‘You know perfectly well that women can and do – or rather did – handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they’re too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to. Why should they bother when the tradition of appealing helplessness can be rationalized as a womanly virtue – and the job just shoved off on to somebody else? Ordinarily it’s a pose that it’s not worth anyone’s while to debunk. In fact, it has been fostered. Men have played up to it by stoutly repairing the poor darling’s vacuum cleaner, and
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