuum....and felt it was a perfect summation of it all. From my perspective, anyway.
Around here, women like Miss Blooie and my mother and I are a complete oddity and are ostracized by both men and women for our duality in so called gender roles. Men seem to resent a woman who can do what they do and women resent it even more, in fear their men will expect them to take on more jobs and muddy the gender specific roles.
