One more last working class hero

or being forced to accept men’s standards, perhaps sociology should consider if these examples might be analysed to
celebrate women’s agency and at the same time critique/influence commonsense views about gender. Fortuitous in the
events occurring during my research is an intervention by Lorber (2000). She argues that feminists should now form a
degendering movement and challenge the whole concept of binary gender divisions 94 . Lorber’s wake up call is perhaps a
next step for feminist and pro-feminist research to consider. This report will contribute to her arguments by identifying
how male firefighters construct their masculinity and consider in the conclusion what gender label do we give the
firefighters who are women and do their work in similar ways to men.
23
1.12. The Chapters
The Report comprises a further five chapters, each combining relevant literature, data and analysis.
Chapter 2, Methodology, explains in detail the methodology and methods for the research, my own experience of the
research process and report production.
Chapter 3, Firefighting: Getting-in, begins by identifying current thinking on masculinity and image presentation
before providing a close look at the business of firefighting, the product of which (can be seen as economic, but in this
chapter) is: saving lives, protecting property; and rendering humanitarian services. This data led chapter focuses in
particular on the tightly knit teams of firefighters, how they fight fires and their motivations for doing so. Foremost
from this evidence comes the understanding that to firefighters, firefighting is not just another job, but a service that
they wish to carry out to the best of their ability and if this involves challenging some company rules, then so be it.
However, the analysis places some question marks over if firefighters’ motivations for doing their job and providing
their service is only humanitarian (the Millais model) and I produce a list of possible motivations that firefighters may
have for firefighting. This list develops to suggest that whilst firefighters are ostensibly helping the public during
firefighting, firefighters may also be testing and proving their masculinity at the same time. However, this is not a
judgement that their reactions to any similar situation at another time would have the same motivation (see Giddens
1987).
Chapter 4, Relations at the station: Fitting-in, moves from the fireground to the firestation and provides detailed
data from firefighters concerning their working relationships on the watch. This data suggests that despite the fire
service having a formal hierarchy, the watch more often support an informal hierarchy; group membership is
conditional on firefighters fitting-in with peer group gatekeepers. To help explain these relationships, including the
resistance that firefighters may show to the informal hierarchy, I produce a list of loose categories or stages that
firefighters may pass through or join. There is no intention to suggest that firefighters’ behaviour will always fit those
categories, the list is just a tool to aid understanding.
Chapter 5, Class, Hierarchies, Resistance and Gender Construction, reviews data from officers and firefighters in
class terms. In particular, I investigate the relations between the formal hierarchy (officers) and the informal one
(firefighters). The data supports a view in all the previous chapters that despite fire service claims to be a disciplined
and united service that there is a vast disparity between public claims and private outcomes (because of firefighters’
resistance to officers). The industrialisation of the fire service is seen as a focus for this resistance, but in a class
orientated analysis about control of the means of production and surplus values, it is possible to recognise that not all
resistance is about economic dividends/surplus values, but that the gap between officers and firefighters is also about
petty dividends involving power and status.
Chapter 6, Conclusion, will bring the findings of the report into a conclusion. It does this by referring back to the
four areas, which Chapter 1 provides for investigation. In particular, it analyses how firefighters construct their
gender at work, what this analysis adds to the debate on gender construction and how this report helps the fire service.
There is also a critique of the research and report, and a discussion of some areas for further research.
mother of one of my friends told me) and staffing radar stations. In the fire service at the time, there is no conclusive evidence that women actually
fought fires as regular crewmembers on an appliance. The general view was that women should not, or could not, be subject to the danger of firefighting
during air raids. However, in a typical piece of irony, during the research I met a wartime woman control operator and she told me that during the war
she was trained as a despatch rider (a motorcyclist who took messages from the fire to the control and back again during air-raids). Females are as a rule
kept away from the high-risk industries, which empower men (see Lipman-Blumen 1976: 23) and this might better explain why women were excluded
from firefighting. Similar views led to the way women were deliberately taken out of the mines in a series of trade-union sponsored industrial laws that
preserved labour (and I suggest proletarian masculinity) for men (see Walby 1990). Currently, examples of women acting in a similar fashion to men
can be found in all areas of employment, from managers to road sweepers and in all industries and professions, but as I argue earlier, this is not seen as
masculine behaviour, but as women acting like men or being defeminised (Cockburn 1991b: 69).
94 This may have been argued earlier by, amongst others, Hearn (1994, 1996). It is possible to see Wollstonecraft taking such a view: “She claimed to be
androgynous in her self-presentation, but manly in her force and reason” (Todd 1989: xxix-xxx) Wollstonecraft (1994) also suggests that women were
‘human before feminine’ and that ‘the soul was unsexed’ (almost an opposite argument to that of Kant 1959 who saw men as naturally rational and
women as naturally irrational).