In our part of the world and in our time, the left hand is, thankfully, equally appreciated as the right hand. I discovered early on that both of my sons were left-handed, which my wife and I found somewhat strange since we are both right-handed. But we felt that our sons’ left-handedness perhaps after all was fairly natural – they are both creative and musically talented, and there seems to be a general belief that left-handedness is linked to creativity and musicality. No one in the family paid much attention to our sons’ left-handedness until the younger one came home from school 1 day beaming with joy, telling us that he no longer had to participate in sewing class – the teacher had given up after hopeless attempts to teach him crocheting and knitting. His mirror-reversed motor functions were impossible to correlate with the teacher’s instructions. The fact that he could not use regular scissors also gave him advantages at school and at home. His inability to handle a standard potato peeler automatically relieved him from several kitchen activities, until the day we stumbled upon a special shop for left-handed people. Here we found everything that a parent of left-handed children could want: specially made and modified potato peelers and special scissors made for the left-handed, plus many other things that to this day disqualify our left-handed children from special treatment at home and at school.

Society is indeed not designed for left-handed people, at least not with respect to all the everyday items and tools that are natural parts of daily living. In the days of the old farming society, the left-handed must have had many problems with several activities, for instance, hay-making, since the handles of the scythe are always mounted for right-handed use. To have a left-handed man on the team making hay with a reversed stroke would be very dangerous when several men are working at the same time side by side. Chris McManus quotes in his book Right hand, Left Hand a very descriptive section from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina [1]:

…the peasants came into sight, some with their coats on, some in their shirts, following one behind another in a long string, each swinging his scythe in his own manner. Levin counted forty-two of them…He heard nothing save the swish of the knives, saw…the crescent curve of the cut grass, the grass and flower-heads slowly and rhythmically falling about the blade of (the) scythe…On the short rows the mowers bunched together…their scythes ringing when touched.

Levin realised how dangerous a tool a sharpened scythe could be, ‘sharp as a razor blade’: ‘A curved piece of steel with a carefully honed edge, several feet in length, swung in a huge arc around the mower. To get one’s feet in the way was to risk serious injury. With a team of men scything their way across a field it was vital that they all be synchronized. To have one man doing everything back to front – left-handed, in other words – would be to risk disaster.’

McManus describes several left-handed problems. For the left-handed, the natural turning movement goes anticlockwise, while the control buttons on ovens, stereos and all kinds of electronics are turned clockwise. Serving wine at a meal from the right side, according to strict etiquette, is very risky for the left-handed – filling glasses with precision is very difficult. Even at the dinner table, the left-handed can encounter problems if the neighbour on the left is right-handed: enjoying soup with a spoon in the left hand can cause many problems since the lefty’s elbow will easily collide with his neighbour’s right elbow. Even when handling a knife and fork, the left-hander has to cross over the right hand to reach the knife, which always is positioned to the right of the plate.