Aunt Pollie
September 9, 2019
A tow truck driver
WHENEVER I see a woman working as a highway flagger or as a policewoman or a security guard, I always think a stupid, outdated thought:
Can’t a man do that?
Most of the traditionally male jobs women take are the easier ones. You never see women on the tops of roofs applying shingles or pruning trees 40 feet above the ground or at the tippy top of telephone poles. But even so, I still wonder,
Can’t a man do that?
Recently, I met a female tow truck driver for the first time. She loves her job, of course. I asked her if she didn’t have trouble getting 4,000 pounds of metal on a truck. “The machinery does most of the work,” she said, and she was right. I watched as she hoisted our car onto her flatbed.
I was very impressed. Still I wondered,
Can’t a man do that?
I am reminded of the writer Taylor Caldwell’s words about a woman who could never conceivably have been a tow truck driver — her Aunt Pollie:
“Aunt Pollie, clothed exquisitely and smelling delightfully of perfume, would go with her redoubtable Mama to twice-weekly matinees, then come home to prepare fragrant tea and bake luscious scones to be eaten with homemade strawberry jam. Though she had no modern washing-machine and used flat irons and hung out her laundry and had no vacuum cleaner and other “aids,” she managed to look serene and rested at all times, and had many hours of leisure every day.
Aunt Pollie, the Queen, a gentle and lovely wife, a “dependent” wife with no ambitions to do a man’s work in the world, would have been despised by feminists and Liberation Ladies. But Aunt Pollie was truly a woman, and not a grotesque neuter full of envy of the male sex — who have always had it much harder than women, with much less physical stamina, and have been conned by women for endless centuries to make life soft for them.”
— “Women’s Lib: They’re Spoiling Eve’s Great Con,” Taylor Caldwell
Can’t a man do that?
