Two perspectives

I just finished two articles for magazines, one in the US and the other in the UK. My writing them makes me think about the past and the future. Beginnings are important to us all and I think often of my first days in the workshop transitioning from boyhood to becoming a workman. Most writers don’t or won’t generally use the term ‘Workman’ any more. Too specific for one thing, but somehow it speaks of a time past that no longer really applies to today’s equalized world. I question the validity of some such changes because many were made not so much for freeing sectors and bestowing rights so much as dumbing down roles to the point that neither roles exist.

My mother was a seamstress not a workwoman even though she worked all her life as a woman. She sewed most every day of her life and I sewed alongside her as a boy. I had opportunity to choose sewing without peer pressure at all. I also had a porch full of tools. There was something about those tools that drew me to them. For me it was never an either/or but both. I hear almost every day from half the people my age that they “weren’t allowed to do woodwork.” The other half standing alongside them never say that they, “weren’t allowed to do domestic science” as it was called then in the UK. I often wonder why that was. It was equally unfair to both segments, but one half of the population felt it unfair only in one extreme and seeing only one perspective. I would have enjoyed domestic science just as much as woodworking and metalworking. Fact is, it was a shame that any of it should fall to the school system at all. What we ended up with is neither. (Unless you include D&T (UK design and technology), which doesn’t quite fit the bill at all.)

Woodworking like basket weaving and spinning and weaving wool and cotton weren’t so much gender specific but carried out by both. My old neighbours Lilly and Wesley Holland of Willow City, Texas were both cedar cutters all their lives. They cut juniper for fence posts and cabin blocking every day of their work lives. I asked Wesley before he died when it was that he switched from an axe to a chainsaw. He told me he’d used a chainsaw for 14 years out of his 80 years. He went on, “Now Lilly, she never would use a chainsaw. Allus used an axe.” Interesting, really, when you think about how things look from the side of the other. What was important was the sharing of responsibilities, the sharing of life and the working together. In a fragmented world where politicians and educators become arbitrators and decision makers without ever working beyond the classrooms and lecture halls we will always see disproportion and distortion.