THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Amy Senninger
“My story is one of an extraordinary feminist adventure, but not one I wanted to take.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, November 2023
AS: My full name is Amy Ellen Senninger. I was born Sternbach; that’s my maiden name. I was born in New York City, where all great things come. February 6, 1957.
JW: Okay, well, tell us little more about your childhood. What were your influences?
AS: My ethnicity is unusual, but not unusual in America. My mother was a second-generation Irish American. She was born, actually, when they got here, right off the boat, and had seven older brothers and sisters. Roman Catholic, the whole nine works. In fact, her family had to emigrate from Ireland because they were first cousins, her parents, and the local priest ostracized them. Of course, these are the kinds of things you find out many years later.
My father’s ethnicity is very different. He’s of German and Russian Jewish descent. You don’t often find Russian German Jews marrying Irish Catholics. But as I said, I think in our country, some of those rules don’t apply. I think it created an enormous friction in their marriage. I think my father had to marry my mother. He got her pregnant, she wouldn’t have an abortion, and that was that, right? It’s interesting.
My mother is a very interesting person that I thought about a lot in terms of your project. Because my mother I think, was very ambivalent about being a mother. She was much smarter than my father. They were both college educated; she was the first of her family to become college educated. They met at the University of Wisconsin, where I spent my early years. He got a job as a social worker, and my mother was much more talented. She went to Columbia University for postgraduate studies in journalism. And when she became pregnant, she went down this road of having all these kids.
We had a large family. The kids were very closely spaced, like a typical Irish Catholic family. My father had to agree to raise us all as Catholics, and he was very strange about it. He would go to our first holy Communions, and he would walk right up to the door of the Catholic Church but not step over. So, I think it was a very weird experience for him. Since my mother’s parents were deceased, we actually had a fairly large Jewish influence from my father’s parents, who were sort of – I can humorously say this – every stereotype of Woody Allen’s Upper West Side Jews. I mean, everything.
He worked in the Garment District. She wore big stoles, the whole nine yards. They spoke Yiddish fluently. And what I learned about my parents’ cross cultures, is how bizarre, useless, and ignorant, bigotry is. Because both sides of the family were very hostile to each other. Like, my father would be ignored by my mother’s Irish clan. My mother was treated horribly by his parents, and I don’t think it did their marriage any good.
However, having said that, I think their marriage was doomed to failure from the beginning. I think she suffered from a mental illness that went untreated. She was pretty violent, and it was a pretty dysfunctional family. We were very close, all the kids, until 1971. They moved from Madison, and they got a divorce, but they split apart the family. I don’t know why they would do that, split apart all the kids. Half of us were sent to my mom, and that was very destructive. I don’t think it was good for us at all, of course.
The one other thing I would add about my family, is my parents were progressive, lefty. Half of my pictures from childhood are me carrying signs against the Vietnam War. When I’ve compared my upbringing to that of other people my exact age, politics was much more a part of my life than many, many people I know who just had a quiet 1960s childhood.
And back to my mother. She was not shy to point out the hypocrisy of the left-wing movement. I remember her saying things like, “All the men were out there solving the world’s problems and starting a revolution, while the women were in the kitchen making sandwiches.” So, I think she really would have preferred to have had a career. That didn’t do us any good as children. However, with a lot of time and perspective, I can see what an extraordinary person my mother really was, despite all the challenges she had.
A lot of the episodes I’ve watched of the people you’ve interviewed have made me think about my mother in a different way. That if she had just been born a little later, she would have had a very different life. Now, some of it she brought on herself. I mean, there is this thing called birth control, and on and on. But both my parents were very left. I wouldn’t even say moderate. Do you know that the first thing I can ever remember reading on my own was a poster that my father had in his study. It was a quote from Che Guevara that said, “Let me say this at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that most true revolutionaries are guided by great feelings of love.” That was the first thing I ever remember being able to read.
JW: That’s amazing. You know, I often say I was lucky I was born when I was. I’m about ten years older than you, but had I been born ten years before, I would have had a very different life. It made a big difference.
AS: One time in a rare moment of honesty, because my father, he didn’t have the strongest moral compass let me put it that way, with regards to womanizing and a lot of other problems; but he said once, in a rare moment of honesty, that if he had been a little more willing to go against society’s norms, he would have been much happier taking care of kids. He was like a giant child himself. And then my mother…she really had much more ambition, much more intellectual power, and she was better at school. She was much more of a high achiever, but she was crammed.
And then, isn’t this classic, as soon as he had his PhD; she supported him all the way through, he divorced her and left her with no job, in the middle of a small town in Vermont. She had a degree as a librarian, so she went to work as a librarian. That’s what she did. She worked in the library system in Vermont. So, that was my upbringing. I think the greatest damage was done to severing the relationships of the kids. That was very hard. I know it was hard on me. I really looked up to my sisters.
JW: Did you regain contact with them?
