Academic

In Wyoming Sisterhood is Powerful?

By Ann Bartow

… as relayed by the NYT. Below is an excerpt:

… Here in a state with the highest gap in the nation between a woman?s wage and a man?s, and a divorce rate 30 percent above the national average, some women are finding a new way to storm the economic barricades.

They are working with an unusual nonprofit organization, Climb Wyoming, which takes women who have absorbed a few of life?s body blows ? bad or absent men, drugs, public assistance and jail are all common stories ? and combines free job training with psychological counseling.

But Climb Wyoming?s real core insight is female solidarity ? that the group, trained and forged together more like a platoon than a class, will become an anchor of future success. New skills can go only so far in changing a life, the group?s trainers say; sometimes it takes a sisterhood.

?We look for groups that are ready to work together and make a change together,? said Ray Fleming Dinneen, a psychologist and co-founder of Climb Wyoming, which four years ago began training go-it-alone mothers for male-dominated jobs that rule the state?s industrial-energy economy.

Wyoming has a reputation, well-earned, as a rawboned place where the wind blows hard and a two-hour drive to a one-horse town is not uncommon. Suicide rates and the number of people working more than one job are among the highest in the nation. Methamphetamine use, as in many other rural states, has become a social scourge.

But a thread of feminism, Western-style, also runs deep. In frontier days, it was about politics. Women demanded and received rights here that were long in coming elsewhere. They began voting in 1869, half a century before most other American women, and elected the first statewide female officeholder before 1900. In 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross became the nation?s first female governor, elected to complete the term of her late husband. …

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).