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research area in folklore studies is folklore performed or initiated within the work environment and about work.
At first, rural outdoor occupations gained the attention of folklorists.
There was a bias toward the more rugged and nearly all male occupations.
For the most part, folklorists collected songs rather than other kinds of narratives.
Miners, firemen, oil workers and others in dangerous occupations got some attention, but the cowboy was the most often
studied of America’s workers.
In 1978 Roger Abrahams wrote about the way folklorists have studied occupation lore of people in farming, cattle,
lumber and sea trades.
He distinguished between folklore which he defined as "the expressive dimensions of traditional culture" with the
folklife which commonly refers to work and materials used in work.
He expressed concern that folklorists had not distinguished between the two in the way Europeans had, and
suggested an examination of how folklorists study occupational folklore was needed.
He called for the collection and theorizing about the self-expression of workers especially in the special
languages that a community of workers use.
He hoped that he could make a contribution to a sociological theory of social aggregates: group, community, society.
Often, the language of a working group sets boundaries around itself—such that there are clear in-groups
and out-groups—those who belong and those who don’t.
Graduate student Amy Stevens studying Eastern Fine Paper
documents and photographs at the Maine Folklife Center
Certain rituals of initiation generally take place when a new worker arrives; passing through these rituals
is part of becoming accepted into the in-group.
Thus stereotyping, slang, jargon, and jokes are all part of the process of defining the boundaries of the group.
Folklorists have tended to examine the lives of lumbermen, cowboys, steelworkers, firefighters and other bastions
of male high-risk occupations.
But Abrahams noted that factory workers, too, worked in low-status (manual labor) jobs in which tradition is
passed on from worker to worker.
He pointed to the community that is constructed in a work situation as "a state of mind."
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Maine Folklife Center's Pauleena MacDougall interviewing
University of Maine alumna and former papermill worker Terry Pierson.
That same year Robert McCarl suggested folklorists consider the actions of workers (for example in pulling a prank
on a new worker) as concrete forms of expression, the same way one would classify hand signals or conversation.
Moving beyond the studies of songs and ballads of work, he proposed folklorists study the techniques, gestures
and oral expressions and customs of workers.
Senior undergraduate student
Katie Wing transcribing interviews.
He declared that occupational stereotyping and ethnocentrism resulting in the distinction between blue and white
collar jobs and the exclusion of women from the literature and the work place has prevented research from
being conducted in this field.
Women’s work lore has received little attention.
In a bibliography of occupational folklore with 70 entries, I found just three that focus on women:
one on Navajo weaving (1996), one on women weavers in Ireland (1978) and one on women who fish in Alaska (1997).
None of these deal with industrial settings with both women and men or highlight the uniqueness of women’s
folklore in an industrial setting.
Our work breaks new ground in looking at women’s work from a cultural point of view as opposed to a strictly
historical or sociological viewpoint.
We are investigating unique ways that gender plays a part in developing culture in a factory setting, particularly
as women moved from gender-defined marginalized positions in paper making to positions in production,
traditionally held only by men.
Graduate student Karen Tolstrup
digitizing project materials for the MFC archives.
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