Alone in a Crowd: Women in the Trades Tell Their Stories

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.