This article and the next suggested by Rob Henderson.
When A Progressive Utopia Burned by Johann Kurtz at the wonderfully-named substack Becoming Noble.
Note that the incident described comes from 1991, not 2024. There was a town destroying fire in California, and a feminist anthropologist is honest but distressed about the reversion of all those progressives to traditional gender roles. Her comments in italics, Kurt's in plaintext.
With the domicile gone, women on the other hand found themselves thrown into utter domesticity… A constant topic in my women’s group was how to deal with food needs, where to get meals, what to feed the family, how to maintain some semblance of a proper balanced diet.
Hoffman never quite manages to offer an explanation as to why this should be so, resorting to vague abstractions like tasks ‘fell to women’. She seems unwilling to contemplate that these women - most of whom were intelligent, experienced, and successful - sensed that they were better suited to take on these duties; that they might want to take on these roles, finding satisfaction, consolation, and purpose in them.
Men’s rapid psychological recovery from the fire (most returned to work within a week) is presented within a critical frame, as if they were uncaring. There is an implication that their lack of sympathy might underpin the heightened and lasting emotional distress of the women:
…the women, uprooted from or severely diminished in their venues, outwardly suffered more depression and longer recovery periods. The Alameda Health Department tallied a far greater use of health services and recommendations for therapy and therapy groups for women than men…
3 comments:
Fascinating stuff. I think the strength of marriage has always been that you get a sense of what your spouse is good at and can divide things up faster base on strengths, often without even having to speak.
I do think this can lead to resentment from both sides depending on the topic. Most of us have probably been the default person for something at work before and had other people tell us “it’s because you’re just so good at it!”. This can be nice, or feel like being dumped on, depending on how interesting the underlying task is. Even if you are the world’s best TPS report writer, very few people want that to be their whole job. And I mean this in both directions, it’s very likely some women and some men struggled more with their roles than others, and it felt more acutely because everyone else seemed to be stepping in to their role more naturally.
In my career as an engineer, I seemed to always be the one to get tabbed to be sent away on short notice to investigate some sort of incident: fire, explosion, chemical contamination, etc. It's a miserable job: typically you pack a suitcase in the middle of the night, and live in a hotel room for days or weeks. Days are typically 12 hours or more of stress, with no days off until the investigation is completed. And nobody really wants you around, because they figure you are "that SOB from out of town sent here to find fault with us."
Finally, I asked my boss why I was always the one picked for these assignments. He hemmed and hawed a bit, and tried to claim I wasn't singled out, but finally said, "Well, it's because you're so good at figuring these things out."
I got sent to the least-functional teams because I was good at getting them to work together. I got cocky about it and ended up in a nightmare for years because the supervisor didn't dare ask anyone else or they would have a mutiny. So yeah, the honor is nice, but I'd rather have nicer people or more money or something. The honor of the thing wears thin.
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