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Alone in a Crowd by Jean Reith Schroedel
The problems of pipefitting and pregnancy, carpentry and child care, truck driving and femininity—these peculiar parings characterize the lives of an often unsung group of women. They are women who have entered the traditionally male-dominated world of the trades. They are women whom we meet in Alone in a Crowd, as twenty-five women who are blue-collar workers tell us in their own words what it is like to be a woman and a machinist or an electrician or a tugboat mate. Here are women who wear lipstick on the line and women who wear steel-toed boots in the yard, women who trade sexual wisecracks with their male coworkers and women who keep to themselves, women who want to get ahead and women who want out. In this book their actual voices speak to us about their nontraditional work and their nontraditional lives.
“When I’m in a fire camp,” says fire fighter Diana Clarke, “I look around and try to find a woman who’s forty years old or thirty-five or fifty, like all the men I see. I’ve never seen her I realize the role model has to be myself.” These are women who, whether they like it or not, are ground breakers; they must contend with condescension and hostility on the job, and perhaps at home, just because they are women; they must cope with policies and facilities not designed for women; they must develop job skills without teachers, self-concepts without role models. For some, like sailor Theresa Selfe, the strain is too much: “There is no place out there for intelligent, sensitive people, much less women who give a damn about themselves.” Others, like steel hauler Mary Rathke, love their work: “I always thought that once I approached forty, I’d look pretty ridiculous in a semi. But the closer I get to forty, the more I think I’ll change that to fifty.”
In these pages, the author has collected the first-hand accounts of women who have formed very personal techniques of dealing with the conflict between being a woman and being “one of the guys.” For them, work in the trades is a way to avoid conventional office jobs or to make more money than in traditional work. To gillnetter Sylvia Lange, her trade is her lifestyle; to truck assembly line worker Nora Qualy, it is a necessary evil, a way to support her family.
Young, middle-aged, or retired; college-educated or high school dropout; rebellious or conservative; gay or straight; black, white, Japanese-American, Mexican-American, or Native-American—the women in Alone in a Crowd share openly with us their unique experiences.
Hardhatted Women: Life on the Job edited by Molly Martin
In this lively collection, twenty-six women talk about their experiences in "non-traditional, " blue-collar work. Employed in a wide range of occupations – as ironworkers, carpenters, truck drivers, electricians, sprinkler fitters, subway operators, welders – the women vividly describe the large and small challenges of life on the job. Their candid first-person narratives express common themes: the drive to prove oneself in trades where women are still vastly underrepresented, the struggles with harassment from male co-workers, the growing self-confidence from new-found skills, the sweet success of conquering previously unthinkable challenges – and earning “men’s wages” for it.
Live Wire by Francine Moccio
In Live Wire, Francine Moccio brings to life forty years of public policy reform and advocacy that have failed to eliminate restricted opportunities for women in highly paid, skilled blue-collar jobs. Breaking barriers into a male-only occupation and trade, women electricians have found career opportunities in nontraditional work. Yet their efforts to achieve gender equality have also collided with the prejudice and fraternal values of brotherhood and factors that have ultimately derailed women’s full inclusion.
By drawing instructive comparisons of women’s entrance into the electricians’ trade and its union with those of black and other minority men, Moccio’s in-depth case study brings new insights into the ways in which divisions at work along the lines of race, gender, and economic background enhance and/or inhibit inclusion. Incorporating research based on extensive primary, secondary, and archival resources, Live Wire contributes a much-needed examination of how sex segregation is reproduced in blue-collar occupations, while also scrutinizing the complex interactions of work, unions, leisure, and family life.
Pride and Paycheck
Pride includes resources, announcements, safety tips, photos, stories, art and poetry by the tradeswomen themselves as well as advice from advocates who have been working hard to recruit women into these high paid, great benefits careers. Construction workers, railroad engineers and shop craft workers, skilled manufacturing jobs, truck drivers and many other trades formerly considered for “men only” are featured in Pride and a Paycheck. Photographs of females performing the functions of these lucrative careers give inspiration and confidence to those women who are “thinking” about entering the blue collar skilled and semi-skilled trades. For free email subscriptions just send your request to tradesis@aol.com.
Sisters in the Brotherhoods by Jane LaTour
Sisters in the Brotherhoods, by Jane LaTour, is an oral-history of women who, against considerable odds, broke the gender barrier to blue-collar employment in various trades in New York City beginning in the 1970s. It is a story of the fight against deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about what constitutes women’s work, the middle-class bias of feminism, the daily grinding sexism of male co- workers, and the institutionalized discrimination of employers and unions. It is also the story of some gutsy women who, seeking the material rewards and personal satisfactions of skilled manual labor, have struggled to
make a place for themselves among New York City’s construction workers, stationary engineers, firefighters, electronic technicians,
plumbers, and transit.
We’ll Call You If We Need You by Susan Eisenberg
“For my very first day in union construction I was sent to a bank in downtown Boston where a journeyman needed a hand pulling wire. Arriving early with my new tools and pouch, I knocked on the glass door in the high-rise lobby and explained to the guard that I was a new apprentice working for the electrical contractor. He refused to let me in. So I sat down on the tile floor, my backpack and toolpouch beside me, and waited for the man whose name I had written down alongside the address and directions on a piece of paper: Dan. The guard explained to Dan later that he’d figured I was a terrorist planning to bomb the bank. In 1978, that seemed more likely than that I might actually be an apprentice electrician.”
Susan Eisenberg began her apprenticeship with Local 103 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in 1978, the year President Jimmy Carter set goals and timetables for the hiring of women on federally assisted construction projects and for the inclusion of women in apprenticeship programs. Eisenberg expected not only a challenging job and the camaraderie of a labor union but also the chance to be part of a historic transformation, social and economic, that would make the construction trades accessible to women.
That transformation did not happen. In this book, full of the raw drama and humor found on a construction site, Eisenberg gracefully weaves the voices of thirty women who worked as carpenters, electricians, ironworkers, painters, and plumbers to examine why their numbers remained small. Speaking as if to a friend, women recall their decisions to enter the trades, their first days on the job, and their strategies to gain training and acceptance. They assess, with thought, passion, and twenty years’ perspective, the affirmative action efforts. Eisenberg ends with a discussion of the practices and policies that would be required to uproot gender barriers where they are deeply embedded in the organization and culture of the workplace.
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