My Life with Left-Handed Women

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without an exchange of gifts among my two grandmothers, mother, and aunt, featuring the trait they shared: all four were left-handed. Waiting for them under the tree in our sunny Pasadena living room might be left-handed oven mitts or can openers, kitchen gadgets too mundane to pass as gifts for righties, but treasures to the matriarchal quartet. I’ll never forget the crows of delight one Christmas morning as they unwrapped identical packages to find pairs of left-handed sewing scissors, the first designed and widely marketed not just with upside-down handles but with inverted blades to make cutting fabric easy.

All four of them sewed—my mother and her sister-in-law, to economize on dresses for themselves and their daughters. My maternal grandmother specialized in holiday-themed projects: red corduroy vests for the men of the family, embroidered table runners. My father’s mother had never taken to the sewing machine and instead knitted afghans and scarves. Left-handedness may have been the reason she never progressed beyond the basic garter stitch. Left-handed knitters, I would later learn, are sometimes forced to study themselves in the mirror to master more complicated stitches pictured in instruction manuals issued for the right-handed ninety per cent.

When I was young, in the nineteen-fifties, left-handedness meant the omnipotence of motherhood. Surely I would grow up to be a left-handed woman, too. Slowly, I began to realize that would never be. My right hand took over when I scribbled with crayons and when I learned to print letters in pencil at school. I had a new best friend who was left-handed—new because I’d been skipped into second grade in the middle of my first-grade year. Catherine lived up the street, and she was an ace at jacks. With her left hand, she bounced one of her father’s old golf balls on the cool concrete of the shaded front porch where we sat cross-legged facing each other, and swiftly scooped up the scuffed six-pointed stars, first one per bounce, then in sets of two and three, on up to the full grab of ten, just in time to catch the ball. I was mesmerized. She’d won before I could even take a turn.

On a Friday in April that second-grade year, my mother’s parents arrived from Northern California to stay with us for spring vacation. Leaving school, I spotted my grandparents’ red-and-white Plymouth waiting for me on the street beyond the chain-link fence and ran to meet them. I ran with my red plaid lunchbox in my left hand and white sweater dangling from my right. The sweater wound between my legs and tripped me; I fell flat, arms outstretched, my forehead landing on the metal clasp that held the lunchbox shut. Even at age six, I knew to press my sweater against the bleeding gash. My grandmother scooped me up, and soon I was in a doctor’s office, facing a needle threaded with coarse black floss.

To this day, if I look closely at my left eyebrow in the mirror, I can see the scar that marks me on the left side: as a woman like my mother, like her mother, to whom I had run with a heart full of love and need.

No one told me, but I knew why my grandparents had come to stay through the school holiday. My father had lost his job again. Mental illness—“manic depression” was the eventual diagnosis—had hobbled my father since his college days, although a few years of graduate study at Harvard’s School of Design won him city-planning jobs back in his home state of California during the housing boom of the fifties. His habit of drinking too much at office parties had cost him a job with Santa Clara County, and we’d moved south to Pasadena halfway through my kindergarten year. He’d failed quickly at the new job in Los Angeles, and now my mother was working every day as a secretary at our church. My sister and I wore our house keys on long white shoelaces tied around our necks and tucked under our blouses; my brother had pockets in the jeans that only boys were allowed to wear to school. Granny was here to mind us kids on the days our mom was at work.

That week, as my eyebrow healed, I lay on my parents’ double bed, watching Granny work her way through the pile of my father’s freshly washed dress shirts. She sprinkled the shirts with water from a blue glass bottle topped with a metal cap like a salt shaker’s, and rolled them into a ball to moisten them; then she unfurled the white or pale-blue oxford-cloth shirts one by one and methodically pressed the collar, yoke, arms, and back and front panels on the ironing board that was a fixture in the room. Like my mother, Granny wielded the electric iron, perpetually tethered by its cord to the nearby wall outlet, expertly with her left hand, although she mistrusted its steam setting. Years later, when I did my own ironing right-handed, standing on the opposite side of the board, I’d have to swing the cord around to my side before starting in, to avoid rumpling the fabric with the cord as I ran the hot appliance over the flowered shifts and A-line skirts I’d sewn at our Singer.

