I've recently been wrestling with the problem of gender and gardening after coming across the above cartoon strip in an issue of the Empire News of the 1950s.
Leafing through a book about Austria (Monk Gibbon, Batsford, 1962)at about the same time, I was surprised to come across the following passage:
A lad must not interfere with the vegetable-garden. He may do the digging but not the planting and picking. If he does, he runs the risk of being called Madl-Bua (of which lassy-lad is the nearest translation).
I suppose I could take the slur personally, but I've had a little reflection about it and it seems to me that we in Britain have had a long tradition of either sex happily tending to vegetable plots. Do they still think the same in Austria as they did 40 or 50 years ago, I wonder.
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