AS: We’ve always maintained contact to some degree. There’s been estrangements and then coming back together. But I don’t think you can tear a family apart with kids and then just expect them to have healthy relationships with each other. It’s been a struggle. Some of us work at it. Some of us are kind of estranged. It’s one of those messy situations.
JW: How many of them are you?
AS: Five. Plus, my father remarried, so I do have a half-sister, who I’m not very close to.
JW: I see, a half-sister. All right, well, you talked about in your document you sent, you did go to college. And apparently in college, at that time it’s 1975, [you] were quite aware of feminist artists. A kind of awakening, I guess, for you. Want to tell us about that?
AS: I think I went to art school with a very naive idea that they were going to teach me to paint, like Caravaggio or Rembrandt or some nonsense like that. And in fact, I chose the school I chose because they gave me the best scholarship. But I didn’t realize that I was placing myself in the very center of the most avant-garde. The last thing they were going to do was teach me traditional painting techniques. It was very different than what I expected.
I did get exposed to many artists who, I didn’t understand their work, but I think it was excellent for me. It’s good to be exposed to things that make you uncomfortable. The first artist that I remember being exposed to, is Judy Chicago’s famous exhibit, “The Dinner Party.” And to be honest, at age 18, 19, I was very embarrassed by these ceramic vaginas. I had no idea. I was so clueless. And like most 19-year-olds, I was just trying to fit in.
I think, even more extraordinary, I was exposed to Lori Anderson, who’s a very famous feminist performance artist, and her work was very evocative to me. It made me understand that art could be a lot more than just painting on a piece of paper. That you could explore much deeper and more extraordinary aspects to things. I wouldn’t say I really understood a lot of what I was seeing, but it was very important.
I also had a very dear and close friend who was one of the only women in the film department, and she was very outspoken with her criticism that there were no female faculty there. I helped her a little bit with a wonderful film that she made called, The Real You, Top to Bottom. So, yes, those were some of the feminist influences I was exposed to. It’s really the milieu. I should have stayed.
My father essentially lost me my scholarship. It’s not something I really want to go into. But he stopped filing income tax. He was a bit of a petty criminal, my father. And I didn’t understand what was happening. I really needed some help doing all those forms. I was trying to earn money as a nude figure model in the painting department. The long shot of it was, he cast a kind of doubt on my honesty, had nothing to do with me, and they took away my scholarship. That’s a very expensive school. So, I went on for another year, taking out loans, and that was when I kind of lost my way.
I don’t know whether or not you’re really going to want to use my interview, because I’m going to tell you something straight out. My story is one of an extraordinary feminist adventure, but not one I wanted to take. I should have lived a different life. I should have become a professional artist. I should have finished my fine arts degree. I really ended up in the blue-collar trades out of a sense of, I think it was really a self-destructive thing. Maybe I was trying to get my father’s attention. In other words, everything I did, I did stupidly, ignorantly, recklessly. Does that count as feminism? I don’t know.
JW: You first went into the Elevator Constructions Union, is that right? How did that happen?
AS: That was horrible. Well, what happened is, after I dropped out, I was working as a waitress and I got involved with this kind of weird guy. I used to listen to WGCI every Sunday, which was the large, Black, radio station. And one day, I was listening to it, and they used to have Reverend Jesse Jackson on, and he announced in his Operation Push, that they were looking for young women who wanted to be part of blue-collar jobs. And at that point, I felt so, I don’t know, lost, at loose ends. I got on the number 64 westbound Madison bus all the way to the heart of the Black west side, and got off the bus in front of his Operation Push.
I think those folks were so astonished by some young White girl going to the worst neighborhood in all of Chicago, and that they signed me up for a couple things. I didn’t even know what they were. They called me for the elevator constructor job. Now, that was a nightmare. It was really dangerous work. It’s like building a railroad vertically. It is the most unbelievably dangerous work.
It wasn’t even really a real apprenticeship; in that they didn’t send me to school or anything. I lasted about a year and a half. I saw two people killed right in front of me, which was really horrible. The last straw was when they couldn’t discourage me as a hard hat, they moved me over to service, and that was when they ordered me into Cabrini Green. And I wasn’t that self-destructive that I was going into Cabrini Green.
JW: Okay, tell us what that is, because a lot of people don’t know what that is.
AS: There were several very infamous, and that truly is the right word, infamously dangerous housing projects in the city of Chicago. Robert Taylor homes was one, Cabrini Green was another. And Cabrini Green was located, actually, ironically, in a very high rent area of Chicago. But it had been put up during the war on poverty, just like the ones on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City.
They were high rise buildings, and pretty soon they were completely 100% under the control of vicious gangs that would take control over an entire high rise. So, the housing project was like 14, 15, of these high-rise buildings that were about 30 stories of apartments. But the problem was, there was nothing to keep the environment safe.
