We Lost Our Ability to Mend
&gt;  No girl graduated high school without knowing how to bake, budget, and sew, while her male counterpart took classes in autoshop and woodworking<p>&gt; This all changed in the 1960s. For good reasons, second-wave feminists fought back against the rigid gender stereotypes of the previous decade and felt that mandatory home economic classes were pushing women into the confinement of housewifery<p>I understand the idea but no, it is not good. Women used to know how to cook and mend clothes while men knew how to fix cars and furniture. It meant that households could do all that. The man&#x2F;woman distinction was kind of arbitrary but it resulted in useful complementary skills.<p>Gender roles are officially a thing of the past now, but the way we did it is by reducing to the least common denominator. Women don&#x27;t learn how to sew and men don&#x27;t learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget. Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?