Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York »

Jane LaTour is a journalist and labor activist living in New York City. She has written for various union publications and managed the Women's Project of the Association for Union Democracy. She is a two-time winner of the Mary Heaton Vorse Award, the top labor journalism award in New York City.

Sisters in the Brotherhoods is an oral-history-based study of women who have, against considerable odds, broken the gender barrier to blue-collar employment in various trades in New York City beginning in the 1970s. It is a story of the fight against deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about what constitutes women's work, the middle-class bias of feminism, the daily grinding sexism of male coworkers, and the institutionalized discrimination of employers and unions. It is also the story of some gutsy women who, seeking the material rewards and personal satisfactions of skilled manual labor, have struggled to make a place for themselves among New York City's construction workers, stationary engineers, firefighters, electronic technicians, plumbers, and transit workers.Each story contributes to an important unifying theme: the way women confronted the enormous sexism embedded in union culture and developed new organizational forms to support their struggles, including and especially the United Tradeswomen.

PART I: WRITING TRADESWOMEN INTO HISTORY
• Rosie’s Daughters
• United Tradeswomen: Organizing for the Guaranteed Right to Work in Any Job
• PART II: CONSTRUCTION
• Learning to Labor on High Steel
• When Worlds Collide: The First Women in Electricians’ Local 3 * "Ticket to Ride"
• PART III: THE AGENCIES * "Sticking to the Union"
• Uncivil Service at the Board of Education * Double Vision: Breaking Down Doors at the FDNY
• PART IV: TECHNOLOGY * From Economics to Electronics: The Making of an Activist * That's Just the Way It Was: AT&T and the Struggle for Equal Opportunity
• PART V: TRANSPORTATION * Woman on the Move * PART VI: MOVING FORWARD * Against the Grain
• Getting Past Pioneering
• Epilogue: Where Are They Now?