Fellas, I got to hand it to you, you’ve had primo taste when it comes to co-opting women’s work.
You want to know what’s a rad job? Being a drummer. Women were ancient history’s
first drummers dominating percussion instruments for like 3,000 years in civilizations dotted
around ancient mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome. Need some old school cymbals, tambourines
or tom-toms for your religious rite, ceremony or rando banquet? Call the ladies. In fact,
the very first drummer in history was a Mesopotamian princess named Lipushiau. So what happened?
Basically Big Catholicism moved in, built the Vatican and were like oh hey, pagan religions
and all your women made music, you got to get out of here. The Catholic senate of 576
even decreed that Christian families should not teach their daughters singing or musical
instruments because it is ungodly and unladylike. I’m going to hit myself. Another rad job
is beer-brewing. From ancient Egypt all the way up to the Industrial Revolution, it was
women’s work. For approximately eons potable water was hard to come by and milk had to
be reserved for making cheese and butter so home-brewing was all the rage, with women
aka brewsters even making special edition groaning ales that women in labor would drink
and bridal ales that they would sell at weddings to raise cash for newlyweds. Then with the
industrial revolution and the helpful scientific discovery of pasteurization, big-batch brewing
became possible, exporting it our of the home and into commercial breweries and with it’s
domestic role gone, the guys took over. Well-played gentlemen. Before undertaking became big business,
preparing dead bodies for burial was just another one of regency and early Victorian
era ladies’ proper duties. As ‘Greening Death’ author Suzanne Kelly told Fusion,
being a DIY mortician was just considered an extension of women’s natural role as
caretakers for children, the sick and other family members. Then the U.S. Civil War and
its 1.1 million casualties hastened the science of embalming. As soon as undertaking took
on a scientific approach, women and their lady brains were immediately considered unfit
for the task. Even though the mortuary industry has been male-dominated ever since, today
it’s attracting more women then ever before including L.A. based Caitlin Doughty who hosts
the delightful web series ‘Ask a Mortician’. And did know that in the 1920s and 30s, Hollywood
screenwriting was dominated by women. Frances Marion for instance was killing it. She was
the highest paid screenwriter of any gender in Hollywood during the 20s and 30s and wrote
130 screenplays that were then made into films. Not to mention a laundry list of other lady
screenwriter powerhouses including ‘Gentlemen prefer blonds author Anita Loos who was raking
in $34k a week in Hollywood for her skills, Jeanie MacPherson who was the personal screenwriter
to Cecil B. DeMille for 15 years, satirist Dorothy Parker was pulling in a cool extra
1k a week just for writing some screenplays. Finally there’s Elinor Glyn whose screenplay
‘It Girl’ introduced us to the concept of the it girl. So what happened? I’m going
to guess that guys saw a bunch of money sitting there and ran in to grab it and kicked the
ladies out because that’s what happened every time. In 1967 Cosmopolitan magazine
advertised a groovy new job for hip chicks everywhere: computer girl! “It’s just
like planning a dinner,’ the queen of software Grace Hopper told a magazine, emphasizing
how women are naturals at computer programming because of our inborn patience and attention
to detail. Thanks? Back then computer programming was considered lower status women’s work,
ideal for math majors whose career pipeline was pretty much limited to teaching. And despite
old school programming secretarial status, the money was good. Vintage Cosmo advertised
an $8,000 starting salary which translates to more than $56k in today’s case. But as
professional and academic computer science and software engineering became more formalized,
dudes began forming all-male networking groups and implementing personality based employment
tests that effectively pushed the computer girls back to the steno pool. But don’t
worry guys, I do plan to do a follow-up video on 5 jobs that women stole from you.