Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Kate’s in Clear Lake, up Highway 10 toward St. Cloud, for a sewing day.  She goes once a month or so and sews with two, sometimes three other women.  This is a tradition as old as needle and thread I would guess.  These sessions offer a time for getting work done, for learning from others and being with each other, visible.

Women have made more opportunities in their lives like this than men have.  Child rearing, cooking, sewing and the keeping/making of a home have provided chances to share the load of what could be lonely work.  Men usually left the home for work, for hunting and left the woman home with the children.  Now that’s changed a lot, a whole lot, and in my lifetime, but the traditions of mutual support and aid still work.

Of these women, for example, Kate was a doctor, Carol a dentist.  Contemporary young women have joined in groups Stitch and Bitch and child care co-ops.  Women’s culture has tended more toward collaboration and this is a valuable trait women now bring to the work place.

Men have tended more towards competitive approaches, seeing other men as challenges rather than potential collaborators.  Who will bag the deer?  Catch the fish.  Bring home the money. Advance to the next position.  Win the game.

Yes, of course, there are men who collaborate and women who are competitive, and sometimes these are even the same person, perhaps competitive in one sphere of life and collaborative in another.

I don’t know what a macro look at these trends would reveal now.  As many women have entered the work place and left the full-time stay-at-home role, they are in cultures that emphasize competition and getting ahead rather than collaboration and getting along.

And, yes, there are work place gurus who try to coach folks into more collaboration and less mutual throat cutting, but this aspect of our overall culture will, I suspect, die hard.

Still, I’m hopeful that the collaborators and the getter alongers will eventually make in roads, creating more humane work places and homes.  That is, if global warming doesn’t make all so irritable than we can’t sustain attention long enough to change.