What I mean by that is in the true Marxist sense of safety from Jane Jacobs, who’s a famous Marxist economist. She pointed out that one of the reasons all housing projects become so dangerous, is there’s no reason for people to be on city streets. So, people become more and more frightened of the gangs to go outside. There’s no stores, there’s no churches. There’s no movie theaters. There’s just a big vacant lot. And so, you’ve got a high rise and a high rise and a high rise and a high rise, and just nothing but dead no man’s land in between.
And of course, the residents are scared of these gangs and they run everything. At that point, I think it was ’84, ’85, the gangs were in complete control. The Chicago Fire Department would not go into Cabrini Green without a police escort. But here’s the deal. Think about how the residents were dependent on elevators. They were 100% dependent on those elevators, which half the time were broken. They smelled like urine. They were dangerous. There were countless rapes and murders in them. And we were the elevator service people, who were supposed to go in without a police escort. So, they figured out how to get rid of me, and that’s all I really have to say about elevator construction. I was only in it for about a year. I went back to waitressing.
JW: Before you go back to waitressing, I want to ask you, how were you treated as a woman in that job? Were there other women?
AS: There were no other women. It’s an interesting question. I decided to do, “I’ll be one of the boys.” I have something very interesting to say about, “one of the boys” later on. “One of the boys” means that, you’re kind of like an, eh. They were okay to me. They used a lot of foul language around me because I was “one of the boys,” right? I later dropped that. When I became a sheet metal worker, I decided to make them treat me as a nice young woman, very different.
JW: So, you learned in that first job. You learned being one of the boys wasn’t really going to be good.
AS: No, but they were decent to me. The guys who were the hard hats, the constructors, they were nice. When they moved me over to service, those guys were complete creeps. They were the ones that were the service techs. They were all alcoholics, and they sat in bars all day long and strip clubs. And then if their beeper went off, then they would respond to a service call. But as I said, I didn’t even last three weeks in service.
JW: Because of this Cabrini Green incident. Do you think they did that to you because you were a woman?
AS: Of course. They didn’t hide it. They said it. They straight out told me. But at that point you see, I understood that the only reason I was there, was because of the political pressure Operation Push was starting to put on some of the blue-collar chains. They kept reporting to the federal government that they would be happy to take women, but they didn’t have any women applicants.
So, when Jesse Jackson heard that Operation Push started recruiting female applicants for all the trades; electricians, pipe fitters, sheet metal workers, plumbers, then he deliberately put pressure politically on them in Chicago, to then say that they didn’t have any applicants. And then they lied through their teeth. They just lied through their teeth and said they didn’t have any applicants.
JW: I see. Okay, so I interrupted you. You went back to being a waitress. And then what happened?
AS: And then, much to my surprise, I got another letter. And this was from Local 73, the International Association of Sheet Metal Workers. I didn’t really want to do it, but again, basically, my life had gone pretty far off the rails. I was living the life that was nothing like trying to be an artist. I don’t know why I gave this a second try, but I did. I guess I had lost all my confidence to compete in the art world. It really did sweep my feet out from underneath me when I lost that scholarship. But be that as it may, I answered this letter, and I thought, the worst thing that will happen is, I absolutely hate this, and I’ll go back to waitress. So, I tried it. And this one was much more of a formal apprenticeship. I was indentured as an apprentice.
JW: What does that mean?
AS: Indentureship goes back all the way to colonial days. What it is, is a formal agreement, that you agree as an apprentice to show up and work for four years for them, and complete all the responsibilities of an apprenticeship, and they agree to educate you and teach you a trade. In this case, it actually involved going to school one day a week. So, I worked four days a week, but I was paid for five. The local paid for my education and I actually went to a school at Washburn Trade School at 33rd and Pulaski in the heart of the very tough area of the South Side.
It was an enormous, amazing structure. It had been the Continental Can Company, so it is a huge industrial building. It was three city blocks long. It was that big. The unions rented facilities from the Chicago Public School System. The Chicago Public School System owned Washburn Trade School, and they offered trade education in chefs, welding, upholstery, all kinds of trade areas. They also rented space to labor unions to conduct their trade union schools, so it was a very interesting arrangement. The reason I’m making a point about this is it set up my local union to be sued by the federal government. And, I think I mentioned this in my chronology, I was a witness in the “Women at Washburn” federal class action suit against the Chicago Public School system.
JW: Okay, what was that?
AS: Title IX; I’m sure you have many wonderful feminists who have spoken to Title IX, was passed in Congress, that said that a public-school facility had to treat women the same as men with regards to sports, education, all these things. Well, it turned out that Title IX federal guidelines applied to the trade unions, because they were renting space from a Chicago Public School facility. Now, that left them vulnerable. And this was probably my big feminist contribution.
When I entered; again, it was pressure from Operation Push, they were receiving Local 73. I want to stop for a second and give your listeners an idea of how politically connected they were. The most influential mayor in Chicago’s history was old man Daley; Richard Daley. His father was a sheet metal worker. His political hold on the trade unions of Chicago was like concrete. It was where he got all his political power.