As she ironed, Granny sang songs she’d learned from her voice-teacher mother, who raised two daughters in Oakland through the first two decades of the century on her own. To Granny, her parents’ divorce was a source of shame; she never spoke of it. She told me instead about her own first-grade year, when the teacher forbade her to write with her left hand and, finally, in exasperation, bound Granny’s left arm to her chest so that she wouldn’t be tempted. Was she also the only child in the class without a father at home? After my grandparents drove back north that spring, I looked closely at the handwriting on the envelopes that arrived every week addressed to my mother and admired the even, right-slanting loops, knowing the price in humiliation and effort my grandmother had paid to achieve them.

My mother’s name on those envelopes was Elva Marshall, but when I looked for samples of her handwriting, beyond the grocery lists she dashed off before leaving for work, left hand raised slightly above the notepad to avoid inking the side, I found the watercolor landscapes she’d painted as an art major in college, which hung in many of the rooms in our house. Her signature in the bottom right corners read Elva Spiess. The unfamiliar name she’d shared with her parents appeared in upright, spidery black—the same ink as the fine lines that made sense of otherwise blurry strokes of color suggesting mountains, lakes, pines. There were a few paintings marked with tiny lowercase initials, “esm,” as if the letters formed one word—here were the yellows and browns of the mustard fields and rolling hills we sometimes drove past near our old house in Santa Clara County. I knew she’d won a blue ribbon in a community art show shortly before we’d moved away. But I couldn’t picture my mother with a paintbrush in her hand.

She just didn’t have the time. A wooden door propped on file cabinets served as her worktable, opposite the ironing board. When I had trouble sleeping at night, I found her there, under lamplight, gouging inscrutable designs in blocks of wood that would eventually yield black-and-white prints—stark representations of scenes, like those in her paintings. Months would pass before the carving was complete, and she’d carefully apply a sheet of rice paper to the sticky, inked surface—schooling herself in patience as she mastered a new medium, chosen because it allowed for interruption. She tolerated my appearances at her elbow, my confessions of worries or a nightmare. Far more disruptive, I knew, were her day jobs, which shifted over the years, and, I could only guess, the anxiety she held at bay about my father’s illness. Many nights, and often in the afternoon when my siblings and I returned from school, he slept, immobilized by depression or recovering from a binge with his drinking buddies, a book open on his lap in a padded wing chair in our former playroom. The room served as his office, where he’d established a consulting business in city planning which never took off.

Skilled as my mother was with her left hand, she frequently apologized for a clumsiness that she believed her dominant side brought upon her. She’d never learned to ride a bike and swam only a tentative sidestroke, head out of the water. At dinner parties, she asked to be seated at a left corner so that she wouldn’t bump elbows with a neighbor. I never saw her gesticulate with either hand, certainly not her left, which often rested in her lap or dangled limp beside her when she stood in company. She wore her thick blond hair parted on the right, but for years she set my own part on the left as I sat on a stool in the back yard, white bedsheet pinned around my neck, submitting to her best efforts with a right-handed pair of haircutting scissors. We looked alike, people said—blue eyes, bobbed hair—except for this.

As the sixties came on, I stopped letting my mother cut my hair and grew it long, as did my sister and most of our girl cousins, all of us right-handed. With our hair parted in the middle, like Gloria Steinem and Joni Mitchell, we’d have a better time of it: embark on careers, make egalitarian matches, if we married at all. In the California of well-funded public schools and libraries, scenic state parks and beaches, we read and swam and biked and, yes, still sewed our way toward womanhood, and we would not be sidelined. The year I turned eighteen, 1972—the year Fiskars put its innovative left-handed-scissors design into mass production—was the last Christmas I spent with my family. I was done with left-handed women.

