Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities.

Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. By Karen Olson. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 216. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-271-02685-5.)

The complexity of deindustrialization in the United States is slowly starting to reveal itself. Besides its obvious and immediate impacts, from the decaying company towns to social and economic hardships, deindustrialization also reorganizes human lives on a very personal and immediate level. As the econometric dust continues to settle, scholars are beginning to recognize the more nuanced aspects of the changing socioeconomic landscape, including its effect on American families and other human relations.

Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities is a valuable, gendered addition to the study of deindustrialization in the United States. By focusing on women of the communities surrounding a steel mill at Sparrows Point, Maryland, Olson demonstrates how the declining fortunes of the mill and mill employment since the early 1980s have actually empowered local women.

Olson argues that post-World War II industrial prosperity played an important role in enforcing local gender hierarchies. Husbands, with the help of postwar affluence and union wages, could keep their spouses at home and under male domination. Deindustrialization, Olson demonstrates, put an end to this blue-collar patriarchy. As their husbands faced layoffs, women's economic contributions gave them more power and equality within their families, resulting in more egalitarian marriages and gender relations in general. The argument, while not particularly new, is clear and well defined.

Building her case largely on roughly eighty-five oral history interviews as well as census records and wide reading of secondary literature, Olson seems to have her finger solidly on Sparrows Point's pulse. She brings the community and its women alive, documenting the human stories underneath the economic transformation and shining new light on the gendered impact of deindustrialization. The result is a lively and often enticing book, a valuable contribution to the field.

Unfortunately, the review cannot end here. While Olson's depiction of the communities surrounding Sparrows Point is thorough and convincing, her Sparrows Point seems strangely detached from the world. She does not fully connect the developments in her community to the changes in American gender roles at large, resulting in an overemphasis on deindustrialization as the main, if not the sole, power behind the transformation of local gender relations. Her obvious reverence for the people she studies and her too tight locus on the communities under her lens make her work occasionally appear as too anecdotal, detached from the larger world and theoretical scholarship alike. Finally, the book is occasionally too repetitive and would have benefited from tighter editing.

Despite its shortcomings, Wives of Steel is a worthy read for anybody interested in the intersections of gender, economics, and deindustrialization. It is doing its important share in expanding the discourse surrounding the character of the new postindustrial America and, one hopes, clearing the path for further studies on the topic.

MARKO MAUNULA

Clayton State University