Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood (review)

While "Heads Above Water" initially appears to be yet another ethnographic case study of a natural disaster, this book takes on the unique task of exploring how disasters specifically affect the lives of women from a feminist research perspective. Like Kai Erikson's "Everything In Its Path," this book documents a disaster through the words of those who lived through it. Rather than simply following in Erikson's footsteps, however, Fothergil builds substantially on his work by documenting the ways in which natural disasters can affect victims in positive ways as well as detrimental ones. The result is a multi-dimensional portrait of the often conflicting experiences of women after a natural disaster.

This book examines the adjoining towns of Grand Forks, North Dakota and East Grand Forks, Minnesota that were flooded during the spring of 1997. Fothergil's data comes primarily from 60 interviews conducted with 40 women over a one-year time period.

She specifically focuses on the roles these women occupied before, during and after the flood, and how these roles both changed and stayed the same. Fothergil outlines the aims of her book as threefold: to document the lives of women during disaster recovery, to understand women from their own perspective, and to conceptualize women's behaviors as expressions of the social context in which they live. In doing this, she presents a theoretically grounded picture of how disasters both positively and negatively affect women's roles in three domains: domestic life, employment and community involvement.

The book opens with the compelling argument that, during the recovery stage after a disaster, women experienced role expansion, which led to changes in identities and world views. By participating in traditionally male activities such as sandbagging and debris removal, Fothergil claims, women began to view their identities in less gendered ways. After an overview of this argument, Fothergil presents examples of this phenomenon occurring in a wide range of contexts. In Chapters 4 and 5, she examines how the majority of women experienced downward mobility as a result of the financial losses they suffered. This downward mobility affected women differently based on their social class before the flood; working-class women experienced more difficulty navigating the bureaucratic procedures designed to provide financial assistance than did middle-class women. On the other hand, middle-class women were more attuned to the stigma of charity and hence experienced greater identity trauma as they received charity assistance.

In Chapter 6, Fothergil uses her subject's own words to describe the myriad of mental and physical effects experienced during the aftermath of the flood including lack of sleep, physical injuries, depression and weight gain. By using the subjects' words to describe these events, she also brings out how the women retained a positive outlook; their recent trauma had not dampened their optimism for the future. Chapters 7 and 8 address the combined topics of family, religion and domestic violence. While the analysis of family and religion as greedy institutions is strong and compelling, the evidence to substantiate Fothergil's findings on domestic violence is lacking. Only two of the women in her sample experienced domestic violence after the flood, and both of those women reported that the violence or predisposition for it had been present before the flood. There is also insufficient evidence to support her claim that the need for domestic violence crisis services and other emergency intervention programs for women increases in the aftermath of a natural disaster. While I agree with Fothergil's contention that this is an under-studied area, it is premature for her to draw such conclusions based on the data available in this study.

Chapter 9 offers perhaps the most compelling and wide-reaching findings of the book. Fothergil explores how women, as the guardians of domestic culture, were active participants in the re-creation of it after the flood. Here she brings out the paradox that...