*******************************************
Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 1997 10:24:40 -0600
From: MICKEY LAURIA <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-NET Urban History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
To: Multiple recipients of list H-URBAN <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: REVIEW: Mining Cultures
Mary Murphy. _Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-
41_. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Xviii + 279 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-252-02267-X; $18.95 (paper), ISBN 0-252-06569-7.
Reviewed for H-Urban by Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon, for H-URBAN
<[log in to unmask]>
Review commissioned for H-URBAN by Georgina Hickey, Georgia Southern
University <[log in to unmask]>
_Mining Cultures_ is an engaging, well-written social history, an urban
study that focuses on what many readers may think is the unusual site of
Butte, Montana.
"Butte, Montana," Mary Murphy asserts at the beginning of the book, "was a
hard place to call home." (p. xiii). It is also a hard place to write
about, especially if you are, as Murphy is, a historian more interested in
gender dynamics than in any of the city's previous claims to fame: the
dynamic battles among "copper kings" who fought for and won corporate
hegemony at the turn of the century; the determined resistance of union
workers (the town still celebrates an annual "Miners Union Day"); the tales
of immigrant life in a town that was once, as Murphy notes, "the most
ethnically diverse city in the intermountain West"; or the environmental
eyesores that mar the city's twentieth-century skyline. (p. 9)
For a would-be historian of Butte, moving the focus to something new
demands more than just reinterpreting the past. It also requires
reckoning with the fact that local residents will be watching every word,
for, in a city that has been declining in wealth, population, and sheer
liveliness ever since World War I, longtime residents of Butte often seem
to have more control over the past than they do over the present. They
guard their memories
fiercely.
I should know. I grew up in Butte. Before I even knew what the word
"historian" meant I was learning about the city's fabled past from parents
and grandparents who trace their local roots back to the immigrant miners,
teamsters, and jacks-of-all-trades that flocked to the "richest hill on
earth" in the 1880s and 90s. For me, then, reading Mary Murphy's book was
a rather unusual experience, and not only because it is the first academic
book I can remember that my parents read as eagerly as I did.
In my mind, the book offers an admirable example of how to treat local
memories with respect even while challenging the version of history they
represent. Three of these challenges recur throughout the book. The first
is a matter of timing. Murphy seeks to examine the city not in its supposed
"glory" days as a turn-of-the-century immigrant mining town driven by the
designs of corporate capitalists, a period that both local residents and
subsequent historians have already examined. What captures her attention
is the generation after that, a time when corporate battles were at a
low ebb, the union had been broken, and the town had begun what would
eventually turn into a century-long decline in population and power.
This was the time, Murphy argues, when the city that showcased the
favorite vices of young, single men would turn itself into a town that
catered to families.
The second of these challenges is that Murphy pushes consideration of
mining, miners, and corporate power to the margins of her study in order
to focus on gender and leisure. Contrasting the working man's town of the
pre-World War I period with the later, more family-friendly city of the
early 1940s, she explores the ways in which women and men challenged and
ultimately transformed their way of life in the one arena, leisure, in
which she argues they had more control than any other.
Third, and finally, Murphy challenges the notion that Butte was, as its
residents would so dearly like to believe, exceptional. She does this
partly by bringing the range of her reading in various subsets of
twentieth-century history (labor & leisure history, women's history,
consumer culture, the history of sexuality) to bear on her local subject.
But she also uses the history of Butte to offer a critique of urban
history in general. Although Butte is, Murphy admits, a city with a
"unique character and voice," it is also an "exemplar of the rush into an
urban, industrial age" and a town that "offer[s] insights into the urban
development of many cities in the United States." (pp. xiv, xvii) Urban
history, Murphy argues, takes too many of its paradigms from New York,
Philadelphia, and Chicago, the nation's three largest cities. Most
mid-century American urbanites, she maintains, lived in towns closer to the
size of Butte than to New York City.
After an initial chapter sets the scene, these three themes run through
chapters that explore particular arenas of social change. In the first,
and, I think, the most innovative of the chapters, Murphy examines changes
in the production, sale, and use of alcohol, arguing that prohibition led
to significant changes in the traditional gendering of "habits of drink."
Building on the work of historians who have portrayed saloons in and
outside the West as indispensable centers of male public culture,
especially in immigrant industrial towns like Butte, Murphy argues that
the enactment of prohibition had an ironic effect. "Prohibition," she
writes, "allowed women to rewrite the script of acceptable behavior and
transform one arena of commercial leisure bounded by rigid gender roles."
