Stridently male: That’s how journalist Joseph
Kinsey Howard characterized Butte, once the world’s greatest
producer of copper. Not only was hardrock mining physically
demanding, it was the most dangerous industrial occupation in
America. Small wonder that Butte developed a reputation for being a
man’s town or that its official history has always been told
from a male perspective.
Now comes a corrective titled
Motherlode: Legacies of Women’s Lives and Labors in
Butte, Montana. Editors Janet Finn, a professor of social
work at the University of Montana, and Ellen Crain, director of the
Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, have assembled oral histories,
diary excerpts, sketches and essays, to make visible the Mining
City’s most valuable “hidden resource.” These are tales of
women largely absent from the dominant narratives of Western
settlement, which tend to focus on pioneer wives, prostitutes and
teachers.
Instead, Motherlode
describes the likes of Bridget Shea, the fiery leader of the
Women’s Protective Union, the country’s first
all-female labor organization, and Dr. Caroline McGill, who, in
1910, became staff pathologist at Murray Hospital and was the only
physician in town who supplied birth control information.
Motherlode also showcases nuns, artists, civil
servants and community activists, as well as the working-class
women who held the community together despite the routine loss of
fathers and husbands. By the time this chorus of voices falls
silent, it’s clear that “crafting the everyday” —
Finn’s term for the unrecognized labor of women — was
as necessary to the vitality of the Mining City as were drilling
and blasting.
Motherlode is a tribute
to those labors and heartening evidence that the work of fashioning
community identity continues.
Motherlode:
Legacies of Women’s Lives and Labors in Butte,
Montana
Edited by Janet Finn and Ellen
Crain
342 pages, hardcover: $32.
Clark City
Press, 200.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Crafting the everyday.
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