Suchergebnisse

"Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. If our environment changes at an unsettling pace, how will we make sense of a world that is no longer familiar? One of Canada's premier historians tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past where state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and technological changes forced ordinary people to cope with transformations that were so radical that they no longer recognized their home and workplaces or, by implication, who they were."--BOOK JACKET

This is a story of two Ontario towns, Hanover and Paris, that grew in many parallel ways. They were about the same size, and both were primarily one-industry towns. But Hanover was a furniture-manufacturing centre; most of its workers were men, drawn from a community of ethnic German artisans and agriculturalists. In Paris the biggest employer was the textile industry; most of its wage earners were women, assisted in emigration from England by their Canadian employer. Joy Parr considers the impacy of these fundamental differences from a feminist perspective in her study of the towns' industrial, domestic, and community life. She combines interviews of women and men of the towns with analyses of a wide range of documents: records of the firms from which their families worked, newspapers, tax records, paintings, photographs, and government documents. Two surprising and contrasting narratives emerge. The effects of gender identities upon both women's and men's workplace experience and of economic roles upon familial relationships are starkly apparent. Extending through seventy crucial years, these closely textured case studies challenge conventional views about the distinctiveness of gender and class roles. They reconfigure the social and economic change accompanying the rise of industry. They insistently transcend the reflexive dichtomies drawn between womena dn men, public and privae, wage and non-wage work. They investigate industrial structure, technological change, domesticity, militance, and perceptions of personal power and worth, simultaneously as products of gender and class identities, recast through community sensibilities

Radiation is a workplace hazard that eludes the sensing body, or seems to. After Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Kai Erickson described radiation as "an invisible threat," "the very embodiment of stealth and treachery." The first generation of Canadian nuclear power workers, from their four decades of experience around reactors has a different sense of the matter. They describe a physical awareness of the morphology and topography of radiation, a cultivated bodily knowledge that informed their actions as they produced power. They describe a "feel and a touch for the plant," framed in theoretical studies, made through attentiveness and alert expectation, honed by being out and about in the station, being its intimate, "listening to its very cries." By their telling, "doesn't feel right" ceased to be a metaphor about their workplace circumstance, and through study and practice, became a bodily effect, a report from the somatic. Key to work safety for Canadian nuclear workers were close study of the theory of ionizing radiation, adeptness with both the instruments which made radiation apparent and the calculations that made the readings on dials into qualitatively and spatially distinctive workplace presences, and skill in choosing, donning, building, and removing physical barriers between their bodies and radiation fields. Through this knowledge and practice, Canadian nuclear workers came to embody the hazards of the job. This working knowledge of the insensible enabled them to be responsible for their own radiation protection and for the safety of those with whom they worked.

Sexual division has been an obvious and enduring characteristic of wage work, much studied on both sides of the Atlantic. Gender roles, household forms, and community welfare have been made and remade by changing access to paid work. The theoretical literature on gender segregation in the labour force is rich, but economists and feminist theorists have been interested in sexual divisions as general features of the economic or sex/gender system rather than as boundaries between tasks forged in defined contexts by particular clashes of interest. Whether in specifying the social groups that benefited by gender division, the systematic relationships that generated the boundaries, or the traits upon which lines of partition were drawn, most analysts have dealt with gender division as a characteristic of the work force as a whole.