Why women should learn to use power tools.

For decades, owing to an incident in early childhood, I’ve been mildly ashamed of my interest in power tools. At my public elementary school in Dallas in the early 1970s, we had a class for art, my favorite subject. Although the class was co-ed, boys and girls were separated into different tracks. Boys got to work at a large jig saw table—the kind found in the “shop” classes of old—and cut balsa wood and build things. They got to wear cool plastic goggles. The saw was satisfyingly loud and dangerous. I wanted to build things, too. But in the early days of Title IX in Texas, girls weren’t supposed to enjoy such boyish pursuits. I was supposed to want to sit quietly and paint pretty bowls of fruit. But I didn’t want a still life.

So, I complained. Indeed, I recall making quite an unladylike stink about the whole thing. Until, one afternoon, the teacher grudgingly relented. She did this by halting the entire class and having everyone stand around in a circle and stare and gawk as I, freak of nature, fumbled (as the teacher refused to help) with the wood. The boys laughed. The girly-girls giggled. My face burned bright red. Needless to say, I learned my lesson. My career in woodworking was sawed short.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered had I, at the same time, been learning how to sew or cook. I loved any activity involving my hands. But the problem was, I wasn’t learning any traditional, female skills, either. The women of my generation came of age betwixt and between: at just the point where home economics had been discontinued in most schools, and mothers, even in conservative Dallas, were beginning to lay down their darning needles and wooden spoons, but before they had begun to make real inroads into traditional male pastimes and professions. My parents stressed a knowledge-based education. I studied hard, went to college, and fell in love with the poet Auden. But as Auden once wrote: “Poetry makes nothing happen.”

I existed in a kind of practical No-Man’s Land between the sexes. Needless to say, I didn’t inhabit a conventional man’s role, but around the house in early adulthood, I often felt like I wasn’t much of a woman, either. I think the women of my generation purposely embraced a kind of learned helplessness. In my 20s, I recall how several female friends (all aspiring writers) confided they didn’t even know how to type. “Don’t become good at anything you don’t want to do,” one advised. In the early years of feminism, being incompetent became a way to avoid being typecast, as, say, a candidate for the typing pool. If you couldn’t cook or sew, no one could insist you be the stay-at-home spouse. There were, obviously, drawbacks to such liberation.

My sense of uselessness came to a head in the days immediately after 9/11. I lived in New York, and like so many of my compatriots, was desperate to help my beloved, grief-stricken city. On the Wednesday after the attacks, I managed to assist at the skating rink at Chelsea Piers, where I helped to set up a triage center for the wounded we imagined, in our awful naiveté, would soon be arriving. But my labors amounted to little more than ferrying around boxes of donations in anguished anticipation. So, I went to the Javits Center, where volunteers were signing up for longer terms of duty. There were welders and contractors and doctors and nurses and line-order cooks. As I went from table to table, I realized, with awful chagrin, that as a former English major, I didn’t have a single concrete skill to offer in an emergency, besides, maybe, reading a poem at Ground Zero (which no one wanted me to do). I finally found a table that had to do with psychological counseling, and told the woman manning it that I’d taught public school for several years. "Do you have an actual degree in child psychology?" she asked. No, I had to admit. She patted me on the back gently: "Sorry, honey, we're looking for professionals."

Tags: DIY, power drill, Shop Class as Soulcraft

Sara Mosle Writer for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, and others, frequently about education. Sara lives in Dallas, Texas, where she grew up, with her young daughter and family, and is writing about the DIY movement for Double X.

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Life

How I Learned to Stop Being a Girl and Use a Power Tool