I would recommend very highly for anybody who ever wants to know about that history, to read the wonderful, readable, Pulitzer Prize winning book by Mike Royko, called, Boss. It’s about Daly’s rise to power and how he consolidated his power in the Democratic Party through complete control of the labor union parties. Every St. Patrick’s Day was an example of his kingship. He would literally stand on a dais on State Street, and all the labor unions would march past and salute him. And so, the most powerful trade union of any of them, was not about to open the doors to Black people or women. Talk about having ties to city Hall.
Jesse Jackson was quite extraordinarily brave in taking them on, so they were starting to feel pressure. They took me on as an apprentice, but they treated me despicably. Not so bad on the job, but the day of the week I dreaded most was the school day because they had this apprenticeship coordinator named Keith Switzer. And every single Monday, which was my day to go to school, he made it his business to go down and “pop in” for a visit where he would do things like tell all my schoolmates, who were all men, to really make sure that they didn’t piss me off because, “You know the way women are when they’re on the rag.” It was probably that time of the month for me; or make comments about my body. It set a tone of hostility that was truly frightening.
I mean, let me put it this way. Remember I said the building was three city blocks long. I was one of the only women in that building with thousands and thousands of men. I think there were 2000, 3000 men in that building. And just to go to the bathroom, I used to bring friends. There were a couple of male friends I had in my class, thank God. And they would walk me to the bathroom and stand outside the bathroom because I was that frightened of being assaulted in hallways, in the stairwells, they would walk me to my car.
And one day, I received a phone call from a lawyer who asked to meet with me. He said he was from the Justice Department. He agreed to meet me outside the building and he explained that all of the skilled blue-collar trade unions were refusing to, what is that word? Stonewall. That’s the word, stonewalling the federal government. Because the federal government explained to them that they needed to show that they were accepting as many women into the program because they were renting from a school facility that was a public-school facility. So, they were refusing.
I agreed to be a witness about how I was being treated. My teachers were fine. Really, they were fine. They were lovely people. And about half my class were okay, and the other half were very actively hostile and threatening to me. And what I learned, is the psychology. I don’t know if it’s just human beings – I think it is not particularly men – but the ones that would be really nice to me if we were just together, like the two of us, had no fucking spine at all when it came to the bullies setting the tone. And I think that’s kind of a human nature thing, sadly. Anyway, this federal lawyer assured me I would be anonymous. And I said, “Well buddy, that ain’t going to do me much good because I’m the only female apprentice. So, if you refer to me as Witness A from the sheet metal program, it’s not going to exactly require a PhD to figure out who that is.”
JW: But you did it anyway.
AS: I did. And the dramatic end to the story, is the sheet metal workers locally kept stonewalling and stonewalling and stonewalling the federal government. Saying there were no other female women, no other apprentices that had applied. And finally, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall because the secretaries at the local all told me it was amazing; the federal government went in there with a warrant, and US marshals, armed US marshals with guns and everything, and they seized the file cabinets at Local 73. And of course, found out there were hundreds of women applicants. Hundreds.
JW: How dumb they didn’t throw them out.
AS: No kidding. They’re not exactly geniuses, are they? That was the level of arrogance, really. And this comes to what the most important thing I have to say about my entire experience as a sheet metal worker, because I was willing to do that, because those files were seized, they had to open all the doors to women. And the year after this happened, all of a sudden, many women were allowed into the program. And they were treated much, much better than I was.
However, they never forgot who was responsible for them having to do that, so the union formed a vendetta against me. Because instead of seeing their own small mindedness for what it was, that we were as capable of good work as anybody else, they focused in that the Jew bitch, that’s what they referred to me as, the kike bitch, sometimes they’d refer to me as the Philadelphia lawyer, a politer term for the Jew bitch was the reason that they had to let in all the other bitches. I’m sorry if my language is a little colorful. That’s their language, not mine.
JW: That is an incredible story. So, when was that? That was around ’85, do you think? Something like that?
AS: About ’84, ’85, and I did complete my apprenticeship. I was injured very seriously in ’87 and at that point, I really should have just dropped out. I’ll tell you, there’s some regrets I have in my life. That’s one of my biggest. But I guess at that point, I felt like I hadn’t finished. So, I was determined to finish this apprenticeship. I was even awarded the Outstanding Achievement for Apprenticeship by the Chicago Building Trades Association. I became the first woman in America to be qualified as a heating and ventilation air balancing technician.
What that is, it’s a little bit more of a white-collar job. When these huge skyscrapers come up with engineering qualifications for airflow, you can’t simply switch these fans on. Some of these fans that service these huge buildings are the size, I would say, of an average living room. They’re huge. They’re enormous. You don’t just walk over and flip a switch. They have to have highly skilled technicians that make sure that the fan is running in the right direction and balance the system so that the proper airflow – basically, a simple way of putting it, is that you don’t want tons of air coming out of one vent and nothing coming out of another, because that would make one room freezing cold and another room boiling hot. So, I became the first woman in this country to become qualified to do that.
