The Peacemaker

From Menletter December 2007

By Tim Baehr

It was an ironic name for a gun: the Colt Peacemaker, a .45-caliber single-action revolver. Originally made in 1873 for the US cavalry, it found its way into civilian use by 1876. With it, a cowboy could make peace with a rattlesnake, and I suppose sheriffs of the wild west used it to keep the peace by doing in bad guys, or just brandishing it in a nineteenth-century version of Shock and Awe.

What made me think of the Peacemaker? I was vacuuming the house and looked down at my grip on the handle. I thought, "Manly men aren't supposed to do housework." At least that's what some "experts" like Harvey Mansfield have said. (See, for instance, "The Year of the Manly Man" in the past articles section of this newsletter.)

Now I've come to like housework, including the physical workout I get hauling the vac around and crawling under the furniture. I'm not exactly a neat freak, but it's somehow satisfying to get finished and dump all the dust and cat hair into the trash. The funny thing is that my wife feels kind of guilty seeing me vacuum and dust (among other things), even though she does the lioness's share of the cooking (among other things). We seem to have a pretty good division of labor - neither up to some feminist ideal nor ready for the Boys' Backlash Club.

And it occurred to me that the vacuum cleaner, as a symbol of our division of labor, could be nicknamed The Peacemaker. Not necessarily in our house, since we're not at war and neither of us is a rattlesnake; but some sort of Peacemaker might be a very good concept in any household where a couple shares the chores.

In a household with shared chores, we have an opportunity. We can find our own version of the Peacemaker to find a combination of things useful to the household enterprise that are also things we really like to do.

Shock and Awe optional.