Who's going to do all the work?

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I was watching a commercial on TV where they show the father in a suit going out to cut grain, the kids milking the cow and mother polishing silver. It then goes into the other extreme where all is packaged together. It got me thinking...who s going to do all the work in these self suficient homesteads that so many are planning on? Who will be the one to grind the grain, make bread from scratch, churn the butter, scrub the cast iron stove, collect the eggs, gut and defeather the chickens, tend the garden, wash clothes on a scrub board etc? In the "lets go back to how it was before technology" wave..who will suffer? The women! It may be fun today to do a few of these things from scratch..but there is a good reason that cakes come in mixes and vacume cleaners exist. They sell, and they sell because they helped take women out of domestic slavery. Camping is fun for a little bit, but what happens when you run out of aluminum foil and have to sit on an icey outhouse seat in the middle of the night? How many women even know what a washboard looks like much less what it will do to their hands? Why did so many babies die at birth back in those days? Will women settle for looking and feeling like old hags just to do everything by hand? Dont tell me you will have a dryer..check out how much voltage one uses..you won't have enough solar panels to handle one. But then again..if the end of society as we know it does not happen..it will be a nice getaway. Providing you kept your old home.

-- Cherri Stewart (sams@brigadoon.com), August 13, 1998

Answers

My grandmother had 14 children, my mother was the second to the youngest. Two of her siblings passed away when they were 90. My grandmother did it and I suppose us ladies are intelligent enough to figure out just how we can do it. One nice thing we have going for us though is birth control. When my grandmother figured out what was causing all the pregnacies, it was too late. But we'll become just like those days, we do it or die.

-- Bardou (bardou@baloney.com), August 14, 1998.

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