While male anger and resentment come with the feminist territory, a special kind of venom is reserved for the women who set out to prove that a woman can do the job as good or better than a man.
And it takes a special kind of woman to be the first to break into the hallowed male professions. You have to prove that you can do the job and do so while simultaneously serving as easy target for the resentment and anger of all the men who thought the best jobs would forever belong only to them.
New York Times:
VENICE — For more than a thousand years, Venice has had gondolas but never a female gondolier. But now there is Alexandra Hai. After a decade of struggle, Ms. Hai has won the right to be a gondolier — sort of. A court recently allowed her to paddle around the canals of Venice, but only for the residents of one of the city’s hotels. . .
What does not flow in her wake is popularity among the 425 gondoliers of Venice, who practice a traditional, all-male craft, and who often hand down their jobs from father to son. In fact, the gondoliers are just a little fed up with her.
Roberto Luppi, president of the gondoliers’ association here, said that Ms. Hai, a 40-year-old of German and Algerian descent, had been proven incapable of the complicated duties of handling a 35-foot-long gondola, having failed four tests, and that she used the fact that she is a woman to whip up interest in the news media.
When asked about Ms. Hai’s accusations that gondoliers had physically threatened her, he reacted with scorn. “After a person accuses gondoliers of being racists and sexists, what does she expect?” he said. “That they are supposed to give her kisses?”
. . . Ms. Hai rattled off her suspicions, which are provocative but unproven: that in one test, she was forced to use an oar that was as “light as a cigarette” and that in another, her route was littered by an unusually high number of moored motorboats. After the Locanda Art Deco hotel hired her privately, she was regularly pulled over by the police to make sure her passengers were from that hotel, she said. . .
Mauro Morozini, a gondolier who is 48, said it is a question of skill and not her sex. “Let’s leave just one tradition intact,” he said. “Being a gondolier is a tradition and it is very difficult work.”
Alexandra Hai Politics Italy Sexism News Gender Gondolier Venice Patriarchy Feminist
