A Roasting

A slightly grim article from the Courier Mail about women getting shitter at doing "female" things like roasting an oven, vaccuming and - presumably - taking a beating from one's husband without reporting his sorry arse to the cops. Because the year is 1950.

But I paraphrase. Let's go to the primary source:

BASIC "female" skills are becoming endangered with fewer young women able to iron a shirt, cook a roast chicken or hem a skirt.

Just as more modern men are unable to complete traditional male tasks, new research shows Generation Y women can't do the chores their mothers and grandmothers did daily. Only 51 per cent of women aged under 30 can cook a roast compared with 82 per cent of baby boomers.

Baking lamingtons is a dying art with 20 per cent of Gen Y capable of whipping up the Aussie classic, down from 45 per cent for previous generations

The thing is, as a Gen Y woman myself I have some concerns with the phrase "able to", as in "fewer young women are able to...". Handed a cookbook and a raw chicken I think most Gen Y women would, in fact, be "able to" roast said chicken, even if they haven't done so before. (I'm not a great cook and I can do it, so how hard can it really be?) I think what the survey was probably asking is whether the women would be able to roast a chicken off their own bat, implying that they'd done it so many times it would be a cinch.

Similarly I can bake a good cake or tray of muffins but I've not the slightest idea how to make a lamington. Mostly because I find them to be ultra weak sauce on my list of tasty treats.

But, wait, it's not all bad. Don't sterilise us en masse just yet.

But Gen Y women are taking on other skills.

As well as working full or part-time, they are doing tasks previously done by men.

More than 70 per cent of women under 30 say they often take out the bins, 77 per cent mow the lawn and 70 per cent claim they wash the car.

Phew. Close one.