(p. 43). Using vivid examples of women bootleggers and tippling clubwomen,
Murphy shows that "[i]n all aspects of the liquor business women moved
into spaces that had once been reserved exclusively for men."(43)
In the second chapter, Murphy moves from "habits of drink" to "manners
and morals," once again focusing on the extent to which women's behavior
changed in the period that would later become known as the jazz age. In
an interpretation that is less surprising than sensible, she charts the
rise of women's public challenges to respectability and public displays of
sensuality. Young women in Butte claimed a unique combination of models
for womanhood, from fiercely independent pioneer women to first-generation
women politicians like Montana's Jeannette Rankin and even prostitutes
(who were, in Butte, numerous and highly visible). Although Murphy offers
several appealing examples of rebellious women, including Butte writer
Mary MacLane, and her account features the usual 1920s fare of movies,
jazz, and dance halls, she emphasizes the limits of these highly visible
changes. They were, she says, temporary at best, affecting mostly
wage-working women, and even them for only a few years before they
married. Much more significant, she says, was the much-less commented
upon change of women becoming "independent wage earners and consumers."
The next chapter, my favorite, focuses a gendered lens on the activities of
masculinity. Here Murphy argues that although gambling and fighting were,
and would remain, pastimes crucial to male identity, they, too, lost their
aura of masculine exclusivity during the interwar years. Prize-fighting
became so respectable that women claimed a share of seats in the audience,
and even the once-male centered Miners' Union Day celebration began to
cater to family audiences and adjust to notions of masculine domesticity.
Although Murphy's point is to emphasize the extent of change, the greater
value of this chapter lies, I think, in the detailed portrayal it gives of
the elements of masculine identity formation in an early twentieth-century
working-class town.
The next two--and, I would say, the least innovative-- chapters explore the
ways that local voluntary associations and a popular local radio station
reflected and challenged the patterns of gender laid out earlier in the
book. The chapter on voluntary associations emphasizes that clubs and
organizations were both the "single most important force in meeting the
needs of women and children in a community whose commercial culture
primarily served the desires of men" and "one of the most persistent forms
of gender-based leisure." (161). It contains an intriguing account of the
political battles that crippled the supposedly non-partisan League of Women
Voters, but otherwise charts patterns that will be familiar to most
scholars. The chapter on radio station KGIR serves as a case study. It
argues that the highly popular station succeeded because it built on
established "gendered patterns of leisure and work" with a twist toward
family entertainment. (p. 169). Its best feature, I think, is its
description of the extent to which "radiomania" was an activity gendered
for boys (p. 172).
In the final chapter, which focuses on the New Deal, Murphy tackles a
tricky interpretive task involving the one aspect of Butte history she
thinks is truly atypical, the absence of an "effective" turn-of-the-century
progressive movement. (p. xvi). Particularly struck by the lack of
community support for public recreation, Murphy argues that the New Deal
pumped considerable money into Butte in an attempt to fill this gap with
recreation and arts programs tied to themes of "family recreation" (p.
211). In the end, though, these programs failed to translate into
significant social change. When the federal government stopped maintaining
them, the city let them slide. In the final analysis, Murphy argues, the
New Deal was less significant for the content of these programs than for
one of its seeming side products: a book of local stories called _Copper
Camp_. "Stories," she concludes, "counted among the treasures won from the
mines" and _Copper Camp_ set the feisty patterns of historical memory that
remain alive in Butte to this day. (pp. xvii, xviii, 223).
_Mining Cultures_ is a book written in the spirit of social historians who
study ordinary people and everyday lives. It is built on a detailed
examination of sources, including oral interviews, that Murphy, who was one
of the first historians to work in the recently established community
archives, has mined carefully and well. She treats her subjects with
genuine respect, displays a fine eye for a revealing anecdote, and places
her story in the context of a wide range of social history literatures.
Murphy's biggest contribution comes, I think, in shifting our attention
from the turn-of-the-century to the interwar period, a move that not only
allows her to break new ground in the well-worn historiography of Butte but
also to contribute to the gendered histories of women and men in this
surprisingly little-understood period. She is so good at tracing the
unlikely history of women during prohibition and the patterns of men's
involvement in street violence that I wish she had taken up a whole host
of related subjects. One of these, violence against women, seems to me a
particularly curious omission. I wish she had confronted more directly the
tension between chapters that follow women's rebellion against traditional
gender roles and chapters that chart the development of a "family"
community. Although both developments were challenges to the public
culture of a working man's town, they contradicted as well as paralleled
each other. And I wished, too, that she had defined her subject more
broadly, so that her analyses of gender in politics, economics, and ethnic
dynamics would seem as central to her work as the focus on leisure.
In the end, though, _Mining Cultures_ is a significant addition to the
growing body of studies on gender in western urban cities and a study that
speaks to scholars of labor, leisure, gender, and modern culture. It's
merely a bonus that what I'll remember most about the book is how much it
taught me about the stories my parents and grandparents didn't tell me.
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