The girls' guide to plumbing and fixing: why the latest women's lit will also appeal to men

Washington Monthly, May, 2003 by Stephanie Mencimer

The impact of all these cultural changes is cumulative. Once you've stopped changing oil, you lose your understanding of simple auto mechanics and an awareness of what else you might be able to fix cheaply on your own. Perhaps this is no great tragedy. In the modern world, the skills left behind are done so for an evolutionary reason. It does seem, though, that without these most practical of skills, we're losing something essential. We sacrifice a level of independence by turning over every possible maintenance task to a class of service workers. Dare to Repair had me wondering whether, as a country, we might be becoming permanently handicapped around the house.

As I discovered how little I knew about my own domestic environment from Dare to Repair, I wondered how we would survive another depression. A few years ago, I went to Cuba, where I was astonished by the resourcefulness of the people there. The country lacks any sort of retail or service economy, yet there didn't seem to be a man in Cuba who couldn't work magic with bailing wire and gum to get an ailing Edsel back on the road again. How many of us could even find the oil filter?

My grandparents learned their Depression lessons pretty well. My grandmother, an Illinois farm girl, could probably have killed a chicken and known what to do with it afterward. She could certainly make jam and embroider quilts. Sure, Gram couldn't program the VCR (she didn't even have one), but in the big scheme of things, what's more important, knowing how to stretch your food budget or taping another episode of "Jackass"? My grandfather was a tinkerer extraordinaire who never needed a repairman for his plumbing--and thrifty as he was, he would probably have considered hiring one a disgraceful extravagance.

I suppose one might argue that delegating repair jobs to the service economy is progress toward a more perfect economic system--comparative advantage, you might call it. Indeed, I can't say I particularly enjoyed fixing my toilet. It was a pain in the ass that I'd happily turn over to someone else. That said, once I figured out how much the plumber cost, and then considered the time I'd waste waiting around for him to show up, I definitely came out ahead.

As the economy limps along and the unemployment figures shoot up daily, a growing number of previously well-off Americans may not have the luxury of making these types of calculations anymore. Hiring a service worker may simply not be in the budget, The boom times of the '90s may have offered homeowners a chance to master the ego-building art of planking a deck, but the recession of '03 may force us to learn the humbling tedium of toilet repair, in which case Dare to Repair couldn't be timelier.

STEPHANIE MENCIMER is a Washington Monthly contributing editor.