Alone in a Crowd

The problems of pipefitting and pregnancy, carpentry and child care, truck driving and femininity—these peculiar parings characterize the lives of an often unsung group of women. They are women who have entered the traditionally male-dominated world of the trades. They are women whom we meet in Alone in a Crowd, as twenty-five women who are blue-collar workers tell us in their own words what it is like to be a woman and a machinist or an electrician or a tugboat mate. Here are women who wear lipstick on the line and women who wear steel-toed boots in the yard, women who trade sexual wisecracks with their male coworkers and women who keep to themselves, women who want to get ahead and women who want out. In this book their actual voices speak to us about their nontraditional work and their nontraditional lives

Women in the Trades, 1981-1985

This study was designed to explore the experiences of women employed in nontraditional blue collar jobs and to identify some common concerns of these women. Twenty-five women employed in the trades in Washington state were participants in this study. The women worked in various industries including aerospace, shipbuilding, maritime, and forestry. No two women were in the same trade. The sample included white, African American, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American women. They ranged in age from 24 to 69 years old. They varied according to marital status, parental status, and sexual preference. Participants were recruited through word-of-mouth. Through one 125-item, open-ended interview, the researcher examined issues central to the lives of these women employed in nontraditional work. Issues investigated included the women's backgrounds and reasons for entering a trade; their experiences on the job and reaction to their minority status; sex discrimination; occupational health and safety; union involvement; and the ways that nontraditional work affected their families and their self-perceptions. The Murray Archive holds additional analogue materials for this study (typed interview transcripts). If you would like to access this material, please apply to use the data

The Voting Rights Act's Pre-Clearance Provisions: The Experience of Native Americans in South Dakota

During the 1965 debates over the Voting Rights Act, there are only two brief mentions of Native Americans. During the Act's 1975 renewal, Native Americans were mentioned only with respect to their inclusion under the minority language provisions. At no point did the applicability of Section 5's pre-clearance provisions to political jurisdictions with histories of discrimination against Native Americans generate discussion. They also were ignored in the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, where Section 4(b) that established the criteria for establishing Section 5 covered jurisdictions was found to be unconstitutional. In this paper, we examine struggles over Section 5 pre-clearance in South Dakota, as well as the challenges of legal attempts to establish “covered jurisdictions” using the more stringent standard required in Section 2. We focus on South Dakota because it is a state with a long, troubled history of discrimination towards Native peoples. It also is the state with the highest number of voting rights cases involving Native Americans. Although a state that has been labeled “the Mississippi of the North” is an extreme case, we argue that it is precisely those settings that make pre-clearance so critical

Finding Her Voice: Hillary Clinton’s Rhetoric in the 2008 Presidential Campaign

After her somewhat surprising third place finish in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus, the following week’s New Hampshire primary became an almost must win situation for Hillary Clinton. Rather than coasting to a series of easy primary wins, polls were showing Clinton in a dead heat or losing to Obama, with the momentum seemingly swinging toward the younger, less experienced first term senator from Illinois. In the context of Obama’s double-digit advantage in the polls leading up to the voting, Clinton entered a diner in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where a middle-aged woman asked a seemingly innocuous question: “How did you get out the door every day? I mean, as a woman, I know how hard it is to get out of the house and get ready?

Yazzie v. Hobbs: The 2020 Election and Voting by Mail On- and Off-reservation in Arizona

During the 2020 election, voting by mail was touted as a way to safely vote from home and avoid the risks of contracting COVID-19. While voting by mail is definitely safer than in-person voting, it also assumes that all citizens have equal access to the mail services needed for voting by mail. Lawyers, acting on behalf of Navajo plaintiffs in Arizona, argued in Yazzie et al. v. Hobbs (2020) that voters living on the Navajo Nation faced impermissible barriers in accessing voting by mail. They provided evidence showing there was limited mail service on the reservation and that mail delivery times were much longer than in a number of off-reservation communities. Arizona District Court Judge G. Murray Snow denied the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, concluding that there was not sufficient evidence showing a disparate burden, as required by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He suggested that disparities in access and delivery times might be due to rurality rather than discrimination against a protected class. In this Article, we delve deeper into the evidence presented by the plaintiffs and then provide new evidence, showing disparities between access and delivery times on the reservation and those in off-reservation locations, including the most rural areas of the same counties