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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.
Winner of the 2018 Distinguished Book Award from
the Western Social Science Association​  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 coworkers 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 coworkers 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.
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