“I can do anything boys can do – better.”
I distinctly recall seeing that t-shirt in Old Navy when I was about ten. I felt girl empowerment pulsating through my veins. Sure I was the shortest person in my class and couldn’t throw a football, but that wouldn’t stop me from growing two feet or making it to the NFL. No boy was going to tell me I wasn’t capable. This was the 21st century.
After seeing “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” everyone wants to be able to time travel. Most of us never get the chance. Instead, we color our view of the past with modern worldviews and never understand how our forefathers could have been so primitive. But halfway through high school I got the chance of a lifetime – to travel back in time to the 17th century.
Working at Plimoth Plantation for four seasons has taught me more than any history class (sorry, Western Heritage) could ever teach. By 9 a.m. each week morning of the summer, I have to be dressed from head to toe in traditional – woolen – Pilgrim garb (which, by the way, is not all-black), even when it is 95 and humid. Sure, if the heat index is that high, we may pretend we did our work earlier, but some things need to get done regardless.
So, what do Pilgrims and gender roles have in common? Just about everything. I have the luxury of only working 9 to 5. I go home, jump in a pond, and microwave dinner. However, when I’m at work I’ll be roasting ribs, boiling hens, and stuffing pig guts with rice pudding as I worry about how we are running out of wood, the garden needs to be watered, the laundry must be done tomorrow – and oh shoot, the kid goat escaped – again.
Then a visitor walks in and asks, “What are all the men doing? Shouldn’t they be helping you?” At that moment, my 21st-century I-can-do-it-all-by-my-lonesome dissipates. I stare at the woman in disbelief as I explain my father’s plight. He has five daughters and two baby sons, which leaves him wholly responsible for fishing, repairing the hole in the roof – oh, and the broken gate – chopping wood, felling trees, and of course, weeding seven acres of corn that our livelihood depends on.
Unfortunately, that response is rarely enough to quell 21st-century feminism. I try to explain that staying in the house has just as much honor and responsibility as going without it. “Mistress,” I respond in 17th-century dialect, “Men and women must each do their work, else nothing gets done.” Then the handsome neighbor boy, Giles, comes to the door with an armful of wood and I hastily wipe the dripping sweat off my face with my apron. “Thanks be to you, Giles. I hadn’t the time to go fetch it myself.”
In 1627, the lack of stability in the fairly new Plimoth colony meant many women were forced outside of the house to go work in the fields with their husbands. Let me tell you, after an hour in the blazing sun hoeing weeds around corn stalks in a woolen clothing, I’m more than willing to head back to the house. My 21st-century-self pipes up now and again – I want to get my own muck or carry my own brass buckets of water – but sometimes, I need to suck it up and ask for help.
Yes, we live in a modern world. Suburbia forgets what muck, corn, and a hot sun make of a woman. I’m not saying women shouldn’t work outside the home — I mean, I want to be a journalist for goodness sake — but the modern feminist movement tells women they need to do everything.
Dare I say that is real female oppression. Women can’t be just women, they have to be men too or they aren’t empowered. It’s time men and women found a happy medium where couples learns to divvy up the tasks in whatever way works in their households. Feminists need to eat a little humble pie and realize that we are only human. We are meant to work together. That doesn’t show weakness, but wisdom. What I’ve learned is, yes, women can do everything men can do. We can be journalists, presidents, teachers, lawyers and carpenters.
But women can’t do everything. Not because we are women, but because we are human.
