Agency and the Gendered Imagination: Women's Actions and Local Culture in Steelworker Families

Abstract

The transformation of a segment of the Hamilton working class in the space of a couple of decades—from lifestyles supported by good jobs that, given the global demand for steel, seemed certain to last forever, to week-to-week insecurity and shattered gender expectations—came about not only through structural shifts in the global economy, but through the agency of the members of steelworker families as well, all mediated by local cultural ideas and practices. This article considers how we might think about the apparently mundane, everyday actions of women as contributing to—rather than simply responding to—broader shifts. I suggest this means thinking about women's lives as entailing meaningful acts that, through continuous and combined application, gradually alter structural conditions. Sensitivity to the forms of agency that women employ requires a notion of agency that can account for different experiences and, thus, different meanings, which arise from unequal access to wealth and power. Human agency involves a cognitive process of remembering the past, engaging the present, and imagining the future as people reflect on ideas and events, make judgements, and evaluate imagined alternatives. In the distinctively human ability to incorporate imagined futures into decisions over which path to take, we can see a particularly gendered expression of agency. As women reflect on their own experiences of the past and the present, they can rarely avoid confronting gendered forms of inequality. Action rests on a capacity to imagine a future free of (the effects of) gendered inequalities. Imagination thus spurs gendered action. Field research on which this article is based was carried out by the author in 1994. My thanks to June Corman, Meg Luxton, David Livingstone and Wally Seccombe for generously providing access to interview and other data also used in the preparation of this article which were gathered by them in 1984.