“A Man’s World”

During the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of women working in Maine paper mills held secretarial positions, or worked in finishing department jobs sorting and counting paper, or binding samples. However, there were times when women were called upon to do “men’s work.” Phyllis Beaulieu began working at Eastern Manufacturing in Brewer in 1949, not long after World War II ended, and she says many of the mill positions formerly occupied by men were filled by women during the war:

A lot of women took over during the war but [when the men returned] they had to have their jobs back. That was the law. If they came back and there was no work, we’d be laid off, the younger ones, and they’d say “We’ll call you back when we need you.” But a lot of [women] stayed right on their jobs too. There were women working on the cutters, which always were men’s jobs. There was a lady there, I couldn’t believe how she could cut those great big reams of paper and pull them sharp knives down .

By the 1960s and ‘70s, more and more women began to move out of the office and finishing department positions and into mill jobs traditionally done by men. Both Lois Andrews and Phyllis Beaulieu bid on positions in Eastern’s laboratory during the late 1960s. Lois recalls:

I think it was 1967, there was an opening in the lab for a technician who would be testing pulp and I applied for it and got the job and did not get warm responses from any men because it was strictly a male-dominated department and they thought a woman had absolutely no place there. But I did it and I proved to them that I could do the work. .

What types of things would the men would do to make her feel unwanted?

Well it’s like you got these little snickers or like, kind of eyebrows raised. I knew I wasn’t wanted out there… It was an attitude, but as they got to know me I think they really did like me and they were very, very helpful. And they couldn’t refuse me because we were unionized and I had the right to bid on that job. .

Women like Dola Hinckley, who began working on the production side at Eastern in 1974, had even more gender stereotypes to overcome. But the key, she says, was proving to the guys that she could hold her own. As she puts it:

Well, when you walk into a mill like that, you’re walking into a man’s world. But I never let the guys know that I was there to be fooled with. And I never had a problem. Once you get the idea through their head that you’re there to work, and to work with them, and that you don’t expect them to help you with your work—I think that could’ve been an issue with some of the guys is that “Well, she’s a woman, she’s gonna expect you to help her out, and why should we have to help her out?” and this type of thing. But once they realized that I could do the job, it was like “Hey, she’s all right,” you know? And I think I gained a lot of respect from the guys. .

Darlene Young was hired at Old Town’s Georgia-Pacific mill in 1978. She shares Dola’s sentiments:

When I first started, the majority of the work force was men and I think the mentality was that this was a man’s job. But they were required to hire so many women. There was only a handful of women and that did increase over the years but still the men did outnumber the women. But, and I’m not trying to brag up the women, but I thought that the women were more conscientious workers. I think we felt like we had to prove something because they just didn’t think women should be running that machinery. A lot of women that I worked with down there were stubborn. They were thinking “Hey, if a man can do it, we can do it.” And we could and I must say we thought we did it better! .

Sheila Feero went to work in production at Georgia-Pacific in 1986. Within a few years, she progressed to a position as the first female machine tender on the mill’s Number One Kraft machine. Sheila laughs as she recalls the reason she initially accepted the job in the kraft area:

Before you took a job, typically the foreman or the supervisor would come over and you would take a tour through the department to see what that job involved and if you thought you would like it. One of the bosses told me at the time when I was walking through, he says, “I don’t think women should be over here. I don’t think they can do this work.” So when we were done with the tour, I said “Okay, I’ll take it.” That made my mind up right there. That’s just the kind of personality I am. If you tell me I can’t do something then I’m going to try it. After I’d been there three or four months he came back and he said “You know, I’ve got to apologize. I didn’t think you could do it, but you do a good job.” .