As far as what I can say about working with the tools, which meant being a hardhat or doing this more technical job, again, I found more decency amongst the hardhats than I did amongst the technicians. They were more threatened by me because it was more of a brain power job. It was more intellectual. So eventually, I went back willingly to working with the tools, because I got so tired of what I saw as the political backstabbing amongst fellow technicians.
At this point, I’m going to rest my voice for a second and see what you would want to know most about my experience, besides the fact that the Jew bitch made it so they had to let in all the other women. They never forgot or forgave. Never. Eventually, I became very active for safety on the job. I was one of these people who was never afraid to speak up.
JW: I got that, which is incredible.
AS: I have to say, honestly, on a personal level, the following personal achievement was a lot more important to me than awards. My fellow sheet metal workers, by the time I left the trade, wanted to run me as a business agent, which is a very powerful position in the union. The business agency chat area of Chicago, because it was such a big local, their job was to see to the welfare of the sheet metal workers. That things were being done right, that things were being done safely, that accidents were minimum. And they wanted to first run me as union steward.
Now, I got to tell you, these jobs don’t go to minorities. They’re usually very connected. And the bosses have a very cozy relationship to the union leadership, which is mostly extraordinarily corrupt. To give you an idea of how corrupt many labor unions had become in Chicago, Local 113, which was the electricians, when there were accusations of a fixed election, the federal government had to step in and take control over the local, because every single solitary one of their business agents was taking bribes from the bosses.
The same thing was really true of my local. So really, I consider that my willingness to speak out against safety; for instance, I’ll give you a small example of how I would use issues that could be divisive, to bring us together for safety. The Chicago ordinance said that I had to have a separate path than the men.
JW: Why was that? Did they have any reason?
AS: Well, it was a health standard. Now, you’ve got to remember, I was on skyscrapers mostly, and all they had were Port-a-Johns. That’s what they provided, and those were provided by the general contractor. I would have to always go and fight for my own Port-a-John that had a lock on it for me and any other women. By this point, there were sometimes one or two other women but they were always in other trade areas so I didn’t have that much contact with them. When there’s 2000 men on a job and only two other women, and they’re in other skilled blue-collar trades, I always was the one that fought for our own Port-a-Johns.
Now, the way I used this to fight for all of us is, a lot of grumbling would happen from my coworkers about how I got this nice, clean bathroom and they got these horrible, nasty, disgusting, Port-a-Johns that weren’t cleaned or emptied properly. And so, what I did was, I used it as an issue to make a bunch of noise about how everybody should have as good a bathroom as mine.
So instead of turning against me, they wanted me to fight for them. Because they were all a bunch of little wimpy boys, scared to say anything and I was already a pariah. Maybe that’s why I had the willingness to speak up for cleanliness and safety. And that’s an example of how I took their turning against me. They were like, “Yes, how come our bathrooms aren’t clean?”
The guys were not the same as the union. I had this thing called the 85/15 rule. Which was, 85% of the guys I worked with were basically nice men who had a very limited viewpoint of femininity. That’s why I refused, as a sheet metal worker, to be treated as one of the guys. They had two categories for women. You had nice girls that you’d marry; nice girls were like your mom, your sister, and your wife. Then you had party girls. And I think we know what party girls were. And then they had the category they liked the best, which were lesbians. Lesbians were the least threatening, because lesbians, they put in the category of not being women, but being “it’s.”
Do you have a clear understanding of how limited their gray zone was for women? So, even though outside of work, I could curse and be a sexual person, be like any other woman, when I went on the job, I dressed exceedingly modestly. I never used profanity. I made them very uncomfortable, because I was just like a nice girl. And that made them question the decisions they were making for their wives and their daughters.
I would ask them, “How come it is that you’re willing to pay for college for your son but not your daughter?” Why? Because their daughter was supposed to grow up and have babies. So being modest and polite was actually much more threatening to them than being one of the guys. And when they would try that stuff on me, I would just simply say to them, “Do I look like a guy? Do I smell like a guy? I don’t think I’m a guy. You need to treat me like a nice young woman.”
JW: Now, this is into the 90s already, right?
AS: Yes. They were Neanderthals. 85% of them were what I call basically nice men, who now and then would kind of lose their mind, as I put it. And this is what I would say to them. Now and then, I’d be working with somebody and they’d come out with something very off color, usually sexualized kind of comments or things that just were way off base. And I would just look at them, and I’d point across the construction site and I’d say, “See that pile of drywall over there? I suggest you go and you look behind that pile of drywall for your mind because I know your mother raised you better.” And there would be dead silence. Just dead silence. And then at the end of the day, they would come up to me sheepishly and go, “I’m really sorry.” They’d say, “I was way off base.”
