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  • Unfinished Revolution
  • Mary Margaret Fonow (bio)
Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City By Jane LaTour Palgrave Macmillian, 2008
Live Wire: Women and Brotherhood in the Electrical Industry By Francine A. Moccio Temple University Press, 2009

Despite decades of litigation, equity policies, labor education programs, leadership programs for women, external advocacy, and internal activism, progress for women in the brotherhoods has been dismal. The civil rights movement and the women's movement helped to open doors for women in nontraditional occupations, but the ceiling in construction, electrical, transport, and public safety proved to be cement, not glass. To understand why—and why this matters—read these two books.

In Sisters in the Brotherhoods, Jane LaTour documents the stories of courageous women who persevered, despite all odds, in some of the most hostile work environments imaginable. They took pride in their work and were staunchly pro-union, yet their unions—the one institution meant to protect their interests—let them down. Not to be deterred, the women formed advocacy organizations to campaign for equality on the job—in the union and in society more generally—and while the efforts of United Tradeswomen, Nontraditional Employment for Women, and others made a difference, the overall picture remains bleak. Over and over again women tell similar stories of harassment, exclusion, and petty forms of incivility—all persisting to this day—that create a daily micro-environment so unpleasant that many women are eventually forced out.

While there is more awareness of harassment today than when women first entered the nontraditional trades, it is still more common than we would like to [End Page 90] admit, and it differs from the harassment women face in more traditional occupations. According to LaTour, the harassment of women in male-dominated occupations is more hostile and is motivated by retaliation for invading male economic and social space, while in traditional occupations the harassment is more subtle and driven by the exploitation of power differences between men and women. Some of the harassment in both settings is sexual, but more often than not it qualifies as workplace bullying. One of LaTour's respondents described her experiences as the first woman on a construction site in New York City as "horrendous" and believed that much of the harassment was designed to get rid of her. These behaviors included assigning her to least skilled work, transferring her to remote sites, failing to assign her a partner, general forms of exclusion, denial of overtime opportunities, and poor evaluations. She felt her work was sabotaged and that she was constantly under a microscope, which led to over-compensation as she tried to prove herself. Many of the women reported other, more overt forms of harassment that were more sexual and included sexual graffiti, pornography, crude remarks, and even indecent exposure.

Racism and homophobia exacerbate sexism and harassment experienced by women in these hostile environments. Quoting Miriam Frank, LaTour writes: "Homophobia in the building trades—you could write an encyclopedia about it or you might as well say nothing" (p. 118). It often does not come up as an issue because people are afraid to talk about it or to "come out" on the job or in the union. Homophobia is a particularly pernicious issue in nontraditional occupations where "dyke-baiting" is often used to silence the activism of feminists within the union and on the job. The lesbian label is deployed as a pejorative epithet used to reinforce the presumption that "real" (heterosexual) women would not want "male" jobs, thus preserving deeply held beliefs about the nature of gender roles and work. Women of color experience multiple forms of discrimination and find it difficult to separate one form from another. According to one construction worker interviewed by LaTour, the further away you were from the norm of the white, male, blue-collar worker the more resistance you encountered. There was a progression of resistance against men of color, then women, then women of color, and then lesbian women of color.

No wonder women remain less than 3 percent of the workforce in construction—a number perilously close to the low-water mark...

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