Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities

by Karen Olson

During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point near Baltimore was one of the world’s largest steel plants, employing as many as 30,000 workers. But these glory years were short-lived, as the American steel industry soon collapsed, taking with it the high-income industrial jobs that many Sparrows Point workers had come to enjoy. This familiar tale of decline in America’s industrial heartland is only part of the story, however. In response to downsizing and job loss at Sparrows Point, many women entered the workforce to fulfill the needs of their families living in the adjacent communities of Turners Station and Dundalk. Wives of Steel tells the story of these women who broke traditional gender roles and, in the process, contributed to the economic survival of their communities. Wives of Steel is based on more than eighty formal interviews conducted over a fifteen-year period with women and some men, both white and black, all of whom were part of Sparrows Point as workers, spouses, or longtime residents of the local communities. Through the stories they tell, we see how a male-dominated industry has influenced personal, family, and social experiences over several generations. We also see the distinct differences and surprising similarities between the lives of black and white women, which often reflect the complicated relationships among black and white steelworkers in the plant. Deindustrialization has transformed many of America’s cities and communities, often in devastating ways. For women in particular, the changes in family and work life have been far more complex and in many ways more positive in their consequences than many studies have led us to expect. Combining consummate research with vivid firsthand accounts, Wives of Steel tells a story that continues to be played out in communities across America as working-class families are forced to cope with a globalizing economy.

228 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2005

Reviews

[Paul Haspel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The wives of the steelworkers of Sparrows Point, Maryland, had to be fairly steely in their own right. Living in an old-style company town, with their husbands engaged in a profession characterized by dangerous working conditions and changeable work hours, they had to hold families together, put meals on the table, and provide both strength and sustenance for their steelworker husbands, and for their children. Karen Olson tells the story of these women forcefully and well in her book Wives of Steel.

Olson’s book works well as a chronicle of an American company town. From its inception in the 1880’s, the town of Sparrows Point was planned and developed as a company town - a world unto itself for the steelworkers of the Maryland Steel Company and their families, complete with company stores where goods could be purchased on credit. The town had over 3,000 residents by 1900; and the residents, many of them migrants from rural America in search of industrial jobs, found that they had entered a town whose “design reflected a social hierarchy based on class, ethnicity, and gender. The hierarchy was clearly marked with streets lettered A through K. There was little question of who belonged at the top of the hierarchy, who belonged at the bottom, or what place you and your family belonged anywhere in between” (p. 147).

It was a world that was strictly stratified in terms of race, class – and gender. In terms of gender specifically, the wives and daughters of steelworkers knew that they faced a world where the bounds of acceptable behavior for women were strictly limited. As Sparrows Point grew – in 1958, Bethlehem Steel declared its mill, with its 30,000 workers, the biggest steel-making facility on Earth – the mill reflected the surrounding Maryland community’s conservative norms with regard to race and gender. Strict racial segregation consigned African-American workers to specifically delineated areas of the company town, and African-American men were “relegated to the hottest, dirtiest, and lowest-paying jobs at Sparrows Point, particularly those in the coke ovens” (p. 50). Yet while Olson pays due attention to the racial segregation of Sparrows Point, her primary focus is on the lives of women, whether Anglo or African-American, in what she aptly calls “the gendered world of steel.”

During the long decades when only men could work in the steel mill, the entire family nonetheless faced the difficulties imposed by the “long turn” (the time when a group of steelworkers had to work a 24-hour shift, in preparation for switching between the day shift and the night shift). As one veteran of Sparrows Point life put it, “the family works the schedule.” For many years, the only money-making opportunity for women in Sparrows Point involved taking in boarders. Women’s lives involved household work, making ends meet on a limited budget, and coping with the emotional stress involved in knowing that the men in their lives were working in exceedingly difficult and dangerous jobs.

To convey the Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities (the book’s subtitle), Olson conducted interviews that give the book much of its power, as when Karen Grant discusses the discrimination that she faced when she began her career as a steelworker; when she applied for and got the job, her younger brother said, “That’s no fair. It’s just because you’re a girl,” and her husband said, “Oh God. Oh my God. On the steel side? You’ll never be able to handle it” (p. 100). Brotherly and husbandly judgments notwithstanding, Grant spent 26 years as a steelworker.

With the beginnings of women’s presence as steelworkers, and the two-income family taking the place of the old paradigm of male breadwinner and female homemaker, came many social changes – a rise in the divorce rate, for example, as changes in social norms, combined with an increased number of women breadwinners, meant that the women of Sparrows Point were less likely to feel trapped in bad marriages. Women of different racial and class backgrounds in Sparrows Point and the nearby communities of Dundalk and Turner Station began to build new networks of mutuality, free from the artificially imposed divisions of the past.

While all this social change went on, the gradual deindustrialization of Sparrows Point also occurred; as in other steel towns across the United States of America, steel plants and steel jobs went to other countries where the cost of making steel is significantly cheaper. Steel was still being made, albeit in limited quantities, when Olson published her book in 2005; but such is no longer the case. The Sparrows Point steel mill went through ten different owners over a ten-year period until the last owner went bankrupt in 2012. As with other industrial communities across the U.S.A. – Homestead, Pennsylvania, is a good example – the families of Sparrows Point now must look ahead to a post-industrial future.

For readers from the Baltimore area, this book is likely to resonate especially strongly in terms of its reflections on not only gender but also socioeconomic class. In her research, Olson found that “Dundalk women told me accounts of beginning new jobs in other sections of Baltimore County and having someone comment that, ‘you don’t look like you live in Dundalk’” (p. 156). Olson’s insights regarding class-based discrimination against Dundalk-area residents remind us that, even in a nation where some regularly inveigh against so-called “political correctness,” open expressions of classism remain socially acceptable in some quarters of American society. How sad.

Wives of Steel concludes on a note that balances cautious optimism with an awareness of the formidable obstacles that the women of the Dundalk area still face, as Olson concludes that “Negotiating more equitable gender relations is, in the eyes of women in Turner Station and Dundalk, an accessible goal and one that they have made measurable strides to accomplish”, even if “separation based on race…hinders residents from launching a truly unified campaign against gender and class inequities” (p. 169). Wives of Steel does well at posing difficult, thoughtful questions for which there are no easy answers.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice academic style review of the big steel plant's impact on the area and the families around it. Was very interesting to get the local history from a women's centered view. Life and work and community and how it was held together thru the years.