Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities

CHAPTER 7 "Borders, Gender, and Labor: Canadian and U.S. Mining Towns during the Cold War Era"

158 chapter seven Borders, Gender, and Labor Canadian and U.S. Mining Towns during the Cold War Era laurie mercier The isolated and scattered mining communities that stretch from the U.S. Rockies across Canada may not meet the standard definition of “company towns”—because since the 1940s individuals, not the mining companies, have largely owned local housing and businesses. But the underlying aspect of corporate control links company, single-industry, resource, or companydominated towns in the mining world. Companies controlled the workforce through a combination of paternalism and intimidation, which often included spatially arranging worker housing near mines or the smelter, maintaining political power, creating corporate welfare programs, sustaining local institutions, and busting unions, as well as controlling jobs.1 However, despite these designs, mining communities throughout North America have exhibited surprising militancy against the main employer. Women have often been at the forefront of that militancy, at times welcomed and at other times resisted by their male kin and comrades. Just as the free movement of capital and globalized mining link these communities, so too do ideas about labor rights and gender roles, which also cross national borders. The domination of powerful mining companies is but one feature of mining towns; the militancy of miners and their families and the persistence of rigid gender roles are two other central characteristics that deserve examination. Gender—the socially constructed sex roles for women and men—has seemed an almost exaggerated component of the mining world. In our anthology project about women and mining, Jaci Gier and I discovered that what many believe to be the most “masculine” of industries has not uniformly banned Borders, Gender, and Labor • 159 women across time and space but rather erected gender exclusions at particular historical moments. Whether in Asia, the Pacific, Europe, the Americas, or Africa, mining became more fully associated with men as it became more capitalized and centralized. Societies and employers normalized women’s exclusion from working underground through an elaborate set of beliefs, traditions, sexual metaphors, and seemingly “rational” and “natural” justifications, which were enforced through legislation or cultural taboos.2 In North America as women were removed from the mining process, capital alternately viewed women as assets or liabilities in its efforts to control labor. Companies often encouraged marriage and constructed family housing in order to secure a more docile workforce; at other times, they tried to limit the number of women in a mining camp. This illustrates the vacillation of employers and the state in either embracing or rejecting mining women, almost always tied to structural conditions. Companies saw their own interests tied with patriarchal male miners and reinforced gendered practices, depending on women’s reproductive and domestic work. As a U.S. Women’s Bureau study concluded in the 1920s, miners’ wives were of “peculiar industrial and economic importance ” to keep miners rooted.3 Women created economic niches through direct relationships to mining in surface operations that admitted them—and in the brothels, taverns and cafes, households, and other businesses that male miners frequented. Much research has focused on ways that women through their reproductive labor supported the industry and in their militancy as wives helped male miners through strikes and other labor actions.4 Women often manipulated gender assumptions to more effectively and physically assert strike goals when men were enjoined from more public demonstrations through injunctions, or military and police violence. Labor movements preserved the ideals of female domesticity and the male worker as head of household, but women creatively exploited these assigned roles to pursue their own interests and their own forms of protests.5 Abundant examples from the hemisphere’s mining communities reveal how women exaggerated gender claims in solidarity for what they viewed as family and community, not just union, efforts.6 In the process of supporting men’s labor rights, women often came to contest the gendered rules for protest and question their own roles in unions, families , and communities. Because these moments of protest often appeared as much about challenging patriarchy as capitalism, male miners and unions were not always as supportive of women’s independent militancy as they were when women performed more traditional support roles during strikes.7 Women and men repeatedly struggled over and renegotiated those gender roles. 160 • laurie mercier WomeninCanadianandU.S.miningcommunitiesassertedtheirimportance to the mining economy and union through their domestic labor and by participating in women’s auxiliaries and becoming miners and smelter...