Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities (review)

Wives of Steel examines the impact that an industrial company has on a wider community. The Bethlehem Steel mill, near Baltimore, dominated the community of Sparrows Point from 1887 to the present. Karen Olson examines the relationship between mill and town from the perspective of gender and race relations. Over a period of fifteen years she conducted more than eighty-five ethnographic interviews with townspeople, spouses, and workers. Her most profound discovery was the community's intellectual and social complexity. It is obvious that the community she studied has her respect and admiration.

One of the first discoveries that Olson made in researching the support network that mill life required was that women, while excluded from even entering the mill in the early days, in their role as wives often brought in money by taking in boarders. In doing so, they were not just helping to support their own families but also responding to a need the mill itself created—that of providing safe lodging for single workers attracted by economic opportunities. The institution of shift work, moreover, required that all the responsibility for household maintenance and child-rearing fell upon the spouse. The shift-working male's "family wage" was indeed payment for the work of both partners, and not just an excess earned by one partner. Olson documents family conflict over this concept, with some male partners withholding money from their wives or making them "beg" for it. It seemed to take women's inclusion in the paid workforce during World War II and their recent integration into mill work itself to uncover their value as workers, value they were creating all along through their economically necessary partnership with their working husbands.

The deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s eroded the "family wage," brought layoffs, and normalized the concept of two-wage families. Olson documents the mixed feelings this trend produced in wives. On the one hand they suffered economically, but on the other they experienced the prestige and freedom of becoming formally recognized wage earners themselves. One gets the feeling they would not want to turn back the clock. Racial integration, another of Olson's foci, was also more progressive in later years than it was in the earlier, supposedly golden days of 1950s and 1960s factory work. Olson cites the Consent Decree of 1974 as the turning point for job discrimination based on race at Bethlehem Steel. Women's fight against job discrimination followed in its footsteps. Olson notes, ironically, that as the overall health of the industry in the United States declined, the equality of its working conditions and its self-perceived community improved:

It is one of the ironies of deindustrialization that modernization and downsizing began eliminating thousands of well-paid jobs, just at the time when the Consent Decree brought together in the same departments and on the same work teams black men and white men who have commensurate skills and who are earning commensurate salaries.

(pp. 50–51)

I would like to acknowledge here my own point of intersection with Karen Olson's study. In 1979, I entered the "man's world" of railroad workers as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific. Olson's chapter on the pioneering women who took jobs in the plant rang true with me. In particular, I appreciated her detailed story about vulgar language as a masculine behavior designed to keep women out. Janet, a woman hired as an expediter during World War II, was not able to get any of her orders through until she swore at her supervisor. But what she actually said to him has been withheld from us by the editors at Pennsylvania State University Press. What a curious bit of Victoriana in an otherwise rigorous scholarly undertaking, not to mention the disrespect for Olson's research. I am certain that we, the readers, can take it, as did the women who entered and worked in the...