Another issue that women working in production frequently had to deal with was pornography, a common item in male-dominated industries like papermaking. Pin-ups and calendars of nude women were often taped to walls and lockers. Dola Hinckley recounts several particularly humorous instances:

I remember the first time I worked as a helper on the embosser, I worked with this fella. I don’t think he really knew what to do with me so he showed me all these girly books, and [I said] “Well that’s nice,” you know. That was my first encounter with that, and after awhile he decided that maybe I wasn’t interested in all that stuff. But again, I was walking into a man’s world, and yeah, there were naked pictures. And I accepted that as, it was their thing. And I never ever said “I wish you wouldn’t put that up,” or “I don’t wanna see that,” because it in no way bothered me. It didn’t affect my work, and I figured it was their locker, they could do what they want with it…I’ll never forget one time this fella, I asked him for something and he says “It’s in my locker.” Well I opened up the locker and I looked and there were these women with HUGE breasts. And I said “Isn’t there a load limit for that door?!” I said “My god, I don’t know why that thing don’t fall to the floor!” And I closed it back up. But, they were good fellas. Never any crude talk with me at all. I mean, we [women] could hold our own when it came to crude talk. Let’s not blame it all on the fellas! But, and that kind of subsided too as the laws changed with women working in places like that, and the sexual harassment, and so forth and so on. .

Anne Robinson, the employee benefits services coordinator at Eastern Fine Paper, recalls the differences that took place in the work environment following the introduction of sexual harassment laws in the 1990s:

We worked in a male-dominated mill, and it was nothing for those men to throw catcalls at us walking through. I’d wave my hand and keep on walking, make a joke out of it instead of being angry. What really upset the men was when they could not have any girly calendars in their lockers anymore, [when] all the discrimination [laws] came into play. The catcalls had to stop. Any sexual approaches to a woman or a woman to a man in that mill had to be called on the carpet right away. .

Was it difficult being a woman working on the production side of the mill? Sure, says Sheila Feero:

It was hot. You weren’t going to stay pretty working over there. I mean if you put on makeup, it was going to melt off. And it could be very physical. When we had a sheet break I mean you had to get in there and you had to pull and tug and if it took eight hours to get it done and going, that’s what you worked. You didn’t stop and take ten breaks, smoke cigarettes, and stand there and look pretty. You had to do a job… It’s just part of being in a mill. And if you can’t deal with that then maybe that’s not the environment for you. .

According to Donna Holland, former vice-president of human resources at Eastern Fine Paper, few women applied for production-side positions at the Brewer mill:

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was very difficult to find women who really wanted to work in the mill and could physically do it. I know that people say we’re all created equal but the Good Lord really doesn’t agree with us because physically most men are able to lift, push, pull more than most women. There are always exceptions to the rule, but in generalities it was a true statement. There weren’t a lot of women that worked for us. I mean literally I can think of maybe ten that were with us from the early 80s, maybe not even ten, right straight thru. Because they would not stay. I can think of one woman, she was a machine operator and was of small frame but she was the exception to the rule and she came in and was always a lady. People resented her initially. But then they realized that she was there to work, she had a family and wanted money and she did what she was supposed to do. .

So have things changed in recent years? It depends on who you ask. While production-side women like Dola Hinckley, Darlene Young, and Sheila Feero have proven that women can hold their own in jobs traditionally considered “male,” others point out that, while women have advanced, some men really haven’t. Terry Pierson, who joined the paper industry as a chemical engineer in the early ‘90s, comments:

People get on me sometimes because I tend to be a little vocal about a lot of situations that women have to deal with in the work environment, dealing with men and their attitudes. I love men but you know their whole way of running a situation is they have a point of view and well…they listen and want you to be submissive because they’re the leader. The reason I worked at three different mills, and eventually left the paper industry, was because I thought there would be differences in moving out west because it was more progressive, but there isn’t. You know, men are men, and unfortunately I don’t think it’s their fault. I think it’s more what they’ve learned through the years on how to react in a situation where they’re the leader. .

Still, there can be no doubt that over the past sixty years, many obstacles have been overcome, paving the way for a new generation of women in Maine’s pulp and paper industry. Elisha McVay, a recent graduate of the University of Maine’s chemical engineering program who worked at Georgia-Pacific, says that as a woman working in the male-dominated engineering field, she’s never suffered any real gender discrimination:

There’s always some people that want to be dismissive of your ideas or they don’t want to do that and to be honest you never really get inside somebody’s head, you don’t know—it may be they just don’t like the way I talk or the way I approach problems. It could be anything. I don’t really believe that one person can hold you back if there’s something that you really want to do. I don’t put myself in those boundaries that I can’t do stuff because I’m a woman. .

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