So, that was like 85% of the men, which actually is pretty good. 15% were horrible, evil, bigoted, horrible, horrible men. I mean, the kind of men that would make you feel like taking a shower just to be around. And to be honest, you know how I dealt with them? My partners protected me for the most part. Those kinds of men had a horrible habit of crawling up to become foremen and snitches. Now, not surprisingly, those kinds of men would make these horrible comments about women, were racist, they would make horrible comments about younger workers. They were just horrible people.
And the way I dealt with the one that tried to put his hands on me, I knocked him across to the floor. And then I looked up his address, and I let him sweat for two weeks. He was really nervous about whether I was going to make a formal complaint. He came up to me two weeks later, and he tried to start making some stupid bullshit comment about how I misunderstood his friendliness. I took out a piece of paper from my pocket and I said, “Let’s call the following number and ask Shirley, your wife, if she thinks I misunderstood your friendliness. Should we go down to the payphone and give old Shirley a call?” Let me put it this way, I never had trouble from him again.
JW: Oh, my gosh. Talk about a brave woman. Oh, my God.
AS: I look at all of this and I was brave, but I was not doing what I should have been doing with my life. But I guess I was doing it well.
JW: Well, you were doing marvelous things for the rest of women kind. I will say that it wasn’t your plan, but you took it and you ran with it.
AS: I remember one of the most astonishing things that ever happened to me, was, I used to go to our union meetings, and to give you an idea of how out of control these people were, how much the union leadership felt they could do whatever they wanted to do, they would rent the Teamsters Hall up on Ashland Avenue, and they would have our meetings there once a month. And what they would do to make sure that the union rank and file never made complaints about our contracts, our safety, our health care plan, is they would get them drunk at the back of the union hall. They would have free beer, and then they would conduct union business at the very front of the hall.
For instance, the treasurer would get up and speak a mile a minute like an auctioneer and say, “All in favor of accepting the minutes as read, say, aye.” And of course, they always passed. They were so bold and not afraid of doing whatever they wanted that they actually, by the last couple of years I was in, so we’re talking ’93, ’94; I started showing up to union meetings and noticing an RV parked off to the side.
Men kept coming and going from this RV and I asked friends of mine, I said, “What’s going on in there? “They said, “You don’t want to know.” It was a whorehouse. It was a brothel. They brought a brothel. That’s how much they wanted to make sure to keep the rank and file occupied. That’s how out of control they are with their power. Our contracts, not surprisingly, got worse and worse in the favor of the bosses, and less and less in the favor of the workers.
I started speaking up about that, and one time, the recording secretary tried to punch me. I made a comment about how I had seen him having dinner, which was the truth, at the Como Inn, which was a renowned mob restaurant and one of the largest contractors in the city, Climatemp. They were a kind of mobbed up company and I saw them coming out of the Como Inn together and I said, “So, are you in there discussing union democracy with Climatemp?” And he insulted me, and he cocked his fist back. One of my dear friends, this huge black guy named Matt, picked me up by the waist and carried me out of the union. He said, “You don’t understand. These people ain’t playing. They know where you live. There’s only so much that you could push them. They’re not afraid of anybody.”
JW: I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say.
AS: There’s a lot to unpack there. The brothel, the free beer, but I want to emphasize again, this was a corrupt union leadership. Leadership. Not the rank and file. They very cleverly played on racial divides. And these are the people that were supposed to be our negotiating agents. In a lot of ways, they were worse than the bosses. You expected the bosses to be what they were. They really played on the worst fears and ignorance of mostly White guys.
I mean, me and my Black friends in the trade used to try to point out to them over and over again, that they had this weird double standard. They were always telling us that we got our jobs through affirmative action and none of us were qualified, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they never seemed to notice that we were the last hired and the first fired, or laid off, and that all of their investment shall we say, in this worldview, that Black people were lazy, women, couldn’t do the job, on and on and on, never prevented them from getting laid off. It bought them two extra weeks.
JW: Yes, that’s an excellent point. Were there other women there by then?
AS: Yes, there were. Unfortunately, I didn’t work with many of them. Finally, at the US post office in Chicago, which was an enormous project, I did work with Dorothea, and she was wonderful. So, we did work together. I did work a couple times with other women, but not frequently.
JW: But, I mean, you had made a breakthrough. You weren’t the only one anymore.
AS: Right. And I’m happy to say, the other women really were treated much better. I think they kind of threw in the towel as far as active hostility and harassment, because they figured it hadn’t worked.
JW: But it had worked. I’m going to say you’re an example, actually, it had worked. I mean, you took a lot, but it worked. They were there.
AS: Right, they were. And actually, the same exact story was for Black men ten years before I got in. There were a couple of pioneers who took all the abuse, and then finally, they decided that, “Oh, well, we’ll throw in the towel. It’s useless to try to keep Black people out anymore.”
JW: Do you know what it’s like now? I know you left then in the middle ’90s, so I just wonder if you have an idea of what it’s like now.
