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The Pink Lunchbucket
"I laugh at bad jokes. Make good money."; -- Kate Braid
At age thirty, Kate Braid was in a party, unemployed. Jobs were few on a Gulf Island in 1977 so she was preparing to go off-island. She was desperate to say. Someone piped up, "I just quit my job as a carpenter on the new school. Apply for that.";
Kate Braid had never hung a door. Never mixed concrete. But everyone convinced her she should apply. There is liquid courage and there is also liquid logic. Just lie, they told her.
So she found the crew boss, asked for work. She had no construction skills, no training, but he hired her. Years later Kate Braid found out why. The crew had been slacking off, so the foreman thought having a pretty woman on the site might increase their motivation to look good at their work.
Now Kate Braid has looked back at her fifteen years in construction with both nostalgia and a critical eye, Turning Left to the Ladies (Palimpsest Press $18). It recalls her progression from her first job as a neophyte construction labourer on a Gulf Island to building houses and bridges on the Lower Mainland as an apprentice carpenter, then as a journeyman carpenter, surrounded by men.
Eventually Braid became the first female member of the Vancouver union local of the Carpenters and the first woman to teach building trades full-time at the BC Institute of Technology. Along the way, she had a love/hate relationship with her work, cherishing her competence and resenting her loneliness.
In this finely-wrought memoir, she recalls how she felt intimidated, other times privileged, other times supported. She learns the beauty of men; and she sees their failings. Men have posters of naked women in the lockers. She sees how they can treat women like hunting trophies.
"Mine is the experience of prey, of the fish and the deer, of being entered into, of a space within meant for welcome.";
Turning Left to the Ladies refers to that awkward moment after work, when everyone is raising a pint, when she feels she has parachuted into male territory, when they are talking shop, and she slips away from the raucous camaraderie and deftly turns left, entering the women's washroom, "only a small slip under the radar.";
She has placed a sticker on her hard that says Wild Woman but she knows she has to very careful. One guy liked to drop things on her head. Another co-worker wanted to protect her. One couldn't wait to tell his best dirty joke. To deflect them all, she started to wear pink. "First, little pink embroidery flowers so small you could hardly see them on my coveralls. then a pink mackinaw...
This is mature, reflective, investigative writing that ventures far beyond self-glorification. There is much to be learned from men, beyond reading blueprints and banging nails. Braid muses on the need for more women to write and talk overtly about their own private parts, the way men do. "Here's a toast to our pink taco rose garden our Southern belle tongue magnet wunder-down-under French pleat..."; A poem by a woman who wore size ten steel-toed boots.
Making a spectacle of oneself can be a political strategy and an act of courage. Although she never strategized to be a feminist pioneer, that doesn't lessen her courage. When Braid endures one job for six months, and all the men have fully accepted her as a colleague, and she can share their jibes and humour, she realizes it's the most radical thing she has ever done.
One of the best poems is one of the shortest. Braid describes the confusion she lately feels on the sidewalk whenever she passes a construction site, having left the trades. She momentarily yearns for the men to recognize her as a former equal, to acknowledge that she knows what they do, who they are. But the schism of conventional thinking, of sexism, divides her and she feels invisible to them. Someone from a different species. A woman.
Braid ran her own renovation company, Sisters Construction, before turning away from hammers in favour of the literary life. In 2006 she was Woodward Chair at SFU where she coordinated a research project on the numbers of women in trades B.C. "That number is the same now as it was in 1980-less than three per cent,"; she says. "It made me realize the importance-still-of telling tradeswomen's stories.";
Hence Turning Left to the Ladies. Ultimately, Braid urges other women to follow suit, to learn to build, to add new meaning to the word homemaker "as we build the new world, one nail, one wall, one woman at a time.";
97800-9784917-0-3
-Alan Twigg
POEM
Something Lost
These days, construction workers are small
hard-hatted jewels dangling
from the necklace of a crane.
Sometimes I slink past, head down, as if
ashamed. I have lost my right to be there.
Sometimes I wave-Hi, boys! Remember me, a sister?
They never wave back. Or if they do,
it's one of those waves they give to all the girls,
a whistle, a leer.
I have lost something-the smell of pitch, the certainty
of nails. Those men? They were a magnifying glass
in which I saw myself, tenfold.