Some of the statistics on left-handers surprised me when I finally took the time to look them up. Men, for example, constitute a small but significant majority of southpaws. One controversial finding claims that left-handed people of both sexes die younger than righties; indeed, my mother and her mother and my left-handed aunt were all survived by their somewhat older right-handed male spouses, counter to the expected outcome—by seventeen, seven, and four years. When, a half century after that last Christmas at home, I compared the ages at death of my four left-handed female forebears and their spouses—including my paternal grandmother, who died in 1986, at ninety-three—I found an average disadvantage of roughly seven years for the left-handed women, the inverse of the lifespan advantage women generally have over men. Mine is a small and idiosyncratic sample, not enough to defend the psychologist Stanley Coren’s claim in “The Left-Hander Syndrome” that right-handers have a nine-year lifespan advantage against the rebuttals of subsequent researchers, like Rik Smits, who, in “The Puzzle of Left-handedness,” debunked the “myth of high left-handed mortality.” Still, no writer on left-handedness disputes the long history of prejudice that, Coren argues, may contribute to a shortened lifespan, starting with the Anglo-Saxon root word for “left”—lyft—which means “weak” or “broken.”

Other writers dwell on the Latinate “sinistral,” an adjective meaning “left-handed,” which shares its root with “sinister.” The derivation is all the more dispiriting to the left-hander, who must become inured to the myriad denotations and connotations of “right”—practically all of them positive, unless you’re a political leftist. One never studies to get a “left” answer on a test or hopes to be found “in the left”—even as one might be left out, left behind, or make a solitary dinner of leftovers. An idea that comes out of left field is unexpected, if not unwelcome, and a left-handed compliment tends to hurt.

The Latinate adjective “dextral” describes a right-hander: dexterous. Lefties who study the French language soon learn that their handedness is gauche, clumsy in English and in French. According to Coren, left-handers really are accident-prone: twenty per cent more likely to have an accidental injury when playing sports, twenty-five per cent more likely at work, forty-nine per cent more likely at home. Living left-handed in a right-handed world incurs risk; right-handedness is protective, a rarely examined source of privilege. Little wonder that in times past, and in parts of the world still today, parents and teachers resorted to extreme measures in discouraging young children from using their left hands. A friend my own age recalls her mother swatting down her left hand when, as a toddler, she reached with it to pick up her toys; she became a righty, though if you toss a tennis ball in her direction, she’ll catch it with her left hand. My grandmother never told me by what means her teacher bound her left hand to her chest, but I’ve read about a device with a leather belt and buckles designed to strap the left arm behind the student’s back, used in Victorian-era classrooms when a child failed to keep her left hand in check.

Not many paid attention, it seems, to a lengthy treatise in defense of left-handers published in 1891, more than a decade before my grandmother entered school: “The Right Hand: Left-Handedness.” The author, Daniel Wilson, a knighted scholar of prehistory (a term he is credited with coining) and a president of the University of Toronto, aimed to prove “the folly of persistently striving to suppress an innate faculty of exceptional aptitude.” Wilson marshalled archeological, anthropological, and linguistic evidence, along with the latest theories of brain science, to champion “the dishonoured hand.” At the time, it was believed that left-handers made up only about two per cent of the population. By 1920, the figure rose to four per cent, as the practice of “retraining” left-handers to use their right hands began to fade from classrooms, along with other physical means of regulating student behavior. By mid-century, roughly ten per cent was the accepted figure, and it has stuck. Manufacturers in the post-Second World War commercial boom started to introduce goods that catered to what now seemed a significant market. The Danish architect Arne Jacobsen’s famous off-kilter stainless-steel soup spoon—its bowl set to the side, to approach the lips ahead of its handle—was produced in both left- and right-handed models from the time of its initial casting, in 1957. The household implements my female elders exchanged as gifts at Christmastime soon filled the novelty shelves of kitchenware aisles in department stores.