In Wyoming coal mines, gender roles not binary

By Clint Talbott

In the coal mines of Wyoming’s Powder River basin, men and women work side by side and enjoy greater gender equity than one might expect, a University of Colorado anthropologist reports.

“We think about mining as this bastion of masculinity,” notes Jessica Smith, an assistant professor adjunct in anthropology. But in the context of the working environment of Wyoming coal miners, women and men forge a “kinship” that often blurs traditional gender lines.

Smith has won a $50,400 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to present her research in this area in a book tentatively titled “Reworking Gender: Labor and Relatedness in the American West.”

Based on her own anthropological research in Wyoming, Smith observes a “construction of similarity” in the mines. She notes ways in which “men and women craft largely gender-neutral conceptions of personhood.”

On the work site, there is less of an assumption that women can’t do things just because they are women, Smith says. Like men, women operate extremely large heavy machinery from 290-ton haul trucks to dragline excavators, which are among the largest, land-based mobile machines ever built.

Women also participate in social activities—such as riding motorcycles—generally considered masculine, Smith observes.

“That’s not to say that gender never matters, because it does,” Smith says. Female workers may have to prove that they can drive a haul truck and can fix it—whereas males are often presumed to have such skills. Once women demonstrate their prowess, they are respected, Smith says.

In the mines, however, these workers develop a kinship buttressed by long hours of work together, by shared rituals involving food and by a deep-seated belief in safe work practices, Smith says.



Even the way workers talk about safety underscores the perceived kinship, as workers call themselves a “type of family” and emphasize that safety is paramount because “we all want to go home at the end of the day,” Smith observes.

Additionally, the miners develop a kinship because they feel misunderstood, Smith notes. “Even though most of the country relies on coal (for electricity) from the Powder River Basin, they either don’t know they exist or they think miners are horrible people because they work for such a controversial industry.”

In her book, Smith aims to present an ethnographic account of how people construct “less-restrictive notions of gender without resorting to static categories.” What is at stake is “women’s access to well-paying though traditionally masculinized blue-collar jobs,” she notes.

Further, Smith argues that transformations in the West’s kinship and gender habits and attitudes “played a key role in the rapid expansion of the energy industry in the American West.”

In other parts of the country, men might complain that a women in a blue-collar field had taken a “man’s job.” In the Powder River Basin, on the other hand, the challenge was getting enough workers, and there was not a strong perception that employed women were keeping men unemployed, Smith notes.

“I suggest that in this case, the miners have transformed notions of both masculinity and femininity to make the mines a safe, meaningful place for them to spend the majority of their waking and working lives,” Smith writes in her NEH proposal.

Smith notes that her book has two larger goals: “first, to dislodge popular romantic notions of the American West that conceal the region’s history of industrial development; and second, to overcome a major disjuncture in perspective … between the producers and consumers of coal-based energy in the U.S.”

Smith has an insider’s perspective on the Powder River Basin. She is a native of Gillette, Wyo., and her father has been a mechanic at one of the mines for 25 years.

One of the best summer jobs she’s had, she notes, was working in the mines. While there, she was “amazed” and “surprised” by what she saw—women in traditionally masculine jobs and men treating them as equals.

Smith herself drove a massive Caterpillar haul truck, an experience that she said made her a better driver on regular roads.

The significance of winning an NEH fellowship so early in her career is not lost on Smith. “This is a really big compliment,” she notes.