Heavy Lifting

I’m entering finals week in my first year of university, and as the year winds down, I have to figure out what to do with all the junk I’ve acquired over the course of the year. One of the ladies at the church where I attend was kind enough to take the TV set and printer that my university will not allow me to keep in campus storage. This lady is in her mid-sixties, and fairly able-bodied. I am nineteen, and able bodied. When it came to carrying my stuff down to her car, she doubted my ability to carry the heavy items like my TV set on my own.

“Let’s get one of these boys to carry it. I’ll even pay them,” she suggested. I live on a coed floor, and she’d seen some of the boys walking by.

Though I managed to convince her (over and over) that I could take it down the hall to the elevator and then out of the building, the twenty yards or so to her car, downhill, no less, she kept suggesting that I should get one of the guys to do it.

I’ll concede that my stuff was heavy, but not something I couldn’t carry a short distance. The first thing many people would say in regard to my situation is, “Well, men are stronger than women.” Yes, on average this is true. I will even grant you that I don’t work out or do any sort of muscle-building activity. However, I have to wonder, if I were a scrawny nineteen-year-old boy of my height, who did no particular muscle building, would people be as quick to assume that I couldn’t carry some heavy items a short distance?

“Men are stronger than women.” In many cases, yes, a man is stronger than a woman. That doesn’t mean the woman is not strong . In societies all over the world, women carry their families’ daily water several miles from the well. Clearly, women are capable of great feats of strength. I think that in our culture many people of older generations believe that women shouldn’t do any heavy lifting, because that is “man’s work”. Neither of my grandmothers or older relatives like me to carry much, and yet my male cousin of the same age is often asked to perform labor-intensive tasks for our grandmother.

We need to accept that women can do the same tasks as men, even physically challenging tasks. I see nothing wrong with carrying my own stuff a short distance, if it’s not straining me, and it wasn’t in this case. I am female, but I am not helpless.