Women Stage a Funeral Comeback

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Slate reports that women are making a comeback in the funeral industry: “Today 57 percent of U.S. mortuary school graduates are women, up from 5 percent in 1970. Though this influx is stereotype bashing, it’s also something of a homecoming.” While men have dominated the death-care industry in recent years, funeral rites used to be a woman’s task; but then the process became commercialized in the 1860s, and women were ousted in part because of the scientific and physical demands of the task.