The Blaisdell Blog

  This week we have heard much of the doomed recreational submarine taking some incredibly rich payees down to view the wreckage of the Titanic.   These men were neither adventurers, explorers, nor heroes.   They were tourists.   While I am sorry for their deaths, I see these as unforced errors.   Submariners, on the other hand, have my constant respect.   My father was Army through and through, but when he married Mom he married into Navy.   Evidently mixed marriages do work.   Keep in mind, I am talking about the men my Aunt’s married.   The force for double X chromosomes is strong in my family and there are lots of girls, who it turns out, marry mostly Navy men.   They then produce a crop of men and women who also joined the Navy.   The one thing we have never had in my family is a submariner.   Now that is a rare breed.   A person is never assigned to a submarine.   You must volunteer.   Evidently one must go willingly to serve in a tube deep under the ocean.   But just v

  In 1964 I started my undergraduate studies, already knowing that my family structure was not the typical one shared by my fellow students.   My mother worked full time outside of the home.   She always had.   Mom had been trained in two years of Normal school, which was a two-year program that produced teachers for a growing nation that valued education for all.   When we moved from Minnesota to Colorado, she got a better paying job as a bookkeeper for the City and County of Denver.   During that same time my Dad worked in every aspect of the dairy industry. In that same year, 1964, men spent an average of 42 hours/week working for wages.   The average for women was 8.   In the current decade women make up over half the workforce.   Women’s work hours moved to 36/week by 2023 while men’s had decreased to 40.   As you might have guessed, with more women working, the other divisions of a day’s labor—specifically housework and childcare—have had to adjust to changes in labor.   In