Selections from We'll Call You if We Need You

            Even today it is still fairly uncommon to see women working jobs in plumbing, steel mills, roofing, and so forth.   Just imagine what things were like 50 years ago, when many women found themselves in those jobs because the pay from "women's jobs" (nursing, filing, cooking) did not pay enough to support them.  
            This reading first introduces a group of women who took these jobs back in the 1950s.   The women write about how they got into the work and why they took the job.   While they come from varying backgrounds and take the jobs for varying reasons, they all do have one thing in common--the discrimination they faced from male bosses and co-workers.
            The second half of the reading deals with the problems the women encountered on the job.   Many of the men they worked with tried to overwork them to have them quit and some just plain fired them a day before they could join the union.   The women were faced with the dilemma of either overworking themselves to prove that they were strong, or losing out on a possibly good paying job in order to protect themselves.   Many women did not realize that they had rights as workers and could have kept the jobs without having to risk their health.
            The reading does a great job focusing on how women transcended the sexist boundaries set up by male-dominated working environments to become part of the workforce.   Despite lacking formal educations, many of these women learned from their experiences and their mistakes on how to survive in and eventually improve these work environments. -M.J.