Long finger nails

I'm with you. I've never had very long fingernails, never wanted them. When I really liked to garden, back in California, I rarely wore garden gloves since the soil was great at our place. Now I have to wear them, because of the stickers on some of the weeds here in New Mexico. Aaaaak!

However, I once worked with a longtime colleague/pal who was very proud of her long and strong nails and her husband loved her nails, clearly a thrill for him. Our professions at the time? We were landscape architects, me still gardening mostly sans glove, and she definitely wore gloves over the long nails.

mmm, different strokes for different folks..

They manage. Your view on what women do seems a bit sexist, if you don't mind me saying so.

Hey, I'm an old knitter, and that other landarch and I had a great day once when a woman we shared the large business space with came to the studio with a giant carton of french and italian yarns (not sure about the italian, maybe a false memory, maybe swiss). I still have the sweaters I made from those.

And, yeah, seriously long nails would have gotten in my way.
We had a male boss, very good guy. He didn't mind some yarns flowing over our drafting tables once in a while. I think some guys knit too.

I used to have very long, beautifully polished nails. The questions you ask seem absurd to me. How did I do things? I just did them. No, I did not have a dish washer; I just washed the dishes. Did I knit? Yes.

You seem to view long nails as limiting one's ability to function. They were not limiting at all.

I'll add that I just noticed that the matter of hygiene was in the list...

I'm not all that concerned with hygiene much of the time. I'm am an odd mix - a person who can't smell much at all (anosmia) and a person with a BA in Bacteriology. Of course it matters, but I've never thought of it as having to do with nails, past keeping them clean.

It's the ones that curl down that get me.

I used to have nice long manicured nails (since having kids it has been impossible) - that being said I was able to do all those things you mentioned but knitting - but that was because I never had an interest in knitting. They were though, not incredibly long like those that start to curl. And I have long nail beds so my nails look longer than they actually are.

One woman I knew though had pretty long nails and we need to use a calculator regularly for work, mine were not so long to get in the way. She would use a pencil turn it upside down to key in the numbers. I couldn't work that way - it was way to slow for me.

So I guess someone with very long nails would find a tool to use in place.

I remembered one thing that was a more difficult to use with long finger nails: a manual typewriter. Electric typewriters, not so much. And computers, not at all.