Plasterers and Stucco Masons
Coming as I do from a city that was built in stone (Bath, in England, if you want to know) in the Georgian style (actually, my place is opposite this pub) I’ve not much experience with stucco masons, but I do know a huge amount about plasterers, having hired them many a time. The internal decoration of those houses is still almost exclusively done in the traditional manner.
The difference between the two jobs is simply the material used and whether it is inside or outside. So my experiences with plasterers can be taken to apply to the masons as well. The thing is, you see, this is one of the very oldest specialist building trades. It’s always done by hand and it takes a good few years (at least three) to be able to do it well. It’s been going on for centuries, using very much the same tools and techniques, even the same mixes for the plaster. Odd when you think about it really: that despite all the advances in other areas of life and technology, the inside walls of houses are still finished exactly the same way they were three hundred years ago.
Given this use of near ancient techniques there are of course no college degrees in the subject. Training is very much hands on, on the job. It might be an apprenticeship, or a combination of community college and local employer, or it might simply be working as a junior for a more experienced person and picking it up as you go along. But college degrees and programs, no, there are none.
As to our EQSQ personality tests I have absolutely no idea what is the best brain type for this job. What I do know is that it is unremittingly physical though, hours and hours a day of moving heavy weights at shoulder height. I know we’re not supposed to say these thing these days but I find it terribly difficult to believe that there will be any (OK, maybe a few) women with the requisite physique to do this for a living. Whether or not it’s a male brain job I’m pretty sure it’s a male physique job, and a fairly unusual one of those too.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:52 am
At 9+ months pregnant and in full-on lethargy, I’ve become much more aware of some essential and unbridgeable differences between the male and female experience. But I still balk at generalizations about what females might or might not be able to manage. I think it really depends on the woman! (I know you said a few women might have the physique—but maybe it’s more than only a few?) Take this broadside about a female plasterer from the 1820’s, for example. Apparently, she masqueraded as a man for a long time, earning her money as a weaver, plasterer, and flesher (what’s a flesher?). I found it particularly interesting that she wasn’t an unusually big woman. In fact, the broadside states that she was delicate and of small stature for a man.
For more contemporary examples, check out this Teamster’s article on women plasters. Seems “John Olivier†paved (or plastered?) the way for other women to enter the field.
December 16th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
I’ll agree that indeed some women can do the job. As you note, I actually said that as well. In fact, the intelligence I get is that the variations within the group of men and the group of women are almost always larger than those between men and women. On really just about everything: intelligence reached me today of an Indian man who actually gestated his twin brother in his belly! (The foetus was swallowed by the other in the womb, and only began growing again decades later).
So if we can find a man who has been pregnant (and not just Arnie in a movie) then I’m pretty sure we can find a woman who has been a plasterer.
It’s the same all over: consider programming and higher mathematics. We assume them here to be signs of the male brain type, systemizing of the highest order. But it’s worth remembering that the first programmer was in fact a woman, Countess Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron if I remember correctly).