After reading Miss Laura’s diary ...Feminisms: Doing Gender I thought I’d share my own story of being a woman thrown into a man’s world, and my own path to discovering just what the feminist’s movement has meant to me, and overcoming the stereotypes that are there for women who decide to enter a workplace environment that was previously the "He Man Woman Hater’s Club"...no women allowed and how I evolved along with the men I worked with. Miss Laura writes:
That is, we act out appropriate gender roles - chosen from a range of possibilities, mostly without our ever being conscious we are doing so - or we face the consequences of being thought to be too aggressive and masculine, if women, or too effeminate and wimpy, if men, or just plain crazy if we don't fit any recognizable role. And we do this constantly.
Very true, and I got a full dose of being told just what I should and should not be doing from both women and men when I first decided to take the jaunt, and bid to the power plants at my work. More on the flip
About 20 years ago, I did the unthinkable and bid from a job in our offices at my work to a job as a power plant laborer. I literally had the women I worked with in my office come up to me laughing, and say they heard I was bidding to the plants, and it must be a joke. They quit laughing after I looked them in the eye straight faced and told them "No" and it was not a joke. I didn’t care for office work, and had no desire to be anyone’s secretary, and was looking for something different, so I took the plunge and bid to the plants. The money was better and I wouldn’t be tied to a desk all day, and it sounded like a challenge and something interesting, and so I leapt.
Another bid to another plant, and going through the laborer’s group, and then to operations, and then to the electric shop, and another apprenticeship to the job I’m at now as a technician, I’d say I’ve come a long way from the first days that I walked into either of the plants that I worked at, and so have the men that I’ve worked with.
I was immediately in for some nasty surprises at my first job where my foreman was openly hostile to me and when I asked the other workers why that was, they said he was trying to get his son hired, and he feels like you took his job. It didn’t matter that they probably would not have hired his son anyway, it was the woman’s fault that got the job and knocked him out. No matter that I already worked for the company and bid to the job and was not a new hire, and if I didn’t take the bid, it likely still would not have gone to his son and to another in-company bidder.
Coming to the next plant was not a lot better right from the get go. There were a whopping two other women who worked in the plant who were not secretaries, and they hated each other. I decided to stay out of that one, and twenty years later, they still hate each other and I’m still friends with both of them....lol. All of the shops were filled with titty calendars everywhere and Playboy magazines in the bathrooms, and it obviously made all of the guys nervous that heaven forbid that women were invading their sacred territory. How can we get any work done when we can’t have our dirty magazines and pee openly if we can’t make it to a bathroom? The HORROR!!
I had people openly tell me that women did not belong in the plants. I had people who would not speak to me even though I didn’t know them. I had people tell me that I could not handle the work. I had people that didn’t like it that they could not curse like they’d like to since they didn’t want to curse around a woman. Never mind that somehow they managed to restrain themselves from openly peeing in public or from cursing constantly during their every day lives at home. There were times when I wondered how many of them managed to stay married given how they acted at work.
I had one of my fellow electricians from another plant have a hammer taken to her hand, and the guy acted like it was an accident after doing it, and saying "Oh....I’m sorry" with dripping sarcasm when everyone knew he did it on purpose. She was and still is a saint I’ll say because even though that man was someone I had liked before that incident, he’d have been injured physically if he’d done that to me, and he did it to someone who he knew was too nice to lash out at him for his actions. That type of thing was rare, and that gal still works for the company, and is a tech like I am now, and one of the sharpest and best workers I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with when we were both electricians.
Eventually as people came to know me they realized that I didn’t really care about their magazines, or if they cursed, and that I could handle the work and gained their respect. There were many times that I worked harder than the guys I was on a job with and got called a bust-ass. I had guys saying I’d flunk out of my electrical apprenticeship and being dismayed that I aced my classes. A woman, how could that be? She doesn’t even belong here.
As the years wore on, the old heads who were still living in the fifties era of a woman’s place is in the home retired, and as more women eventually started coming into the plants, things got better. I’ve often wondered if I was half nuts for taking the entry job and going to the plants to begin with given what I put myself through. I think it’s important for women to not be afraid to do jobs that were traditionally thought of as men’s jobs though, and I can tell you first hand that we can, and even though we’re still a tiny minority of the workers in these sorts of jobs, there is no longer the stereotype that women don’t belong there.
I think the feminist movement has meant to me a great deal since it gave me the opportunity to get where I’m at to begin with, and that any other woman who wants to do the sort of work I do also will have an equal chance to do so also without putting up with the harrassment that myself and my fellow female co-workers did 20 years ago. I’ve seen women not be able to handle the work and quit, but I’ve seen men quit as well for the same reasons. What I’m glad about is that the opportunity is there for anyone who wants to do it and they're at least given the chance. I’m glad that the few of us who first came into the plants, and you could count on both hands how many of us there were at all the plants when I first came in were brave enough to put up with the crap to stick it out, and give other women a chance to come in later with less harassment and more acceptance.
I would love to see this be the case in every walk of life, and every job, and that it doesn’t take having a union in place like we do where I work to make sure that women are paid equally for equal work. We’ve still got a long way to go, but I truly think women can change this world for the better, and I love all of the brave women in this community who are speaking out and making a difference. We can all do it in our own ways, and that’s a great thing.