A New Job Track for Single Mothers in Wyoming

By Kirk Johnson
The New York Times

Thursday 06 March 2008

Cheyenne, Wyoming - The lunch table was full of people in the same boat: Single mothers who are trainees in the hydraulics and pipe-fitting trades, thrown together and traveling to a place none of them could quite imagine.

"I don't know how I want to say this," said Lillian McEwan, who is 31 and a mother of four. "But I trust you guys more than people that I've known all my life."

For a moment, silence. Then it seemed everyone spoke at once. Hands reached out to touch. Heads nodded in understanding.

"We've all had our hearts broken," said Shannon Heidelberg, 36, who is raising a 12-year-old and a 2-year-old. "But there's no one here who's going to turn around and hurt you."

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.

But somehow cowboy egalitarianism bumped up into the hard reality of economics. Most jobs that Wyoming has created in recent years, as the state's oil, gas and coal industries have boomed, are tough, dirty, outdoor occupations that pay well and that are dominated by men. Service jobs that most women get have not kept up. Wyoming also ranks near the bottom among states in the proportion of women who have higher education degrees or own businesses.

"To have led in some of those areas and now to have fallen to be the worst in the country in the gender-wage gap, something's wrong," said Nancy Freudenthal, the wife of Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat.

Ms. Freudenthal, a lawyer who worked on women's economic issues in private life, kept at it as first lady and is credited with helping Climb Wyoming expand statewide from here in Cheyenne. The group's $1.8 million budget is about 70 percent public money, mostly federal grants, and 30 percent private donations and foundations.

More than 500 women have gone through the course, about one-third in nontraditional fields like welding and truck driving, two-thirds in office and medical work like phlebotomy.

Many women deemed unprepared for Climb Wyoming's journey are put on waiting lists and directed toward other programs that could help them get ready, like high school equivalency or drug-treatment programs. That self-selection keeps classes small, attention by counselors intense and success rates high, but it also means that not every woman is immediately helped to a new career. And some probably fall through the cracks.

But for those who are accepted, the level of passion is often intense. Mr. Freudenthal was at the Home Depot in Cheyenne a while back, his wife said, when he was spotted by a group of early graduates buying their first tool belts. They told him how their lives had been changed for the better.

Melissa Kutz, a 27-year-old mother of three who is in the current Climb Wyoming class, said it was all about escaping "the rut." Originally from Wisconsin, Ms. Kutz was marooned in Wyoming nine years ago when a military marriage shattered. At times, she said, she has worked three jobs at once, mostly in food service and child care.

Now she studies electricity, and imagines a day when she might have health insurance. (Her children are covered by the state.)

"I spent a lot of years trying to figure out what to do, how to make things work, and after a while you reach a point where you're completely hopeless," Ms. Kutz said recently at Climb Wyoming's training center. It is a barracks-like building at Laramie County Community College, where workstations are a jumble of computers, blowtorches, copper pipe and circuit boards.

"You hear it all: 'You're white trash. You're a welfare mom. Why'd you have kids if you can't feed them?'" Ms. Kutz said. "But I just have never been as hopeful as I have in the past few weeks."

Across most of the country, blue-collar training for women is an idea that has mostly failed, in the 1970s, when the women's movement set its sights on barriers and glass-ceilings of every kind. Many states financed training programs, said Randy Albelda, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, but many women at the vanguard were more interested in breaking through to other previously male-dominated areas like business and medical school.

Professor Albelda, who has written widely about women's economic equality, said she knew of no other program that combined the group concept of training and counseling.

"There is still some of that training out there, but a lot of it is, 'walk in the door, here's the training, go get a job,'" she said. "Single mothers need more support than that."

They also must be ready to cut the cord to their old lives, another way the new group becomes important. Sometimes, Climb Wyoming graduates and students said, old friends - or people who seemed like friends - can grow jealous or hostile when a person tries to better herself.

"We all realized that we weren't calling our old friends anymore when we needed something - we were calling each other," said Amy McGuire, a 25-year-old mother of three who went through the 10-week, part-time Climb Wyoming course last year and now repairs copiers and fax machines in Cheyenne.

There is also a certain practical reality to the Climb Wyoming sisterhood, the plain and simple sense that the new group is absorbing a lot of arcane, technical information that many other people cannot comprehend, like how to solder a brass pipe so it is straight and true and will not corrode from within.

"That's why this group is good," said Kristina Sheets, 31, who has worked as a waitress while raising her three children, ages, 9, 12 and 13. "They know all the steps that went into it."

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