Women of Bethlehem Steel

In 2016 and 2017, the South Side Initiative and the Steelworkers’ Archives collaborated with dozens of women who had worked at Bethlehem Steel’s home plant in order to explore the significance of their pioneering and under-acknowledged labor in the city’s iconic steel industry.  Together, we created the Women of Bethlehem Steel, a fully searchable digital archive of images, documents and video interviews with women who had worked in many settings at Bethlehem Steel, from the shop floor to corporate offices.  We also organized a series of public forums at which these women could tell their stories and community members could discuss how we might create a city today that guarantees equality in the workplace and enables all girls and women to flourish. We welcome new material and interviews for this collection and we facilitate ongoing research on the archive in the public schools, at Lehigh, and at other research institutions.

This project marks an important moment in the city of Bethlehem’s exploration of its past.  For more than a century, almost every aspect of life in the city revolved around the massive Bethlehem Steel plant – which, at its peak, employed more than 30,000 workers. The story of the Steel has generally been told as a story about male workers who performed highly skilled and dangerous industrial labor and about male engineers, managers and executives.   But women held jobs at the Steel throughout its history, as nurses and clerical workers, as cooks and waiters, phone operators and “elevator girls.”  During the First and Second World Wars, women were hired into traditionally male production jobs, but were promptly sent home at war’s end.  Then, in 1974, a Supreme Court consent decree forced major steel companies to leave behind a century of discriminatory racial and gendered employment practices and to hire women into unionized shop-floor production jobs.  During these years, women also began to climb the ranks into management positions in the corporation for the first time.

Women in Steel: Why This Matters

The Women of Bethlehem Steel archive tells the story of these female pioneers.  They proved that there was no such thing as “men’s work” and “women’s work,” that women could perform successfully in any workplace.  The archive tells the story of women who felt empowered by earning a union wage and by mastering the skilled and dangerous work that men in their families had often performed for generations.  It also tells the story of their struggles with discrimination and harassment and with the challenge of balancing industrial labor and shift work with motherhood.  Those interviewed describe the experience of female office workers and the first female executives, and they explore the forms of solidarity and inclusion experienced by many women as well as the persistent dynamics of sexism and racism at the plant.  Some interviews also explore the experiences of the wives, mothers, daughters and workers at small businesses who made possible the vibrant lives of steelworker families and neighborhoods on the South Side.

Activating the Archive, Amplifying these Voices

Since the project’s launch, SSI and the Steelworkers’ Archives have organized an ongoing series of public events at which women who worked at Bethlehem Steel have shared their experiences.  Several of these have taken the form of panel discussions, at which women steelworkers and office workers have told their stories to packed auditoriums and responded to community members’ questions.  Families have traveled across the country to attend these events, at which children have heard for the first time about their grandmothers’ work at the blast furnace or the beam yard.  At a couple of public forums, scholars who had studied the archive emphasized major themes, commonalities and differences, and contemporary implications – to which interview subjects and community members responded.   At one, held in an 18th-century Moravian choir house in historic Bethlehem, scholars gave brief presentations about the role women had played in transforming the city during two dramatic moments of historical change:  the founding of the city in the 1740s and the integrating of the Steel in the 1970s.  Against that backdrop, community members participated in a wide-ranging dialogue about what changes we need to make in our city today to ensure equality in the workplace and to enable all girls and women to thrive.  These events have been covered widely in local media.  

The project team continues to facilitate ongoing research and community engagement with the Women of Bethlehem Steel archive. Students in the Bethlehem public schools have studied the interviews.  Lehigh undergraduates and graduate students have written research papers, conference presentations and poems about materials in the archives, as well as profiles in local media, including Southsider, SSI’s journal of arts and culture.  Faculty members have presented on the project at international conferences and are drawing on the archive for books-in-progress.   The SSI project team welcomes inquiries from community members, school-teachers, journalists, documentary film-makers, and scholars interested in working with materials in the archive, which are freely available and fully searchable online.   We also welcome inquiries from women who worked at Bethlehem Steel and who would like to be interviewed for this project.

Project Partners

Funded by a grant from the Mellon Digital Humanities Initiative, the Women of Bethlehem Steel project emerged from a years-long collaboration between the Steelworkers’ Archives and Lehigh’s South Side Initiative.  At Lehigh, staff from Library & Technology Services designed, built and maintain the archive; faculty and graduate students from the English and History Departments and the American Studies program joined members of the Steelworkers Archives in conducting interviews, indexing the collection, and facilitating public forums. 

Project Team: 

– Julia Maserjian – PI  (Digital Scholarship Team Manager, Lehigh LTS)

– Seth Moglen – PI (Professor of English, American Studies & Africana Studies, Lehigh)

– Jill Schennum – (Steelworkers’ Archives & Professor of Anthropology, County College of Morris)

– Susan Vitez (Steelworkers’ Archives)

– Kim Carrell-Smith (Director of Community Fellows & History Dept. faculty, Lehigh)

– Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno (Ph.D. Student & Teaching Fellow, Lehigh English Dept.)

– Jo Grim (Ph.D. Student & Teaching Fellow, Lehigh English Dept.)

– Amey Senape (Program Manager, Northampton Community College; transcriptionist)

– Karen Myers (Transcriptionist)

 Public Event Hosts:  Northampton Community College (main campus and South Side branch); Bethlehem Area Public Library; Single Sisters House;  PBS/Channel 39.

Publicity and Press Coverage

What Work Was Like for Bethlehem Steel’s Female Workers – Express Times April 2016

Steelworkers Archives Hold Women of Steel Forum – Sun Sentinel April 2016

Women of Bethlehem Steel to tell their Stories – Morning Call  Nov. 2016

Women of Bethlehem Steel – Capital Gazette Nov. 2016

Lehigh Hosts Panel Discussion with Women of Bethlehem Steel – Dec. 2016

Lehigh Joins in “Women of Bethlehem Steel” Project – Jan 2017

Pioneering Panelists Share Experiences at BAPL – Bethlehem Press March 2017

Digital Archive: The Women of Bethlehem Steel – March 2017

Women Transforming Bethlehem –  Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Nov. 2017

Women Transforming Bethlehem – Then & Now – Nov. 2017

Stories of the Women of Bethlehem Steel – Southsider March 2020

Community Voices Spotlight:  Jill Schennum – Southsider April 2020

Women of Bethlehem Steel Series: Spotlight on Esther Lee – Southsider June 2020