Boys And Girls, By Alice Munro

“It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” (Benjamin Franklin). But what about the women who work? Working women may be happy too, but it depends on the work that they are doing to support themselves and their family. In the short story “Boys and Girls” written by Alice Munro, the female narrator remembers a time when she was an eleven year old girl working on her family farm. She struggled with accepting that she was going to grow up to do “women's work”, so she chose to do the same work as her father and brother, to the dismay of her mother. In the short story “Sweat” written by Zora Neale Hurston, Delia Jones is an African American washwoman who works to support her husband Sykes and herself.
While Delia is proud of her work, her husband resents her because he is dependent on her, which he believes compromises his masculinity. The narrator of “Boys and Girls” looks down upon “women’s work” because of the gender roles associated with the work, but Delia takes pride in her work because it empowers her and is the only source of income that provides for her family. Jobs and chores that have to do with laundry, cooking, cleaning, and sewing have always been viewed as “women’s work” mainly because they were associated with the care of the family and the home. Women who had children would teach their daughters their role of being a homemaker in the household. The narrator of “Boys and Girls” did not value “women's work” because she enjoyed doing the farm work that her father and brother did. But at the time, this work was considered