Lanie Oles: Women and Blue-Collar Jobs

“Meet and greet” with author and women’s labor activist Jane Latour. May include a kiosk for multimedia viewing of interview materials with women in nontraditional jobs. Crumb Library, LTEC, Thursday 10:00 – 11:00 am

Women ‘Leaning In’ to Attain Power: Pros and Cons of Sheryl Sandberg’s notion on the Empowerment of Women. Panel with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Jane LaTour, Kellas 105, Thursday 2:00 - 3:00 pm

Blue Collar Women: Legacies and Lessons from their Nontraditional Jobs. (part of the Anne Righton Malone lecture series). Jane Latour, Kellas 105, Thursday 4:00 - 5:00 pm


Women and Blue-Collar Jobs by Lanie Oles

Imagine this: you have your heart set on going into a certain profession that you have a passion for, and you have all the necessary qualifications to be able to do this job. It must be nice to know what you want to do with your life while also knowing that you have all the skills to be good at this job as well, right? Now imagine that this job is not a job that your gender typically works in. If you’re a woman, blue-collar jobs are often closed to you. These jobs can include carpenters, plumbers, electricians, firefighters, engineers, mechanics, technicians, and many more (LaTour, “The Trades”). If you are a woman who wants to go into a blue-collar job, you won’t have it easy: even when knowing you are good at something, you can’t always get a job in that field just with that knowledge and skill alone. How is this fair: if they have the proper training shouldn’t they be equally as good of a candidate as the typical sex that works in the field? Women seeking blue collar jobs face many hardships, such as being discouraged from even trying to go into that field, being stereotyped based on their gender, and possibly not getting jobs in this field solely because of their gender.

Many of these women’s stories are told in a new book Sisters in the Brotherhoods that is written by Jane LaTour, a labor educator from New York City. This book is about women in blue-collar jobs. These jobs could include being a firefighter, an electrician, a carpenter, and many others, which are “non-traditional” for women. Jane LaTour will be attending the Academic Festival at SUNY Potsdam on April 11th, 2013 to talk about her book. Within her book, LaTour talks with women who entered blue-collar jobs in the 1970s in New York City and “the training they received, the working conditions they experienced, and their organizing efforts on the job and within their unions” (LaTour/Talking History, “The Sisters”). These women are viewed as pioneers as they sort of broke the barrier for women in blue-collar jobs. If you would like to read about the women LaTour interviewed, and even listen to the interviews, you can do so here: http://www.talkinghistory.org/sisters/sisters.html (LaTour/Talking History, “The Sisters”). LaTour not only wrote a book about women in blue-collared jobs she actually worked in one herself; “LaTour's working life began on the assembly line. For more than seven years she worked in electronics assembly plants, pharmaceutical companies, and many other factories” (LaTour/Talking History, “Credits”). This makes for a much more interesting presentation because she didn’t just write a book about these blue-collar women; she is one herself.

During her presentation, Jane LaTour will likely be addressing many important problems faced by women in non-traditional jobs such as:
• Gender stereotypes
• How other people view the idea of women in non-traditional jobs
• How colleagues or employers treated them
• How the women got interested in their jobs
• How they handle these jobs
• If things have changed in this topic since the women entered their jobs
Jane LaTour started her job, and interviews, in the 1970’s, so it will be interesting to see if she addresses this idea of gender equality and how/if she believes it has changed since she began writing. Around that time “most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable” (Coontz).

The topics Jane LaTour will be talking about during her presentation are sure to be important. These topics are important because they affect a woman’s life in many crucial ways. Women have always been viewed to be inferior to men and this makes many things harder for them. For example, if a divorced mother with three kids wanted to make enough money to support her family she would likely end up working two or more jobs just to make ends meet. Working this many jobs takes away with the time the mother should be looking after her kids, but because she is a women she has limited access to higher paying jobs and she will receive lower wages than a man would working the same job. “Government programs have not always done enough to help women get higher paying jobs” (Coleman). This belief of gender inequality can still be seen today in some instances.

No one should be limited to what they can and cannot do because of their sex and what other people think. If you are good at something and have the qualifications to perform it you shouldn’t be turned away based on your gender. If a woman wants to become a firefighter, so be it. If a woman were better at a certain job than a man why would it make more sense to hire the man? It will be interesting to see what made these women want to go into their fields even though it was viewed as non-traditional, how others responded to these women and treated them because of it, and the effect that these jobs had on each of the women and how it impacted their lives.

Throughout this presentation, Jane LaTour will address many important topics that are brought about through this issue of blue-collar jobs. We will likely be hearing about gender stereotypes in the workplace, discouragement these women came across, and how things may have changed from then to now. If there weren’t stereotypes in the first place then this issue would most likely not even be around. These stereotypes put unfair limitations on how much a woman is allowed, in a sense, to achieve. If it weren’t for these stereotypes, it probably wouldn’t have been so uncommon for a woman to become a firefighter or an electrician, etc.


Works Cited

Coleman, Elizabeth. “Breaking Out Of The Pink Collar Ghetto: Nontraditional Jobs For Women.” USA Today Magazine 122.2588 (1994): 70. Academic Search Complete. Web 1 Mar. 2013.

Coontz, Stephanie. “Why Gender Equality Stalled.” The New York Times, 16 Feb. 2013. Web. 1 Mar. 2013.

LaTour, Jane. “Credits.” Jane LaTour/Talking History, 2012. Web. 1 Mar. 2013.

LaTour, Jane. “The Sisters.” Jane LaTour/Talking History, 2012. Web. 1 Mar. 2013.

LaTour, Jane. “The Trades.” Jane LaTour/Talking History, 2012. Web. 7 Mar. 2013.