A woman's work is never done

Today, after watching Thanksgiving dinner being prepared, I realized how true is the truism: A woman's work is never done. There are several interesting things in regard to a woman's work.

(1) Women work is almost always ritualized, in the sense that the first necessary steps flow into the second necessary steps, and the second into the third, and so on, and everyone seems to work in concert, preparing parts of the meal. Women can, probably don't always, but certainly can, work well together, anticipating their own and the other person's next steps and one another's needs.
(2) While women undoubtedly are thinking about what they are doing, much of what they do seems to be so comfortable for them that they don't seem to concentrate on what they are doing. They can do several things at once, including talk, laugh, tend to children, work on two dishes at a time, etc.

I know, looking back over my memories, that it takes many years of working with others, your mother, grandmothers, aunts, to develop these skills of cooperative endeavor. When I was five, my grandmother had me doing things a five year old could do--fold napkins, polish the silver--and when I got to the age of being able to handle the crystal, I knew that my labors were acceptable in her sight. It was only as I began to enter my teens that I could join in the truly cooperative labor that I had been observing for years. It took almost a decade to develop many of the important skills for preparing one meal.

I could go into much more detail, other than just saying that women's thanksgiving meal preparation activities so often being intergenerationally social and cooperative, but it seems clear to me that the work that men do (and now many women) is often solitary. Men are not to be interrupted when they work and if they are interrupted they are generally not happy campers.

Now, don't get me wrong, I work in research and on a daily basis I have to concentrate and hate having that concentration broken, as "crucial" thoughts get lost in the shuffle. However, I do recognize that in the long run and the big picture, these thoughts that are being strung together in my computerizing mind, are of less importance than the rituals of food, generosity, and child rearing. The point here is that work requiring intense concentration (e.g., painting, Anne; research, Kate, stuff that men in the family are doing) is antisocial. It is at the expense of being social

So, if there is a point here it is that thank god a woman's work is never done. She is holding the world together while others are sunk deep into their thoughts, too many of which have lead to inventions that one has to wonder if we need, or to the world being torn apart in war and strife. So much for creativity.