| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. By Karen Olson. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. x, 216 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-271-02685-5.)

In this excellent ethnography of steelworkers' wives, Karen Olson examines women's work lives and marriages in three historical periods. The first, from 1887 to 1945, began with Bethlehem Steel's construction of a steel mill and segregated company town near Baltimore. Two semi-independent working-class towns offered working families an alternative to company paternalism, but without a union, steelworkers earned too little to support their families. By taking in boarders, their wives contributed crucial income. From 1945 to 1970, a strong union allowed many steelworkers to earn enough income to achieve the breadwinner ideal, and their wives turned exclusively to homemaking. That "golden age" was short lived, however, and from 1970 to 2000, deindustrialization drastically cut the number of mill employees, forcing many wives back into the paid labor force. Acknowledging the heavy costs borne by working-class families when well-paid, unionized industrial jobs disappeared, Olson nonetheless finds in the decline of steelworking an opportunity for working-class wives to negotiate more egalitarian marriages. Key to that opportunity have been women's incomes and the disappearance of severely disruptive shift work.

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