At one time, Janis and I got marital counseling. We found a psychologist with a PhD in clinical psych from the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Who also happened to be Jewish! What in the world was she doing Tallahassee? Her husband had gotten hired to run a program for Florida. After we had done the majority of the marital work. I continued to work on my own issues with her. At one point, she said I was the least sexist person she knew. If you read the introduction to these posts, you also know that someone discouraged me from writing these. It was her. This story is an an example of my feminist credentials.
When I got to my doctoral program in anthropology at Boston University, Nick K. was a student who was in his last year before going to do his field research. He was doing painting and home repairs on the side and invited me to join him. A year later, I bought all of his equipment when he went to Germany where he was from to do his research. We put together a crew from people we knew.
Fifty years ago a really interesting thing about the old New England homes is the gutters were made out of these 4 x 5” pieces of cedar, literally trees molded into this beautifully rounded curved gutters. And of course they rotted it because people didn’t treat them regularly with Linseed oil to protect them.
One project was a 50-foot long rectangular house with rotten gutters. I owned a couple of ladder jacks. The attached picture illustrates them. We put them on a 4 x 4’s we attached to the house. You put a plank over the ladder jacks. One of you stands on each end of the plank and you literally press your foot up and down and it jacks up to the level where you have to work.
So here we are 20 feet in the air; Mark, Janis, William, Craig and I. We’ve already taken the rotten gutter off the house, but of course the wooden paneling behind it called the fascia had rotted and we had taken that off as well. This house is now completely exposed to the New England elements.
We had a saying in Boston “if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute”! The customer comes out, he looks up and says:
“What is she doing up there?”
I said:
“Repairing your house.”
He said:
“Women can’t do that kind of work. They don’t have the strength they need for it in their hands.”
I replied:
“Could’ve fooled her!”
He said:
“Well, I can’t have her working on my house!”
I looked at everybody on the scaffold with me and I said:
“Well, you heard the man! Let’s go!”.
We put our tools into our utility belts and walked to the end of the scaffold and started ladder jacking it down to the ground.
He said:
“What are you doing?”
And I said:
“You said you can’t have her working on your house and since you can’t have HER working on your house, you can’t have US working on your house!”
He arguing with us trying to dispute that. We didn’t say another word to the guy, but continued packing up everything and left, leaving him with the roof and the attic of his house completely exposed to the New England elements. On a job like that I always got paid for the materials in advance. We didn’t get paid for our work but I wasn’t out the costs.