Article March 14, 2011 Issue

Getting beyond ‘woman’s work’ vs. ‘man’s work’

By Tracy Bronner

There was a time in my life when I felt I was missing out on experiencing what I thought was the conventional view of raising a family with a husband and a wife, children and a home. This view represented security, stability, and comfort to me.

I’d been raised in a typical household of its time, where it was the woman’s job to wash the dishes, do the laundry, cook the meals, and in general take care of the more common aspects of running a household. The man, in turn, would take out the trash, mow the lawn, shovel snow, repair anything broken, and take the car to be serviced when needed. Although this was something of a generalization, it was formulated in my thinking at a young age, and I willingly learned those tasks associated with woman’s work and generally avoided the ones that I was taught should be done by men, preparing for a day when I would be married and have a husband to do them.

At one point after my husband and I divorced, I owned my own home, was a single-parent of two, and in order to cut costs I attempted to do many of the repairs and projects in my home myself. In addition to my training as a homemaker, I got do-it-yourself books from the library and spoke at length to employees in hardware stores in the hope of gathering the knowledge and the courage to tackle projects like replacing a toilet seat, repairing a leaky faucet, and even restoring hardwood floors. Armed with the help of more experienced people, I still approached these projects with reluctance and, in some cases, profound trepidation. I always complained verbally to my two young sons and silently to myself at the onset of these projects, and, needless to say, I encountered many problems in my attempts to successfully complete anything with this negative mind-set.

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