AS: Well, it’s a long story and a bad one. They cheated me out of my pension and that was terrible, but they got away with it. I looked into briefly whether or not I had a case, and I don’t. But by that point, the reason I bring this up, is when I went to the union national, which is in Washington, D. C., they were very politically correct. This was a couple years ago. Everything was addressed to, Dear Brother and Sister. They had pictures of women welders. They had pictures of women sheet metal workers. They were very politically correct. All my mail came to me. Dear Brother, Dear Sir.
JW: You were from the old days. You couldn’t have been a woman. Well, I hope more than the optics have changed.
AS: Yes, I hope so, too. And to be very honest, it’s very difficult work physically. It’s very, very, very hard women work. All the blue-collar trades are not created equal. Women physically are much more suited to being electricians. We’re very dexterous for the most part. And for the most part, conduit is this big around. Sheet metal, ductwork in a skyscraper, is like 3 X 4ft. It’s very heavy work.
Now, what I used to do, was always find the oldest workers to help me learn how to do things with my body, because I figured, okay, they’re older, they’re in their 50s. They can’t do this work the way they did when they were in their 20s. So, I would go to them and ask them, “With my smaller body, how do I carry a ladder this big?” And that was a pretty good technique. I learned a lot on how to make the most of it.
But I’m not going to lie. I remember one time; some feminist group wanted me to come and talk with other skilled blue-collar women, this was like ’92, ’93. I don’t think I made myself very popular because everybody else talked, and then I went last and I said, “Don’t do this.” I said, “Do you know how big and heavy sheet metal is? How cold it is in the winter, how it goes through every glove that you can put on your hand?” I said, “I don’t care if you get a Port-a-John locked up. They’re guaranteed to put it a half a mile away and you’re going to end up having to use the Port-a-Johns that the men use if you really have to go. And in those Port-a-Johns, you’re going to see graffiti of huge penises sticking into the anuses of women, and racist graffiti.”
I had a little kit if I had to use the Port-a-John, with Lysol and gloves. I would make my partners go in there and make sure there were no gigantic penises this big, sticking into women. If there were, I’d make them go find another one that was graffiti free. It really was bad. And honestly, I lasted as long as I did because I had fantastic partners. I had really good luck with the partners I had. And I told those women there, “Look, the hardest thing about doing my trade is hanging it from the ceiling. If you need to shoot anchors into the deck above, you’re going to have to use a hammer drill this big. You’re going to have to carry a bigger ladder because you don’t have as much upper body strength.
“Your partner could carry an eight-foot ladder, you’re going to have to carry a ten. A ten is 35 pounds heavier than an eight. You’re going to be using a piece of equipment half the size of your body, and you’re going to stand under a shower of concrete dust as you’re drilling into this. And after doing all of that, you’re going to be able to put three anchors in for every ten this big man you’re working with is doing. So, no, it’s not equitable,” I told them.
I said, “My partners always felt I carried my weight, but that’s because I found very creative ways of carrying my weight.” They knew I couldn’t do work like that at the pace they could do it. They had great big arms. They were huge men. I would make sure everything was organized. I was phenomenally mean. I saw so many terrible accidents happen from a lack of good housekeeping. I was always sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, always making sure we had lots of light. I would try to carry my weight in other ways that made their jobs easier. But I’m not going to pretend that with all of that work, I was the equal of a man. How could I be?”
JW: Yes, well, I’m going to challenge you, though, and say there could be women who are bigger than you are.
AS: Absolutely. Some of them were.
JW: Who could handle it like a man, if you will.
AS: Actually, I was very aware that there were many older workers who couldn’t keep up that pace. There were men who were small. I had four partners in a row who were six foot six.
JW: That was good for you.
AS: It was good for me. They were wonderful people, all of them. But I also worked with men who were much more average in size. And there’s no way a five-foot seven man could do that work.
JW: So, it’s not gender, its size, really.
AS: It is really size. And it was really only some work. It was certain jobs that were like that, but I would certainly say I could do 80% of the work as well as a man.
JW: With an appropriate partner, you together, could do the job.
AS: Right. And certainly, when I worked with smaller men, we didn’t get as much done as when I had those. Let me tell you, a big human being has an advantage.
JW: Right. There you go. I mean, obviously you left at one point and moved from Chicago, right?
AS: Right. My mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and at this point, I was just done with it. The whole thing. And she really needed me. I left, and I moved back to Vermont to help her, and that was kind of the end of that part of my life.
JW: Did you get back into art?
AS: I’ve always been a working artist. I’ve never gotten my formal degree but I have continued to show and compete in the art world. So, yes. Actually, I did a lot of sheet metal artwork when I was a sheet metal worker. That one day a week in school, I got all my work done way before I really needed to. The whole last year of my apprenticeship, my teachers really liked me. I was a really hard worker and they basically let me just do whatever I wanted since I had completed all my coursework.
