Photograph by George Sakkestad
Mary Gaddis (left) shows Sonia Shell-Powell and Manuela Raquelle (right) how to measure and prepare wood for cutting.
By Suzanne Cristallo
The jigsaw growled, sawdust flew and the wood fell away clean from the penciled line. "Yes!" the women cheered. It was another simple challenge met. Two weeks before, it did not look so simple for the women entering the carpentry class at the San Jose YWCA.
"For years, I've wanted to know how to handle tools," says Los Gatan Manuela Raquelle, community education coordinator for the "YW" and one of the first students to sign up for the new class. "Men friends would try and show me, but I was humiliated by my ignorance and intimidated by their skill. I was afraid of asking stupid questions."
"I'll give $50 to anyone who asks a stupid question," says Mary Gaddis, who teaches the class, which is part of a series sponsored by the nonprofit Women Empowering Women. Through the group, Gaddis will teach classes in plumbing and electrical work at the YW during the upcoming school year.
Gaddis, who lives in Aldercroft Heights in the hills above Los Gatos, says she's never had to pay off on her stupid question challenge.
For the first time in her life, Raquelle, 54, says she understands how to measure, how to hold a saw, what kinds of cuts to make, how to measure and identify a nail, and what tool is best for the job. "This class is just for me, and Mary makes it so simple."
For women who have gone through life referring to a seven-eighths measurement as "three-quarters of an inch and two little lines past it," the class can be a revelation. The students give credit to 47-year-old Gaddis for the strong sense of confidence they have developed.
For Gaddis, who has worked 16 years as a pipefitter, the opportunity to empower women in classes such as this is a kind of payoff. It is a reward for her successful battles--on the job and in the courtroom--on behalf of women's right to work in trade unions free of harassment.
"When a woman can run her own skill saw, she doesn't have to take anything from anyone," Gaddis explains. "She can feel good about herself, about her independence, and that also gives men the space to be themselves. They don't have to always be the one who leads or knows."
In the early 1940s, this YWCA class might have been a group of women training for wartime duty at naval shipyards. During the height of World War II patriotic fervor, few questioned the acceptability of women wielding saws and hammers and drills. No one questioned the ability of women to do jobs previously thought to be the domain of men. Those women were affectionately referred to as Rosie the Riveter.
But when the war ended, Rosie was expected to exchange her tools for more domestic pursuits.
Yet, in a roundabout sort of way, it was Rosie the Riveter who helped open the door for Gaddis as she pursued a "nontraditional" career field and eventually led her to go to bat for women in the trades who were finding it rough going. Her teaching the carpentry class at the YWCA is another manifestation of the experiences she's had--some good, some bad--working in a field that used to be closed to women.
It wasn't until the women's movement that began in the 1970s that women began to think seriously about careers in the trades.
In 1979, Gaddis heard that Local 393 of the Pipefitters Union was accepting applications from women. Why not? She had worked side-by-side with her husband to rebuild their home and had learned to enjoy physical labor. And there was a childhood that taught her the value of working with her hands.
"My dad loved model railroading," Gaddis recalls. "There was a train big enough to ride in our back yard. He cast his own wheels for it and built his steam engine from scratch. By watching him, we saw things could be done."
Her mother was an accomplished woodworker. "Mom made bookcases and coffee tables beautifully yet would rave over anything we made. From her, we learned confidence and about function and aesthetics."
Gaddis submitted her application and became the first woman pipefitter in that local, a position that brought new challenges.
She says it didn't take long for her to get some idea of what she was up against. A standoff on hiring out of the union came when a contractor learned he would have to hire Gaddis. He did not want a woman, but Ray Borgette, the dispatcher at the union, held firm, Gaddis recalls. For three days, he insisted Gaddis was next in line, and no one would go out until she was hired. The contractor finally relented.
"He sent me to a sewage plant where he hoped I'd quit," Gaddis smiles. Instead, she was hooked up with a junior journeyman who was "scared stiff" of having the first girl apprentice. But he taught her so well, they worked together for a year.
Gaddis ran into plenty of opposition from coworkers when she became a pipefitter. But some of the male pipefitters took her under their wing. These were the ones who remembered Rosie the Riveter with affection. Their kindnesses to Gaddis were a form of reciprocation.
They had been too young during World War II to be drafted; so, they took jobs in the ship-building industry where they were taught welding and pipefitting by the Rosies of the day.
Others of Gaddis' new pipefitting colleagues tended to be more neutral. They watched her closely, scrutinizing everything she did.
Gaddis didn't mind those who watched to see if she would fail, though. It was a third group, larger and passionate in their opposition to working side by side with women, that almost succeeded in forcing her to quit. These were the men who caused her to fight back.
Gaddis was no shrinking violet. She had been an antiwar demonstrator during the Vietnam War and took to the picket lines again to protest PG&E's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in Avila Beach.
But the indignities she suffered on the job were far different from the direct confrontations she experienced with police during protests. Those on the job tended to be anonymous and their acts were largely surreptitious.
Gaddis says she was locked in an outhouse and then lifted with a forklift; she recalls dog droppings in her lunch pail and other humiliations.
