Keeping Up Appearances | Los Angeles Review of Books

Women now make up roughly 75% of recent mortuary science graduating classes, up from 5% four decades ago, marking a quiet generational shift in the deathcare industry. A Los Angeles Review of Books essay profiles this transition through interviews with young female morticians, including Lucy, a tattooed lesbian embalming apprentice in her twenties who notes her mortuary class had only three men, one of them a trans man. The essay, a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 50: Scene, highlights how the industry—long obscured from public view—has been transformed by young women in their twenties and thirties, many of them queer. Winter remains the sector's busiest season, driven by annual waves of pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19. The piece underscores how deathcare, like other service industries, is being reshaped by demographic and cultural change. Watch for whether the trend continues as mortuary programs expand and the industry's labor composition draws more attention.