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superiority of women came to mind just the other day when I was reading about sanitation workers. New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I’ve discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. There was a story about the hiring of these female sanitation workers, and I was struck by the fact that I could have written that story without ever leaving my living room—a reflection not upon the quality of the reporting but the predictability of the male sanitation workers’ responses.
    The story started by describing the event, and then the two women, who were just your average working women trying to make a buck and get by. There was something about all the maneuvering that had to take place before they could be hired, and then there were the obligatory quotes from male sanitation workers about how women were incapable of doing the job. They were similar to quotes I have read over the years suggesting that women are not fit to be rabbis, combat soldiers, astronauts, firefighters, judges, ironworkers, and President of the United States. Chief among them was a comment from onesanitation worker, who said it just wasn’t our kind of job, that women were cut out to do dishes and men were cut out to do yard work.
    As a woman who has done dishes, yard work, and tossed a fair number of Hefty bags, I was peeved—more so because I would fight for the right of any laid-off sanitation man to work, for example, at the gift-wrap counter at Macy’s, even though any woman knows that men are hormonally incapable of wrapping packages or tying bows.
    I simply can’t think of any jobs any more that women can’t do. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any job women don’t do. I know lots of men who are full-time lawyers, doctors, editors and the like. And I know lots of women who are full-time lawyers and part-time interior decorators, pastry chefs, algebra teachers, and garbage slingers. Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.
    Maybe the sanitation workers who talk about the sex division of duties are talking about girls just like the girls that married dear old dad. Their day is done. Now lots of women know that if they don’t carry the garbage bag to the curb, it’s not going to get carried—either because they’re single, or their husband is working a second job, or he’s staying at the office until midnight, or he just left them.
    I keep hearing that there’s a new breed of men out there who don’t talk about helping a woman as though they’re doing you a favor and who do seriously consider leaving the office if a child comes down with a fever at school, rather than assuming that you will leave yours. But from what I’ve seen, there aren’t enough of these men to qualify as a breed, only as a subgroup.
    This all sounds angry; it is. After a lifetime spent with winds of sexual change buffeting me this way and that, it still makes me angry to read the same dumb quotes with the same dumb stereotypes that I was reading when I was eighteen. It makes me angry to realize that after so much change, very little isdifferent. It makes me angry to think that these two female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can’t handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don’t want.

THE JANE

    O ne day I was standing in a bathroom in City Hall washing my hands when the city council president stepped up to the sink beside me. (I will stop here, lest I precipitate another city scandal, to say that at the time the city council president was a woman.) We began to chat, and eventually our chat turned to matters of moment, and eventually the matters of moment became newsworthy. I left the bathroom with a story. After years of worrying that the best stories were coming out of conversations in the men’s room, I also left with the conviction that journalism was