One foreman, she recalls, would not talk to her for four months. In her presence, he referred to her in the third person. "He finally relented when some of the workers urged him to lay off," she smiles. "Then he said, 'Mornin'. "
On another job, while the men complained about the filthy conditions of the outhouses, Gaddis complained about the sexually explicit graffiti in them. Her protests were ignored. The drawings got worse.
Eventually, the contractor brought in a separate outhouse with a lock on it for use by the women. The security guard kept the key, requiring the women to hunt him up and ask for it each time they wanted to use it. A day later, the word "LEZZIE" was scrawled across the door--a stereotype for all women in construction--and over the weekend, urine was sprayed on all the walls.
Openly lesbian since 1976, Gaddis reacts to the word "lezzie," which she has often seen scrawled across bathroom walls on the job, the same way any minority reacts to hateful slurs.
Identifying herself as a lesbian in the world of construction was a major challenge in her life. "It's a heterosexist culture," she says. "Men always ask me what my husband does, or if I refer to my partner, they assume I'm referring to a business relationship."
Gaddis uses every opportunity to educate people about who she is.
"When they tell me 'queer' jokes," she says, "I say, 'Hey, do you know who you're talking about? Turn around and look at me. I'm what you're talking about.' "
Despite her attempts to humanize the careless language of her coworkers, the degrading labels still hurt. "A lot depends on who's saying it," she says. "On a job site, every woman has been called a 'lezzie' or by parts of her anatomy. They are terms intended to devalue you."
When the graffiti continued, Gaddis and another woman brought a camera to work and made a show of photographing it. Management still did not respond, and the harassment continued.
Eventually, she was promoted to foreman--or "forema'am"--and the graffiti became specific to her. She says she attempted to retaliate by ripping up sexually explicit calendars throughout the site. But the misogynist atmosphere persisted. She was ready to throw in the towel. Then someone suggested she file a lawsuit.
In 1991, after 12 years of what she describes as degrading experiences, Gaddis filed a sexual harassment suit against the contractor in federal court. (More than that she cannot say, according to the wording of the final settlement.)
What took her so long?
"No woman would ever get a thing done on a job if she took time to challenge each act of harassment," Gaddis notes. "You pick your fights."
The lawsuit caught media attention immediately. Word got out that there were photos of the graffiti. The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times and a local TV station excitedly requested copies. "They took one look at what we had photographed and returned it. They said it was too explicit for publication," Gaddis says.
The magistrate in the case also took a look and promptly raised the settlement amount.
Because of the suit Gaddis filed and won, the contractor must conduct classes in sexual harassment for all of its workers. Gaddis says other contractors who have seen the trend are conducting classes on their own.
Robert Mize, business agent for Local 393, says he sees changes in working conditions coming mainly as a result of social revolution. "It's just a '90s thing. I see people accepting others in this union where maybe some didn't 30 years ago, but certainly in the last six years, they have."
While Gaddis was the first woman in 1979, today there are 15 women among more than 1,500 pipefitters in the local.
During the years she has been a pipefitter, Gaddis has learned to be cautious and alone. Each day, she takes her lunch to an isolated spot and reads. The dog droppings episode taught her a lesson. "Besides, men talking in groups tend to want to out-gross one another," she says.
She also has learned who is working on the site through an age-worn form of communication. "The first thing I do on a job is read the outhouses," she says. "I can tell right off if there are any blacks or women by the graffiti on the walls."
After her first day on one job, a very graphic and humiliating drawing of a woman appeared. "I was infuriated and told the men how I felt," she says. The next day, the graffiti had been painstakingly blacked out with a marking pen.
"I knew then I had an ally." On every job since then, Gaddis says she looks until she finds out who her allies are.
While her working conditions seem to simulate the intrigue of war, things have improved.
Although she was prevented from including racial harassment as a part of her suit, she has, nevertheless, become a kind of a champion to minority workers who seek her out.
Additionally, since everyone knows of "Mary's" lawsuit, those in the field have come to look upon all women as a potential "Mary."
"There's a sort of tippy-toe caution around women on the job these days," she smiles. "There's a tendency to treat all women as if they might fight back."
Being "forema'am" on the job brings with it some trepidation on the part of her crews who have never worked for a woman before.
She overheard a comment to that effect recently and replied, "Many of you have never worked with a woman before and especially a grandma [a reference to the grandchild she shares with her partner of 14 years, Judy Cayot]. I expect you to treat me with grandma respect."
And she is getting that respect. "Tiny" is an example.
After an admonition to the giant pipefitter about his language, which degraded the abilities of a minority, Gaddis asked him, "What if every day you came on a job and were given nothing but grunt work to do? What would that do to you?"
On the closing day of his job, Tiny came up to her, gave her a hug and said, "You've given me a lot to think about."
"Moments like that make it all worthwhile," Gaddis says.
Classes in Carpentry for Women taught by Mary Gaddis begin again Sept. 17 at the San Jose YWCA. Four weekly sessions run 6-8:30 p.m. For information, call 295-4011, ext. 226. Ask about the all-new curriculum.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, August 7, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved