Gender norms and home repairs

The Washington Post has an interesting article on the subject. It reminds me a lot of my wife and my mother-in-law. There's also an interesting discussion of the world's "first lady plumber", who was from Arlington, back in 1954. If you click through the links on that the discussion at the time is intriguing. It's supportive of her, but still permeated with gender norms, which makes for a real split-personality in the coverage of it at the time.

Also - aside from the gender stuff - this has a lot of discussion of the substitution of home production for market production during recessions. This is something that has been discussed by labor economists since the 1960s, and then was incorporated into some business cycle models in the early 1990s.