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Reworking Race, Class, and Gender into Pacific Northwest History

Reworking Race, Class, and Gender into Pacific Northwest History laurie mercier From the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, logging, mining, agriculture, and fishing have distinguished the Pacific Northwest and the gendered character of its work. Though in recent decades high-tech, service, and other industries have employed greater numbers of workers, many of our notions of work remain frozen in the early twentieth century and the concept of a white, male ``wageworkers' frontier.'' 1 For instance, when I point out to my students in southwest Washington State that more communications workers than loggers have lost jobs in recent decades, they argue that loggers and their communities deserve special assistance because, unlike other workers, they represent ``a way of life'' symbolic of the rugged Northwest. My students, like most people, are not conscious of the ways in which jobs come to be defined in racial- and gender-specific ways and granted more cultural weight because of who dominates them. These perceptions persist because scholarly as well as popular treatments of work perpetuate them. For example, a fine recent anthology featuring literature about work in the Pacific Northwest includes some selections about contemporary urban, high-tech, and industrial agriculture realities, but, for the most part, the book focuses on the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies University of Nebraska Press

Reworking Race, Class, and Gender into Pacific Northwest History

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies , Volume 22 (3) – Dec 1, 2001

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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by Frontiers Editorial Collective.
ISSN
1536-0334
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

laurie mercier From the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, logging, mining, agriculture, and fishing have distinguished the Pacific Northwest and the gendered character of its work. Though in recent decades high-tech, service, and other industries have employed greater numbers of workers, many of our notions of work remain frozen in the early twentieth century and the concept of a white, male ``wageworkers' frontier.'' 1 For instance, when I point out to my students in southwest Washington State that more communications workers than loggers have lost jobs in recent decades, they argue that loggers and their communities deserve special assistance because, unlike other workers, they represent ``a way of life'' symbolic of the rugged Northwest. My students, like most people, are not conscious of the ways in which jobs come to be defined in racial- and gender-specific ways and granted more cultural weight because of who dominates them. These perceptions persist because scholarly as well as popular treatments of work perpetuate them. For example, a fine recent anthology featuring literature about work in the Pacific Northwest includes some selections about contemporary urban, high-tech, and industrial agriculture realities, but, for the most part, the book focuses on the

Journal

Frontiers: A Journal of Women StudiesUniversity of Nebraska Press

Published: Dec 1, 2001

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