When the 34-year-old non-profit Chicago Women in Trades ( CWIT ) held a January orientation for entry into its two training programs in welding and technical opportunities, a line of working tradeswomen stood in front of an audience of well over 350 women hoping to travel along the same road.
The work of those tradeswomen—and many like them—to level and pave over decades of misogynistic attitudes, misconceptions and abuse toward women dreaming of a career as a plumber, carpenter, steelworker or any number of trades once padlocked by societal tradition as male dominated and associated with macho caricatures has made the progress of the 21st-century tradeswoman from apprentice to journeyman to a career with the potential for a six figure salary much smoother.
The tradeswomen at the orientation came from backgrounds which, in many cases, might have dampened their thoughts of a career of any kind let alone one in which they have found both contentment and success.
Sarah Stigler is a union plumber with Local 130 U.A. "I've always gravitated towards non-traditional work for women," she told Windy City Times. "In high school I was fixing machines for a small bulk mail company. I was always working with my hands."
Initially, Stigler wanted to become a welder and leverage that desire into the art of sculpting. But immediately after high school, her abilities began to piece together her future in ways she did not expect. "I had an opportunity to go and work for a small kitchen and bath remodeling company and I really liked the work," she said. "Belonging to a union was always something that I wanted long-term. It was the end game—more important to me than a college diploma. I just didn't know how it was all going to fit together."
Stigler was working a non-union job for a family owned business when she happened across a license plate holder for CWIT. "I thought 'well I'm a Chicago woman in almost a trade.' So I called them up," she said. "I took a class [at CWIT]. Basically I had the hands-on skills but I didn't have the math skills needed to get into one of the apprenticeship slots. But these guys really helped me to get my math skills up to snuff and taught me how to get into the trades."
Stigler was accepted into the plumbers union in 2003. "I had a little bit of difficulty getting onto the apprenticeship," she recalled. "I was one of three women in a class of about one hundred. By the way, those are great numbers—a sign of the changing times. A lot of what we learn at CWIT is how not to take shit from anybody yet convince people they should teach you like any other apprentice. Of course a lot of the guys don't want to take us seriously as women. When you come onto a job, they're like 'she's here just to file a lawsuit or start some trouble.' There are a lot of stereotypes against us. But we're not taking 'no' for an answer. The company I was hired by gave me a shot and I took it from there."
Jacqueline Townsend didn't accept the word "no"—even from her own family. She was born and raised in Aurora, Illinois; by her second year of college in Edwardsville, she discovered that academia was not the direction she wanted to take. "I went because it was what my father wanted me to do," she recalled. "To be honest, I wanted to go into the military but my family doesn't believe in women in the military. I got kicked out of college for academic dishonesty so I came home, did nothing for a couple of years and wound up getting into some trouble. I got a felony and ended up on probation. Once that happened I had no idea what I wanted to do in life."
In the same year Stigler was realizing her dream of becoming a union worker, Townsend saw a CWIT flier at the unemployment office. "I got into their technical opportunities program," she said. "While I was there, they took us around, let us see all the different trades and do some hands-on work and I just fell in love with bricklaying."
In 2005, Townsend began work with Lombard-based Iwanski Masonry, where she remains today. "It will make 10 years in April that I've been working in construction," she declared with a proud smile. "When I first started, the guys thought I wouldn't make it but one of the owners worked with me every day for several years and he vowed to himself and to me to make me a great bricklayer."
She added that her current foreman saw the same potential. "Occasionally I have a guy who offers help but I don't need that help," Townsend said. "If I need it, I'll ask for it."
Her family's reaction to her chosen career was mixed. "My mom and my grandparents were very open and accepting of it," Townsend said. "My father doesn't like to admit it but I think he's a male chauvinist. We've had some issues that stem from me being a lesbian and doing a 'man's work.' He acts like he's OK with it. He doesn't want to stir up any conflict with me because I'm pretty outspoken about my job. I do equal if not more than my male counterparts and I'm pretty good. Actually, I'm great."
"Part of the mission here at CWIT is to be way above the heap, in the top percentage where we're picking up the next tool and doing the next thing," Stigler said. "It was my strategy and it's the strategy we teach here—don't give them a chance to doubt you."
Yet despite the advancements that Stigler, Townsend and Chicago Women in Trades have achieved, or the fact that certainly those unions represented at CWIT's orientation are actively looking to increase their numbers with women, some of society's commentators still glorify and bathe in the attitudes of the 1950's when the only electricity a woman was supposed to work with was an oven-switch.
In a 2013 Time magazine editorial entitled "It's a Man's World and It Always Will Be," academic Camille Paglia wrote, "It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. "
Both Stigler and Townsend find such views to be archaic to the point of becoming as fossilized as those who espouse them. The confidence they have in their abilities and in themselves as individuals are instantly observable through their forthright conversation and raised postures so hardened by determination that they can shoulder a world of discouragement without once buckling under its weight.
"I'm going to do what is in my sights and I don't give a shit what anybody thinks about it," Stigler said. "Maybe there is push-back but I don't have time for it. If you are thin-skinned and give a shit in your heart what other people have to say or think about you or if they think that's not the kind of work for a woman to do, then you're not going to make it because it's never going to stop."
"My grandparents believe that a woman's place is behind her man and that I'm supposed to have kids and stay home" Townsend said. "Nobody believes that I can do what I do. But I don't pay any attention to them anymore because I'm going to do it regardless."
For Stigler, traditionalists like Paglia are negated by one simple but overriding concept. "I'm not there to discuss the nuances of gender politics," she said. "I'm just there to work."
An CWIT information session is planned for Nov. 25, 2015 @ 5:30 pm — 8:30 pm at Chicago Women In Trades, 2444 West 16th St., Chicago.
Read more at the link: chicagowomenintrades2.org/ .
The "Women Build Nations Conference" will be held in Chicago 2016 April 29 — May 1, 2016. Read more at the link: chicagowomenintrades2.org/ .
