AT HOME: Decorating and the Great Divide
Men build things and women look at pretty pottery.
By Loraine Page
COLUMNIST
Women are thrilled by the pretty, colorful goods at HomeGoods. This is a fact.
Also a fact: if you look around this store, you'll see only women. If you see a man, he's helping hoist a large purchase item for his wife, maybe a patterned area rug or possibly a Teal Velvet Accent Chair.
The women are zombies roaming the aisles. But they are excited zombies, trying to catch their breath at the breadth of the colors and shapes and “wares” of every conceivable type on display. Should they go to Table Settings first? Or head straight to Bathroom Decor?
I am one of these women. Yet I am intrigued, and slightly weirded out, by seeing seas of women and usually no men. Why are we like this? I wonder about this, yet I know I would buy out the whole store if I had the money.
At the same time that women are dreaming their dreams at HomeGoods, men are zooming into Home Depot to grab a new drill bit for the cabinet they're building. When I’m at Home Depot, usually to buy a lightbulb or a filter, I'm often the only woman.
So why this great divide? I'm not sure, but it would seem women are the decorators — make the home pretty so that you want to be there, and men are the makers — if they don't make it, there is no home.
There are exceptions to this rule in humans. I am certainly generalizing. I can’t generalize about the functions of females and males in the animal kingdom, but I do know of one exception.
I once wrote an article for a science journal about the male bowerbird from Australia. He creates the structure to live in and he decorates it with items like shells, flowers, feathers, stones, coins, and bits of colored glass, which he has painstakingly collected.
He might enjoy a spin at HomeGoods. It would save him a lot of time and then he can get to the real purpose, which is to attract a female to his digs.
While I don't understand the whys and wherefores behind the functional divide between women and men, I do know it’s not new.
My grandmother came to this country in the early 1900s. I’ve always pictured her standing on a ship holding a cloth bag containing only her clothes. She looks off into the distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the country where she will finally have something to eat. Surely, she had nothing and knew nothing while working with her father growing grapes — or was it tomatoes? — in Abruzzo, Italy.
Flash forward many years: she's older and now has me as a granddaughter. I never did find out what she hoped to find in America because she never learned to speak English. But she kept a home that was utmost perfection, decor-wise. And she had a hope chest filled with embroidered everything — linen sheets, doilies, handkerchiefs, dish towels, all of it contained decorative threads in many colors.
The wooden hope chest — the large, ornate piece of furniture she kept in her bedroom all her life dispelled my preconceived ideas of why she came to America. This woman came over for money — the money to increase decorating power.
To put it simply, my grandmother had so many beautiful draperies that she could switch them with the seasons! Of course, a man would have to help with that. Get the ladder, hang them, and so on.
So where was my grandfather in all this? He didn’t live long enough for me to get to know him well. But I recall that he whittled sticks with his penknife while he sat on the stoop. And long after he left this world, his large woodworking bench in the basement remained. It had a large round saw that I was scared of.
While his wife dusted the furniture or something upstairs, to keep the home pretty and neat, he was downstairs — possibly making some furniture.
Where am I in all this? Hopefully I’m in HomeGoods with those women. They’d better make some room for me in the Brightly Colored Glassware aisle — because I'm in the mood for, well, color and glass. And I don't know why.
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