Olson, Karen 1943-

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Olson, Karen 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born April 14, 1943.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Community College of Baltimore County, Dundalk, 7200 Sollers Point Rd., Baltimore, MD 21222. E-mail—kolson@ccbcmd.edu.

CAREER:

Historian, anthropologist, educator, and writer. Community College of Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, professor of history and anthropology.

WRITINGS:

Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Karen Olson is an anthropologist and historian and author of Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. In her book, the author adds to the work of earlier scholars who looked at the rise and decline of the U.S. steel industry and the lives of the men who worked in the steel industry. The author's contribution is to examine the role that women played in the community, especially after the industry's fall in the 1970s. Olson focuses on the Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point, near Baltimore, which was one of the largest plants in the world and, at its peak, employed as many as 30,000 workers.

The author's book is based largely on interviews she conducted over a fifteen-year period with both black and white women and men who worked in Sparrows Points or who were spouses of steel industry employees and lived in the area. The author also uses numerous secondary sources to support her findings and, as noted by Oral History Review contributor Jo Ann O. Robinson, to place them within "the larger contexts of American economic history, women's history, and African American history." The author ultimately reveals a part of the decline of the American steel industry that has been overlooked. She tells the story of many of the wives of steelworkers who ended up abandoning traditional gender roles to enter the workforce as their husbands lost their job. In the process, the author describes how these women made important contributions to the economic survival of their communities. She also delineates the differences and similarities between white and black women as a reflection of the complicated relationship among black and white steelworkers.

"Scholars and teachers in the fields of women's history and labor history will welcome Wives of Steel, as will oral historians and ethnographers," Robinson wrote in the Oral History Review. "Written in a clear style, empathetic, and insightful, the book will also appeal to the general reader." In a review in the Journal of Southern History, Marko Maunula noted that an increasing number of scholars are providing "more nuanced" examinations of deindustrialization in the United States and its socioeconomic impact. In that vein, he wrote that the author's book "is a valuable, gendered addition to the study of deindustrialization in the United States," adding: "By focusing on women of the communities surrounding a steel mill …, Olson demonstrates how the declining fortunes of the mill and mill employment … have actually empowered local women."