Mining Coal and Undermining Gender : Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West

Among the miners of Wyoming's Powder River Basin--the largest coal-producing region in the U.S.--anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston reveals how the mining industry, though heavily masculinized, generates new configurations of the "working family"--a kind of kinship based on the shared burdens of shift work and concerns for safety, which challenges and reproduces gender differences in everyday working and family life.