Why women should learn to use power tools.

Why women should learn to use power tools.

So, this is where I proselytize about my newfound religion. As women, of course, we can’t do it all. Few can simultaneously be hard-charging CEOs and mothers and as adept at sewing and cooking as we are at carpentry and car repair. But as our lives become ever more abstract and floating in cyberspace, I think we women lose our sense of mastery over the physical world at our peril. For one, such mastery is genuinely useful—for us and our children—and not just during the occasional national emergency. (Do we really want to raise a generation who can’t so much as sew on a button or change a flat tire?) But in a far more profound sense, it is an essential part of what makes us human. What differentiates us from the rest of the species isn’t just our minds, but also our tools, our clothes, and, perhaps most importantly, as the Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham has recently argued, our cooking.