The Lifespan of a Fly

What We Lost

Last week I handed in an essay on Doris Hilda Anderson. If you’re a Canadian, and a woman, and you don’t know who she is, please do me a favour and quickly Google her. actually, you know what? Just click this and be re-directed to a Wikipedia page, because you really should know who she is and what she did for us. So, now that you’d read a little bit about her, aren’t you embarrassed to not know who she is?

Her autobiography “Rebel Daughter” was absolutely fascinating. It outlined her life growing up in Calgary, Alberta during the Great Depression and her continued fight against the status quo. Pretty much, you’re freaking lucky this lady was around, girls. Women have only really truly had their equal rights in Canada since 1981. Yeah, only thirty years have gone past and yet my own generation is completely in the dark about how it was. But I think we lost something when we gained feminism.

I think we lost an essential skill set: domestication. My own generation of women are, well, sort of useless. Oh sure, we hold down jobs and are good at things, but how many actually know how to cook? How many can cook without a recipe? How many of us bake? How many of us can sew? Yeah, not very many. And why would we have to? Dinner is a phone call away. You can have that pretty dress for the office Christmas party for $120, in all sizes and colours. This is capitalism, and this is feminism.

When we gained the freedom to pursue our own interests, we forgot how to do those things our grandmothers spent a life doing. So ladies, have we really helped ourselves? Or have we traded in our over mitts and sewing machines for computer screens and drive-thru? We have lost what made us the queens and conquerors of our homes. We have lost autonomy from mass-produced, capitalistic, shit.

So ladies, remember the women who lived through the Great Depression, who saw the fight for our freedom, and who watched us forget all about it… do them a favour, Ok? Let’s learn to do those skills that are taken for granted; that are needed, but unappreciated. Let’s learn how to do this stuff because if we don’t, we will never be able to gain back what we’ve lost.

Edit: We’ve already kicked men’s asses in the workforce, so let’s kick their asses at home again. Cool?