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Encouraging American women to become "Mrs. Fixit," Martha Wirt Davis declared in 1936: "There is quite a bit of satisfaction in being able to . . . put new washers in leaky faucets or replace burned-out fuses without calling for male assistance" (Davis 1936, 44). Seventy years later, after installing faucets, light fixtures, and tiles, homeowner Mary Caput o-Kamerer boasted, "My children know that Mom uses the power tools in the family, and they come to me when something needs to be repaired" (Baker and Jarrin 2006, 7). Across the years, these women's shared interest in home repair defied social stereotypes that more often assigned tools to a father, husband, or professional handyman. After World War I, home economics professionals promoted manual ability as essential for modern wives. Domestic engineering classes, women's magazines, and Girl Scouting let women construct their own technical learning environments, offering social reinforcement for mastering new hands-on skills. Post- World War II cultural reassertions of traditional gender roles remas culinized home repair, and by the 1950s, Steven Gelber wrote, "the very term 'do-it-yourself would become part of the definition of suburban husbanding" (2000, 71). Yet even then, women never entirely ceded the toolbox, and 1970s second- wave feminism provided a new framework connecting tool skills to independence and equality. After 1990, big corporations and women entrepreneurs capitalized on rising rates of female-headed households and home ownership as marketing opportunities. Home renovation shows made repairwomen celebrities; they combined solid technical information with emotional appeal to sell other women on tool use as a vehicle for material pleasure, self-expression, and personalized empowerment.
This history of women and repair complicates the picture held by twentieth-century Americans of tool use, whereby they still often presumed such activity to be male. The ideal of tools as a medium for father-son bonding was captured in a 1951 Better Homes and Gardens illustration of a neat workshop, with a man handing a wood plane to an attentive boy. Cartoons showed a woman bringing a broken lamp to a man's worktable, interrupting his model-ship building (Better Homes and Gardens 1951). The scenario of wives nagging husbands to complete weekend "honey-do" lists became a pop culture staple, appearing in comics in which Biondi e drags Dagwood off the couch to...