So, I made a lot of interesting sheet metal artwork. I actually still have some of my tools. I don’t use them very often, but I’ve always thought it would be fun to find a little tiny sheet metal shop who wouldn’t mind if I came in and screwed around on the weekend. I doubt that they would because of insurance and all that, but I’ve always thought it would be kind of fun.
JW: I have to say that your story is really amazing. Relating to myself, I was somebody who would kick up a storm, too, but I did it more on a federal advocacy level. I mean, I might come face to face with somebody at a hearing or something, but it was very different from you, on a daily basis, standing up to individuals at your job. I don’t know that I could do that, quite frankly.
AS: I’m going to tell you this. I’ve often told other women this. Do you know what I ended up finding the most depressing of anything? It was not their attitudes, the bigotry and the harassment, and the sexism. It was their attitudes towards each other. I’ll explain by saying, and this is a little bit graphic, I’ll try to tone it down.
Anytime I noticed that you ended up with more than four of us together on a construction site, say, waiting for the freight elevator or a truck to come in, and there would be a group of us, it only took less than 30 seconds for someone to start making these really graphic comments about, “Get out the grease gun, bend over”, all these weird, really violent, graphic, quote, “jokes” about essentially, anal rape. And I was completely perplexed by this.
The way I dealt with it, it was so ugly and weird, is I would just walk away. I wouldn’t try to say anything. I would just walk until I was 35ft away. And sometimes they took the hint and toned it down, but eventually, I had to ask a dear friend of mine who was an electrician, “What the heck is this about?” I said, “Chris, when heterosexual women, I don’t know about gay women, but when a group of us heterosexual women get together, our main topic of discussion is not like having Cunnilingus.
“What is this about? What is going on?” And he laughed and laughed and he said, “That’s because you think it’s about sex.” And he said, “It’s not about sex, it’s about power.” He said, “What this is, is chest beating. I’m the bigger gorilla, you’re a smaller gorilla.” And he said, “So the way they view the world, is if you have a hole that something could go in; He said, “Believe it or not, they’re so moronic, if they had a man give them oral sex, they would not think they were gay because they were doing the inserting.”
JW: They were the powerful one.
AS: Right. And once he explained this to me, I then understood that this is why this happened every time there was more than four. This seemed to be the magic number to start a power struggle. I just was so depressed by all of it at that point. But I have to say, I found that as equal or more depressing that they would treat each other like that constantly.
JW: So, it was to each other. It wasn’t really just because you were a woman in the group?
AS: No. It was always this jockeying for power. Who was the Alpha? It was so depressing. What a way to live your life. By that point, I was kind of done with the whole scene.
JW: Yes. And you left then.
AS: Not to mention the fact that I started getting very unlucky in the winter. For a long time, I had really great luck. I kept getting in enclosed buildings in the winter. Eventually, I knew my luck would run out, and it did. And you ain’t lived till you were in the freezing cold at 26 below zero. I was already kind of done with this.
JW: Well, our time is coming to a close, but I do want to say, looking back over from when you started until you say, you were done with that, and moved on, I hope you see the contribution you made. I really hope so. Do you see that? You got into it, as you say, sort of through the back door. You weren’t sure, it was a mistake, but, wow, what a contribution you have made for women.
AS: I’m going to really take that in, and if I can unpack my regrets, of which I have many.
JW: Yes, I know you have them, but I’m so proud of you.
AS: Thank you. I also want to end by saying this. I have worked with a lot of wonderful men, and one of the things I’ll say is, the best thing about construction workers is if somebody tells a funny joke, it’s not a job of decorum. You can laugh your head off. And I worked with many really great guys who were a lot like that. I had a lot of fun, especially in the summer. It wasn’t always a terrible job. Many days I came home and I was so exhausted, I would actually fall asleep on the kitchen floor in all my work clothes. Many times, I woke up at eight in the evening having fallen asleep on the kitchen floor.
A lot of the guys I knew were very inventive. For example, I want to just quickly say, they never provide on construction sites, any decent place to eat your lunch, for instance. And then you only get a half hour. So, my partners, one of the first things they would do for me as an apprentice is send me scouting for a decent place to have lunch. And they were so funny and inventive. We would collect cardboard to sit on, and figure out how we could take naps on piles of conduit with whatever was left of our lunch [time].
I will also say this, and I’m glad I’m remembering to say it, it’s an extraordinary experience as a human being to have other people entrust you with their life. And for you to entrust other people with your life. It’s really quite an amazing experience. I can’t imagine having that experience anywhere else in my life. And I’m proud of the fact that my partners entrusted me with their lives. It was serious business. It really was. I saw one guy almost get his arm cut off. I saw many bad things. And it’s a very human thing to have that experience. I guess I did contribute there. I will own the fact that these big men entrusted this little tiny woman with their life.
JW: Yes. Well, this has been really wonderful. Thank you so much for spending the time.