In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In 1993, the New York City Fire Department issued a curious order: no pictures could be taken of Brenda Berkman, on or off duty, inside or outside of a firehouse. Berkman was a firefighter, a fifteen-year veteran of the force. The order was the latest shot in a protracted battle against Berkman and others like her: women claiming the ability to do a job that had been a men’s preserve for all the New York City Fire Department’s 117-year, traditionconscious history. The struggle began in 1977, when the city first allowed women to take the Firefighter Exam—and then promptly changed the rules on the physical agility section when four hundred women passed the written portion of the test. Five years and a victorious class-action suit for sex discrimination later, forty-two women passed the new, court-supervised tests and training and went on to become the first female firefighters in New York’s history. Among them was Berkman, founding president of the United Women Firefighters, and the most visible and outspoken of the group.1 Their struggle dramatizes many elements in the larger story of women and affirmative action, which involved remaking “women’s jobs” as well as braving male bastions. What Berkman and her colleagues encountered when they crossed those once-undisputed gender boundaries was not simply reasoned , judicious skepticism from people who doubted the capacity of newcomers to do the job. Repeatedly, what they met was elemental anger that they would even dare to try. Hostile male co-workers used many tactics to try to drive the women out, including hate mail, telephoned death threats, sexual harassment, refusing to speak to them for months on end, scrawling The Hidden History of Affirmative Action Working Women’s Struggles in the 1970s and the Gender of Class NANCY MA C LEAN 356 15 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb obscene antifemale graffiti in firehouses, and organizing public demonstrations against them. . . . Sometimes, the men resorted to violence: one woman was raped, and a few others endured less grave sexual assaults. Some men even carried out potentially deadly sabotage—as when one newcomer found herself deserted by her company in a burning building and left to put out a four-room fire on her own. . . . The women found their only dependable internal allies in the Vulcan Society, the organization of Black male firefighters, who had themselves fought a long battle against discrimination in the department. They now stood by the women, even to the point of testifying in support of their classaction suit, despite “enormous pressure to remain silent.” The tensions surrounding the entrance of women into the fire department were explosive although women constituted a mere 0.3 percent of the city’s 13,000-member uniformed fire force. The no-photographs order from the top, the uncoordinated acts of hostility from would-be peers, as well as the support of the Vulcan Society, signal us that a great deal was at stake. Even in cases less egregious than the New York firefighters, boundary crossing backed by affirmative action affected something that mattered deeply to many men, especially many white men.2 Yet, historians of the modern United States have only begun to examine workplace-based sex discrimination and affirmative action struggles such as those of the United Women Firefighters. More attention is in order. On the one hand, disgust with discrimination and low-paying, dead-end jobs moved large numbers of working women to collective action in the last quarter [of the twentieth] century. On the other hand, these struggles produced an unprecedented assault not just on previously unyielding patterns of occupational sex and race segregation and the economic inequality stemming from them but also on the gender system that sustained men’s power and women’s disadvantage and marked some women as more appropriate for certain types of work than others. “Work is,” after all, “a gendering process,” as the scholar of technology Cynthia Cockburn has observed—and, one might add, a race-making process as well. “While people are working, they are not just producing goods and services,” Cockburn argues, “they are also producing culture.” Similarly, Ava Baron has pushed labor historians to “think of gender not only as a noun but also as a verb” and to examine how “gender is created not simply outside production but also within it.” These observations complement the argument in recent feminist and cultural theory that THE HIDDEN HISTORY...

Share