At age thirty, Kate Braid was in a party, unemployed. Jobs were few on a Gulf Island in 1977 so she was preparing to go off-island. She was desperate to say. Someone piped up, "I just quit my job as a carpenter on the new school. Apply for that.";
Kate Braid had never hung a door. Never mixed concrete. But everyone convinced her she should apply. There is liquid courage and there is also liquid logic. Just lie, they told her.
So she found the crew boss, asked for work. She had no construction skills, no training, but he hired her. Years later Kate Braid found out why. The crew had been slacking off, so the foreman thought having a pretty woman on the site might increase their motivation to look good at their work.
Now Kate Braid has looked back at her fifteen years in construction with both nostalgia and a critical eye, Turning Left to the Ladies (Palimpsest Press $18). It recalls her progression from her first job as a neophyte construction labourer on a Gulf Island to building houses and bridges on the Lower Mainland as an apprentice carpenter, then as a journeyman carpenter, surrounded by men.
Eventually Braid became the first female member of the Vancouver union local of the Carpenters and the first woman to teach building trades full-time at the BC Institute of Technology. Along the way, she had a love/hate relationship with her work, cherishing her competence and resenting her loneliness.
In this finely-wrought memoir, she recalls how she felt intimidated, other times privileged, other times supported. She learns the beauty of men; and she sees their failings. Men have posters of naked women in the lockers. She sees how they can treat women like hunting trophies.
"Mine is the experience of prey, of the fish and the deer, of being entered into, of a space within meant for welcome.";
Turning Left to the Ladies refers to that awkward moment after work, when everyone is raising a pint, when she feels she has parachuted into male territory, when they are talking shop, and she slips away from the raucous camaraderie and deftly turns left, entering the women's washroom, "only a small slip under the radar.";
She has placed a sticker on her hard that says Wild Woman but she knows she has to very careful. One guy liked to drop things on her head. Another co-worker wanted to protect her. One couldn't wait to tell his best dirty joke. To deflect them all, she started to wear pink. "First, little pink embroidery flowers so small you could hardly see them on my coveralls. then a pink mackinaw...
This is mature, reflective, investigative writing that ventures far beyond self-glorification. There is much to be learned from men, beyond reading blueprints and banging nails. Braid muses on the need for more women to write and talk overtly about their own private parts, the way men do. "Here's a toast to our pink taco rose garden our Southern belle tongue magnet wunder-down-under French pleat..."; A poem by a woman who wore size ten steel-toed boots.
Making a spectacle of oneself can be a political strategy and an act of courage. Although she never strategized to be a feminist pioneer, that doesn't lessen her courage. When Braid endures one job for six months, and all the men have fully accepted her as a colleague, and she can share their jibes and humour, she realizes it's the most radical thing she has ever done.
One of the best poems is one of the shortest. Braid describes the confusion she lately feels on the sidewalk whenever she passes a construction site, having left the trades. She momentarily yearns for the men to recognize her as a former equal, to acknowledge that she knows what they do, who they are. But the schism of conventional thinking, of sexism, divides her and she feels invisible to them. Someone from a different species. A woman.
Braid ran her own renovation company, Sisters Construction, before turning away from hammers in favour of the literary life. In 2006 she was Woodward Chair at SFU where she coordinated a research project on the numbers of women in trades B.C. "That number is the same now as it was in 1980-less than three per cent,"; she says. "It made me realize the importance-still-of telling tradeswomen's stories.";
Hence Turning Left to the Ladies. Ultimately, Braid urges other women to follow suit, to learn to build, to add new meaning to the word homemaker "as we build the new world, one nail, one wall, one woman at a time.";
97800-9784917-0-3
-Alan Twigg
POEM
Something Lost
These days, construction workers are small
hard-hatted jewels dangling
from the necklace of a crane.
Sometimes I slink past, head down, as if
ashamed. I have lost my right to be there.
Sometimes I wave-Hi, boys! Remember me, a sister?
They never wave back. Or if they do,
it's one of those waves they give to all the girls,
a whistle, a leer.
I have lost something-the smell of pitch, the certainty
of nails. Those men? They were a magnifying glass
in which I saw myself, tenfold.
Submitted on December 11, 2009 in By David.
