Women and moms fought to break into the ranks

Bill Knight column for 5-9, 10 or 11, 2019

As the country marks Mother’s Day this weekend, it’s timely to once more recognize that mothers are workers, whether working as full-time homemakers or experiencing other opportunities elsewhere.

And as a new book shows, working women have constantly fought for access to equal pay, decent working conditions and even jobs themselves.

Reading “High Voltage Women” (2019, Red Letter Press), I recalled decades of watching my dad work as an electric utility lineman answering “trouble calls” at all hours, from routine outages to ice storms, which helped me appreciate that hard jobs helped many Americans achieve the middle class. But “many” didn’t always mean women, who had to weather more than wind damage and freezing temperatures.

In labor writer Ellie Belew’s book, she documents and narrates the history, personalities and breakthrough events in Seattle in the 1970s. Then and there, some women wanted better pay, and some sought bigger things – a sense of solidarity, a more robust labor movement, and an end to discrimination at Seattle City Light.

The largely untold, if not unknown, book about trailblazers who fought for job integration despite race and gender has the subtitle “Breaking Barriers at Seattle City Lights.” That’s accurate, because the women dismantled hindrances to climb the heights (even if they were on power poles instead of the proverbial ladder).

This inspiring tale is about 10 amazing women, a diverse group of feminists, unionists and minorities including two single mothers. Taking on affirmative action, city policies and demands by activists ranging from the United Construction Workers Association and conscientious bureaucrats to Seattle’s socialist/feminist group Radical Women, eight of them earned journeyman status after union grievances, layoffs, management sabotage, unfair layoffs, strikes, bias and serious injuries – with help from office workers, men of color in the building trades, and an IBEW Local.

Clara Fraser was a key participant, hired in 1973 as Training and Education Coordinator for Seattle City Light (formerly the municipality’s Department of Lighting), and soon ushered in the Electrical Trades Trainee (ETT) program. A fierce activist once dubbed “Seattle’s grande dame of socialism” by the Post-Intelligencer newspaper, Fraser knew how to organize.

The 10 women were accepted into ETT in 1974, the first women to enter a program to overcome the obstacles women faced in electrical-field crews, one of the 10 most dangerous U.S. jobs

As shown in Belew’s research, the women’s years-long struggle was complex (which makes a nine-page timeline handy for sequencing incidents along the way). After the ETT program was summarily dropped in 1975, Fraser and others filed complaints with Seattle’s Office of Women’s Rights and Human Rights Department, alleging discrimination based on gender and also harassment on the job.

The city’s powerbrokers dragged their feet, so the complaint wasn’t even heard by a panel until 1976, when it ruled the women had to be reinstated with back pay and promoted retroactively, and ordering the utility to eliminate the distinction between “trainee” and “helper.”

Afterward, on-the-job harassment decreased but remained. Responding to continuing and chronic harassment on the job, Angel Arrasmith, a proud lesbian, finally responded to one belligerent male co-worker by saying, “I’m more of a woman than you’ll ever get, and more of a man than you’ll ever be.”

Since then, of course – in Seattle, in Washington state and nationwide – affirmative action has eroded because of feckless politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. But the struggle continues, and “High Voltage Women” offers hope – and more.

In the 223-page book’s Introduction, Megan Cornish praises these “women who risked heartache to seek the simple pleasures – and higher paychecks – that come with careers in construction trades and other ‘male’ jobs. This book not only shows that you can fight misogynist institutions; it’s an essential guide on how to do it.”

And victory is possible, writes IBEW Local 77 Business Manager Louis Walter, who said this determined handful of pioneers were “ten brave and daring women [who] met with relentless resistance and overwhelming challenges that tested their minds and their bodies but never broke their spirit.”