I was struck by the lovely name when May introduced herself to me at a civic meeting a few years ago. Making get acquainted conversation, I discovered that she was a big truck driver! May had a peaches and cream complexion, shoulder length blonde hair and she wore dangly earrings and a pink and white running suit. “What kind of loads do you carry?” I asked surprised at the choice of occupation of this delicate looking lady. She told me she was a log truck driver and that her job was to go to remote logging sites in the mountains, where the loggers would load up her trailer, and she would drive out through wet, muddy, windy dirt roads with her mammoth load and deliver the logs to the sawmill. Logging is a dirty, rough business and loggers are as tough as they come, so I was wondering if it bothered her to be in this milieu. Surprisingly, she didn’t consider that her job was any different from anything else a woman might do to earn a living! She was on friendly terms with the rough and tumble loggers and they didn’t seem to think it was unusual either.
We see more and more women driving big rigs these days, so much so that no one thinks much about it any more. Women can be seen doing other jobs once thought to be specific male occupations. They climb telephone poles to repair the lines, they operate snow removal equipment, earth movers, and supervise construction crews. Surprisingly, I have seen very little discussion about this. It seems to be generally accepted. Now there are even army and navy recruiting ads that urge parents of the sons AND daughters to encourage their offspring to sign up to go to war. Recently I heard that the daughter of a friend was attending a large, well respected university. Was she studying Nursing? Medicine? Home Ec? No, of course not. She was going for a Masters Degree in Automotive Engineering!
There are many ramifications to gender equality in the working world (that is, all of the world outside of homemaking and child rearing). Strange that the United States is behind many other countries in this respect. Latin America has a culture of respect for the role of wife and mother even greater than that in the US. But this is a changing society. It doesn’t help if we don’t like that fact and dig in our heels to hang on to the old way of living. But perhaps it pays to be flexible. Who knows – the current confusion could get sorted out and lead to a much better society in the long run.
