High Voltage Women: Breaking Barriers at Seattle City Light

High Voltage Women: Breaking Barriers at Seattle City Light, by Ellie Belew (Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press, 2019).

Review by Francine Moccio. 

In High Voltage Women: Breaking Barriers at Seattle City Light, the author, Ellie Belew has achieved a well-documented work of historical non-fiction about how ten heroic journeywomen lineworkers at Seattle’s public utility—City Light—broke barriers in a highly dangerous skilled occupation. Belew takes readers on a fascinating journey with ten brave Seattle women along the road from apprentice to journeywomen; and go ‘where no women has ever gone before’. What enfolds is a thriller/drama important for all readers who have felt left out, isolated at work, ignored, passed over, and denigrated at work.  The significance of a small group of ten women in all all-male industry tells its readers important aspects of fighting resistance to one of the toughest battles of the twentieth century and winning against all odds: women breaking barriers in highly skilled male-dominated blue-collar jobs.

Journey lineworkers have one of the most dangerous jobs in the power industry. The industry’s record on accidents and fatalities is only surpassed by electrical work in the construction trades. Facing such barriers as hostility, sexual harassment, violence, physical threats, verbal abuse, women braved hostile supervisors, utility bureaucrats and administrators and on a daily basis, hostile male co-workers. This treatment from men needed to be severe enough as to warn off additional women who may be interested in joining the apprenticeship for many reasons:  financial, love of the trade, desire to advocate for women into blue-collar jobs.  The message: “Women need not apply.”

In addition, High Voltage Women unveils the degree to which public policy (like the EEOC’s ordinance to integrate the electrical trade) can only be successful if there is struggle on the ground to support it. In this book, Belew immortalizes one of these struggles, preserves local history and enriches the readers’ understanding of feminist ideals:  work and personal life, industry and policy, patriarchal-like institutions, and how keeping women out of the public sphere can allow greater control of the state.  For all her efforts, the author enthusiastically energizes the reader to wake-up:  without history and narrative there is no truth.

For example, Belew problematizes masculinity in the electrical public utility as a microcosm of such workplace issues as: the reproduction of male-only social and political networks inside the public utility – Seattle City Light. Furthermore, she takes her readers along the women’s journey from apprentices to journey level lineworkers. Through this prism, Belew reveals the ways in which industry and labor relations, as well as public policy are intertwined. Furthermore, this understanding allows interested stakeholders to identify tactics when integration halts and to provide best practices on the ‘shop floor. The negative reception the City Light ten received from male co-workers is emblematic of how capitalism albeit in the public sector can pervade institutional actions through manipulation of ideology. City Light’s male culture of solidarity is a bond that was made in the 1930’s. This cult of manly work is relevant as underpinning the philosophical meaning of male breadwinner and workers’ negotiations for better wages. In prevailing against male resistance, these heroic ten women point up not only discrimination against women but economic, racial divisions that work to divide a broader capitalist workforce. In addition, High Voltage Women pinpoints allies in the women’s struggle to establish themselves in the industry: black men, feminists advocating on the grassroots level, socialist politicians and the women’s use of male networks to burrow into an industry-specific masculine culture. This culture would shore up the union’s breadwinner demands. In addition, fetter the well-established male hierarchy and paternalism in the town hall. This finding correlates with other important studies of male dominant blue-collar trades and shows that despite public policy to integrate the workplace, there is a ‘men only’ sign on good skilled trades jobs. The 1970’s feminist movement among blue-collar women although submerged in US history, rears its importance for how such a symbol of strength, danger, physical prowess, and brotherhood shape and are shaped by cultural definitions of masculinity/femininity and race. The story of these ten women – pioneers in Seattle’s public utility -City Light will not disappoint the reader. Belew carefully documents the successes and failures of 1960’s and 1970’s movements through public policy mandates intended to dismantle sex and race discrimination and to integrate—institutionally, and socially — the electrical trade.

The significance of High Voltage Women holds for the present day this moment in history when public utilities are bearing responsibility for inadequate supervision and the cause of the raging fires consuming whole communities like Paradise, California.  Women entering City Light was only possible owing to federal guidelines from the push a transformative agenda to deconstruct sexism and to flick the switch that held a powerful privileged few. Linemen are men. Women are for after work. Freud pointed up the dangerous ground of gender identity as the ‘ragged edge of the mind’.  As women become increasingly integrated in professional occupations like law, medicine, and engineering, blue-collar work is more complex: it does not strictly rest on traditional capitalist exchanges. Imbued in the masculinity in the electrical industry, Belew shows readers how extraordinary and predictable men’s responses became. And what it took to shut them down.

What is most striking is the way in which the women interweave one another’s stories:  entwining the personal and political, the political and benevolent, and the contractual. Their presence in the trade did not only shake the foundation of City Light’s institutional arrangements but raised universal issues of fair pay, adequate training, preventive sexual harassment, working conditions, safety and health. These were the issues that most male co-workers would “suck up” lay back and crack open a beer to forget.

“When women enter the city……they change it forever”. stated the ancient Greek writer Aristophanes.  Male workers, politicians, and bureaucrats at City Light intuitively knew, according to Belew, that women meant change. To reproduce an occupation and/or industry as male-only takes a village. Here is where High Voltage Women’s power decodes race and sex along the lines of male privilege – predetermined and assured.

Furthermore, in High Voltage Women, readers will revel in the comraderie and bravery of these female pioneers who braved patriarchal institutions and their agents. Seattle City Light female journey workers bear the scars of this battle that won a woman’s right forever to consider pursuing their dreams and goals regardless of race or gender.

To do the job they love — to open doors for unforeseen generations of women workers — to short-circuit male domination and power — Belew’s unfolding of a dramatic historical moment that transformed the meaning of being human.

The submerged story in High Voltage Women is the role of radical left leaning organizers whose influence and skills energized the Seattle community to activism. There is much hope and optimism in Belew’s book coupled with a caveat: when women enter the City they are agents of social change in the struggle for equity and freedom. These women have also liberated men.

High Voltage Women is a case study relevant for examining much broader foundational issues of radical social change—using history, ethnography and narrative against the backdrop of historical depth and savvy political analysis.  I know that I will always keep a copy in my library.

Francine Moccio is the president and co-founder of the Association for Advancing Women’s Equality (AAWE), an organization dedicated to providing research, advocacy and training for union women throughout New York and New Jersey. For over twenty years, Moccio headed Cornell University’s Institute for Women and Work (IWW) which was dedicated to advancing women in their unions. Moccio authored the book Live Wire: Women and Brotherhood in the Electrical Industry (Temple University Press, PA) (2010). She lectures around the country on best practices to integrate the American labor force in unionized settings. Moccio also works with unions, workers’ rights associations, immigrants’ rights organizations and in labor relations. She has taught at Cornell ILR and the Cornell in Washington Public Policy program, Emory Law, Cornell School of Law, Rutgers University School of Management and Employment Relations (SMLR), and Fordham University’s Anthropology, Africana-Studies, and Urban Studies Departments.