Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Population & demography
|
Buy Now
Mining Coal and Undermining Gender - Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R3,478
Discovery Miles 34 780
|
|
Mining Coal and Undermining Gender - Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (Hardcover, New)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
|
Though mining is an infamously masculine industry, women make up 20
percent of all production crews in Wyoming's Powder River Basin-the
largest coal-producing region in the United States. How do these
women fit into a working culture supposedly hostile to females?
This is what anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston, herself a
onetime mine worker and the daughter of a miner, set out to
discover. Her answers, based on years of participant-observation in
four mines and extensive interviews with miners, managers,
engineers, and the families of mine employees, offer a rich and
surprising view of the working "families" that miners construct. In
this picture, gender roles are not nearly as straightforward-or as
straitened-as stereotypes suggest. Gender is far from the primary
concern of co-workers in crews. Far more important, Rolston finds,
is protecting the safety of the entire crew and finding a way to
treat each other well despite the stresses of their jobs. These
miners share the burden of rotating shift work-continually
switching between twelve-hour day and night shifts-which deprives
them of the daily rhythms of a typical home, from morning
breakfasts to bedtime stories. Rolston identifies the mine workers'
response to these shared challenges as a new sort of constructed
kinship that both challenges and reproduces gender roles in their
everyday working and family lives. Crews' expectations for
co-workers to treat one another like family and to adopt an
"agricultural" work ethic tend to minimize gender differences. And
yet, these differences remain tenacious in the equation of
masculinity with technical expertise, and of femininity with
household responsibilities. For Rolston, such lingering areas of
inequality highlight the importance of structural constraints that
flout a common impulse among men and women to neutralize the
significance of gender, at home and in the workplace. At a time
when the Appalachian region continues to dominate discussion of
mining culture, this book provides a very different and unexpected
view-of how miners live and work together, and of how their lives
and work reconfigure ideas of gender and kinship.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.