Woman Machinist
It was almost time to punch out. I was tired, and my arms were covered in oil elbow-deep. And you can’t work on precision tool settings with rubber gloves, so it was inescapable, those tiny brass shavings getting under my skin. I wondered what happened to them. Did they bring on the rash I had up and down my arms? I wiped my arms with a rag, planning to wash up after I collected my tools and rolled my toolbox over to the dull gray side wall where all the other toolboxes were. My feet hurt. I was getting tired of this job.
As I made my way to the restroom, I looked around at all the operators mechanically pulling down their drill presses and unloading those little brass covers. That was their daily routine—over and over, the same thing. I had done operator work myself in the beginning. Most of the operators were older women who had worked at the lock company for decades. Mary had arm problems and called in sick more often now. They were going to bring in an ergonomics expert. Who knew when? And for her only? The whole place needed help. I really felt for the operators, wouldn’t want to have their jobs.
Josefina would sometimes shout something in Spanish and jump out of her seat, her curly blond hair bobbing as she marched vehemently over to the windows and flung open one or two, muttering and stomping all the way. Desi, the operator inspector, leaned over to me one day when I was watching Josie: “She’s going through her Change.” I wasn’t too sure what that meant, being only thirty five myself. Desi was looking at me with her big dark-brown eyes as if she were waiting for a comeback in a comedy routine. I just smiled. Now, of course, I know Josie was having hot flashes—because I experienced them myself later in life. I don’t think people who haven’t had a hot flash can really understand that intense rush and sudden overheated feeling, often accompanied by a need to shout. At that time, I had no idea. I just thought Josie was a little crazy.
Now Desi had an interesting story. She was short and thin with long dark hair, an older Mexican American, maybe sixty, barely a touch of an accent, a woman who seemingly went busily and capably about her inspecting work, but what really captured her attention and kept her working was Cliff, one of the toolmakers. He was a partly bald, leathery, white guy, always smiling and soft-spoken, despite his biker look (and he did have a Harley). He was about her age, they both had families and they had been carrying on their affair for over ten years. I didn’t quite get how their families managed to accept the whole thing, but apparently the families even socialized together. Nobody got divorced. Cliff and Desi were in a relationship, a given both at work and outside of work.
After I locked my box and washed up, I walked over to see Gary in his quiet room. Gary was the lead inspector. Locks required precision so inspection was an important part of the process. He sat in a clean bright room with all kinds of instrumentation. It was nice and quiet in there, as opposed to the plant floor. Gary was my buddy. I liked talking with him at second break and would have liked having lunch with him, but he spent it with his African American friends and I didn’t fit in.
I told Gary I was thinking about quitting my job, quitting machine shop work entirely, and traveling to Russia. “If I had a chance like that, I’d leave in a heartbeat,” he said, “but I gotta stay here and keep this going for my family till retirement. You’re still young and single. Take the opportunity. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
I didn’t really need Gary’s approval for this huge life decision I was making, I just wanted to hear what he’d say, and in his words I began to sense the immensity of his dependence on this job. How did he keep going? I knew he was bored, but he had social connections at work and that probably helped sustain him as he strove to meet his family obligations. I started thinking about how close to slavery this kind of work was in its own way—mouths to feed, bills to be paid, kids to be sent to college, all of it keeping people like Gary in what amounted to indentured servitude. He was tired of the place but he felt bound to it.
I looked at him and tried to take it all in. “You’re right, Gary. I need to do this. It’s calling me. Thanks.”
Why Russia? Years earlier I had graduated from NYU with a master’s in Russian Literature, and had developed a strong interest in the country and culture. Then I tried to get my Ph.D. in comparative literature but was stymied by classist and sexist barriers at U.C. Berkeley. They didn’t want me in their ranks. But how did I get from there to becoming a machinist? That’s a more interesting story.
It was 1977, toward the end of the civil rights movement, and at the height of the anti-war movement, the women’s movement and the movement against intervention in Central America. I had married a physics professor and we’d moved out to California when he got a job at Stanford Research Institute. I had spent a year or so taking classes at Berkeley before they rejected me, and then I taught a class in Shakespeare at Foothill College. My husband was invited to the University of Birmingham in England to do research, and I went with him. We packed up and left for six months, occupying a little carriage house next to a larger house with a beautifully pruned garden in Birmingham. There I sulked over my failure at Berkeley and began to write and read about my future pursuits. I learned about Marxism and became captivated by the women’s movement, even letting myself heed my sexual dreams about women.
One day when I was walking around London, I noticed a small ad in a travel agency window. I don’t know what drew me to read that hand-printed note in an out-of-the way street, but it said something like: “Looking for two more people to join a group tour to Russia: Moscow, Leningrad and Talinn, Estonia.” It was leaving in a month. Reading that ad changed my life. Or did meeting the person, who had also seen the small sign, change my life?
I joined the group, which turned out to be a bunch of British Marxists who wanted to know more about the Soviet Union. Gina, an American, traveling through Europe on her own, had already joined them. I met her in the waiting area of the airport, and she would become my lover and mentor, the main shaker and mover in my earthquake coming-out experience. A relationship with her would move me out of my marriage. And it was she who helped me synthesize some of the feminist and socialist analyses that I had begun making in my own mind.
I found myself in an aware and engaged group of people, so different from the people I had known in the Bronx and in academia. Daniel, the group leader, explained that when we were on the trains in Russia we should help the workers by picking up after ourselves. Penny was in a London political theater group that put on short plays on social or political themes and then had discussions with the audiences. The people in the tour group had a genuine interest in the lives of Russians, beyond just seeing the Hermitage. They even asked me to be a translator for some of the meetings we had with various organizations and individuals. I felt useful and needed, the best medicine for my depression. When Gina explained how a Marxist analysis helped give perspective on life, I began to study history in a different way, a class way, and to form a new world view. The late 1970s was a courageous time, a time of struggle and excitement, a wonderful time to come out.
And why a machinist? A few years after this transformational trip, I joined the Socialist Workers Party whose members were turning to industry to get jobs, become union and political activists and work for social change. Two points of advocacy within our unions were: the need form a labor party to counter the two parties run by the rich and urging that U.S. workers to oppose U.S. intervention and war efforts in other countries. Since my future was no longer in academia, I was open to this idea. After a few jobs as a driver and a sewing machine operator, I picked up some trades skills and got enough help from a friend to apply for a machine operator position at FMC (the former Food Machinery Corporation, making M-1 tanks) in San Jose.