Real Women
Real Women
In the seventies it was cool to sew. If you’ve lived here awhile you remember the great fabric store Virginia Gore had downtown. Everybody used to go there.
People used to make clothes to send their kids to school in. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but currently, if you send your kids to school in something homemade, they turn you into family services. A social worker comes to inspect your house to see if you’re high on cocaine, and then they give you a gift certificate for the factory outlets and tell you if you ever try to make your own jeans again, they’re going to take your kids away and send them to Martha Stewart’s house.
Martha says, “why would anyone make children’s clothes when they could be making poached salmon with dill in a filo dough crust instead?”
So anyway, Virginia Gore now has a great quilting store on 4th South up from the Art Museum on the north side, next to that neat little bakery/restaurant, which, by the way, has a drive through that you can get BAKED GOODS from early in the morning for breakfast.
Quilting is now trendy. It’s the tie dye of the nineties. Drying food used to be trendy. In Relief Society, we all had wheat grinders and fruit dryers. And we canned while we listened to John Denver sing about a Rocky Mountain High and a knew he was really singing about how fabulous it felt to have 200 quarts of tomatoes done. People use to can bushels of peaches until they figured out that when the Wasatch fault finally shifts, they’d just have a pile of sticky glass slivers to walk across to get to their homemade beef jerky. That, and the fact that no human being alive deliberately eats canned apricots.
People talk all the time about how important it is for guys to prove their manliness. My husband LOOKS manly but he’s such a softie he cries when he sees cousins he never speaks to at family reunions, and he would die before he would tell one of our kids “no.” But he’s a builder and he looks tough and sometimes guys start talking about the outdoors and tools around him like imitation Tool Time guys.
Women also have their own rituals to prove their femininity. Women like to be “on top of things.” A good woman who’s a bad homemaker, a.k.a. “a slob,” messy or disorganized, is going to spend the rest of her life feeling inadequate even if she goes to Harvard and becomes the first woman president. If the drapes in your living room and your family room don’t coordinate, it won’t matter how much money you make or who you know, you will always feel like something’s wrong with you.
There’s a whole list of things that give you that real woman aura. Real women know how to do their hair and the hair of little girls. They can do fancy French braids or just grab an elastic band and make themselves look like Julia Roberts. Real women can wear eye shadow and do not look like Ronald McDonald. They like to shop and can find bargains on name brands. They’re skinny enough that everything looks good on them.
Real women have sponge painted their family room walls and stenciled the bedroom borders with alphabets and baseball motifs. Real women bake and they don’t eat it all before the kids get home. Their kids recognize the difference between Taco Bell, made at the store and homemade tacos. RW give gifts on time, wrapped, with ribbons, that say “Best wishes to Sara and mike” instead of just “From the Elders.”
Their houses are clean, they make breakfast and THEY UNDERSTAND MEN.
The ironic thing is that there are no women alive who feel they fit any of these descriptions, but we all think everyone else does—and is talking about us.
That, in fact, is actually how you recognize a Real Woman.
In the seventies it was cool to sew. If you’ve lived here awhile you remember the great fabric store Virginia Gore had downtown. Everybody used to go there.
People used to make clothes to send their kids to school in. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but currently, if you send your kids to school in something homemade, they turn you into family services. A social worker comes to inspect your house to see if you’re high on cocaine, and then they give you a gift certificate for the factory outlets and tell you if you ever try to make your own jeans again, they’re going to take your kids away and send them to Martha Stewart’s house.
Martha says, “why would anyone make children’s clothes when they could be making poached salmon with dill in a filo dough crust instead?”
So anyway, Virginia Gore now has a great quilting store on 4th South up from the Art Museum on the north side, next to that neat little bakery/restaurant, which, by the way, has a drive through that you can get BAKED GOODS from early in the morning for breakfast.
Quilting is now trendy. It’s the tie dye of the nineties. Drying food used to be trendy. In Relief Society, we all had wheat grinders and fruit dryers. And we canned while we listened to John Denver sing about a Rocky Mountain High and a knew he was really singing about how fabulous it felt to have 200 quarts of tomatoes done. People use to can bushels of peaches until they figured out that when the Wasatch fault finally shifts, they’d just have a pile of sticky glass slivers to walk across to get to their homemade beef jerky. That, and the fact that no human being alive deliberately eats canned apricots.
People talk all the time about how important it is for guys to prove their manliness. My husband LOOKS manly but he’s such a softie he cries when he sees cousins he never speaks to at family reunions, and he would die before he would tell one of our kids “no.” But he’s a builder and he looks tough and sometimes guys start talking about the outdoors and tools around him like imitation Tool Time guys.
Women also have their own rituals to prove their femininity. Women like to be “on top of things.” A good woman who’s a bad homemaker, a.k.a. “a slob,” messy or disorganized, is going to spend the rest of her life feeling inadequate even if she goes to Harvard and becomes the first woman president. If the drapes in your living room and your family room don’t coordinate, it won’t matter how much money you make or who you know, you will always feel like something’s wrong with you.
There’s a whole list of things that give you that real woman aura. Real women know how to do their hair and the hair of little girls. They can do fancy French braids or just grab an elastic band and make themselves look like Julia Roberts. Real women can wear eye shadow and do not look like Ronald McDonald. They like to shop and can find bargains on name brands. They’re skinny enough that everything looks good on them.
Real women have sponge painted their family room walls and stenciled the bedroom borders with alphabets and baseball motifs. Real women bake and they don’t eat it all before the kids get home. Their kids recognize the difference between Taco Bell, made at the store and homemade tacos. RW give gifts on time, wrapped, with ribbons, that say “Best wishes to Sara and mike” instead of just “From the Elders.”
Their houses are clean, they make breakfast and THEY UNDERSTAND MEN.
The ironic thing is that there are no women alive who feel they fit any of these descriptions, but we all think everyone else does—and is talking about us.
That, in fact, is actually how you recognize a Real Woman.
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