Into No Woman's Land, War Stories of a Female Construction Worker

Women in work boots and hard hats belong in nude calendars, not on real construction jobs. That's what they told me when I joined the Laborer's Union in 1986, a young woman with three broken ribs from being trampled by a horse, a lot of grit and a determination to survive. They could hate me, harass me, threaten me, and even assault me, but nothing, I mean nothing, was going to stop me from making a living in No Woman's Land. This memoir is the story of my life as a woman in the non-traditional work of heavy construction. It follows me from my first day on the job at a project high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California to the building of Corcoran State Penitentiary where I was almost killed on the job by a hostile co-worker, to the construction of stone walls and bridges in America's National Parks, and many other jobs and experiences in between. It is a walk in the work-boots of, not only a female construction worker, but of all construction workers, those people whose straining muscles, rugged endurance, calloused hands and skill with tools build the world. Interwoven through the story are remembrances of early childhood, the lessons of life taught to me by my mother, the death of my father (a man of blazing passions and great folly) and the heartbreak of losing my older brother to AIDS.