10/6/2004 Don't talk to the patients: And other tales from Minnesota's working women
Kelly Westhoff
At work, Billie Jean Potter remembers, she was expected to keep her mouth shut. Potter began working as a nurse in the 1960s when talking to patients was a privilege still reserved for doctors.
Times have changed. American women still face workplace obstacles, but they are making strides in all fields. And today, nurses have become much more respected.
What was it like to have a job where you weren't allowed to talk to the people you were helping? Potter tells her story in her own words on a new website chronicling the history of women and work in Minnesota. The Minnesota Women & Work Oral History Collection features the stories of more than 50 Minnesota women along with a timeline of national and local workplace trends and women's rights in the state.
"We want to get people to experience work through women's eyes," said Renee Vaughan, founder and director of the oral history collection. "Many times women have had their histories told for them by men. Women, very often, don't do glamorous work, and so women's words haven't been published. Their working experiences haven't been accessible to us today. We don't know how they've interpreted their work or seen their work through their own eyes."
In 1981, Kristin Gunderson saw herself as a pioneer. Frustrated in her teaching career, she decided to become a carpenter. But during an orientation meeting with a carpenter's union, the man leading the meeting told the new apprentices "to make sure not to bend over and pick up a two-by-four for a woman because she is taking the bread and butter right out of your mouth." Gunderson and the one other woman present were shocked, but when they learned the speaker was the head of the carpenters' union, they became determined. They sat in the front row of every union meeting to drive home the fact that women carpenters were there to stay. Gunderson certainly was; she went on to become a staff carpenter at Regions Hospital.
Like Gunderson's story, most of the oral histories on the site reveal subtle shifts in gender roles and workplace practices. The history of the Willmar 8, however, recounts a more volatile time. An all-female labor union of bank employees, in 1977 they filed charges of sex discrimination and unfair labor practices against their employer and initiated the first bank strike in the state. The Wilmar 8, as they came to be known, stayed on the picket line for 18 months and the strike garnered so much publicity that it became the subject of an Academy Award-nominated documentary in 1980.
The website also includes a timeline of issues and photographs dating back to 1858 that offer snapshots into the workplace of the past. In 1926, for example, St. Louis Park schools fired three female teachers because they were married. By 1995, Minnesota had had the distinction of employing more women than any other state in the nation: 70 percent of Minnesota's women worked, compared to an average of 59.3 percent in other states.
Vaughan began collecting oral histories in 1996 as an instructor at Metropolitan State University. As a class assignment, she asked students to interview a Minnesota woman on tape or video about the paid and unpaid work she had done in her life. The goal, explained Vaughan, was to ask questions like, "When you were growing up, was work gendered and how did that affect the work options you thought you had?"
The oral history assignment proved to be such a valuable learning experience that Vaughan continued to assign it semester after semester. The tapes and videos started piling up. For lack of a better option, Vaughan stored the histories in plastic tubs in her basement. Then her basement flooded in 2000. The tapes were safe, but Vaughn realized she needed to do something to preserve all that history.
The Center for Community-Based Learning at Metropolitan State University helped fund the creation of the Minnesota Women & Work Oral History Collection website, Workday Minnesota provided the website design, and the Minnesota Historical Society provided many of the photographs used on the site. Currently, visitors can read transcripts of the taped interviews.
In the future, Vaughan hopes to find funding to add video and audio clips, teaching guides and discussion questions. And she continues to add new oral histories. Vaughan currently has two interns gathering stories from Latina migrant workers and from women in public office. She hopes to add stories from Hmong and Somali women in the future.
Visit the Minnesota Women & Work Oral History Collection at www.mnwomenwork.org.
