The Working Hands Project
uses film and photography to offer a close-up look at trades work, centering on the stories of women and nonbinary tradespeople.
When I began work as a residential service electrician in 2018, I felt that being a woman in the trades was rare. And yet, the longer I worked, the more I began to meet other tradeswomen.
Over time, fourteen women joined the company (not all concurrently), and almost half of the apprentices I trained were women. I began attending a meeting of local women and nonbinary tradespeople, which, within a couple of years, went from a gathering of eight to a listserve of over a hundred, including carpenters, woodworkers, contractors, masons, welders, auto-mechanics, jewelers, electricians, and blacksmiths.
I was struck by
how many of us there were. Where had I gotten the sense that I was rare? At the electrical supply house, I sometimes ran into Carol Dixon, who had been running Carol’s Electric for over thirty years. I came across Tradeswomen Magazine, published from 1981-1998 by blue collar women for blue collar women, filled with personal accounts, essays, letters, and photos. Statistically, of course, we are rare. In the US, about 4% of tradespeople are women[1]. But percentages belie numbers and therefore stories; 4% equates to over 81,000 tradeswomen, each with their own stories.
In response,
I began to develop The Working Hands Project as a way to tell these stories. In the Fall of 2024 I spent time talking with, interviewing, and filming Nikki Puckett, an auto mechanic, who is in the process of opening a queer mechanic’s collective, which developed into a short film. I spent the Spring of 2025 with Angela, a metalworker and basketweaver, as she she cultivated and harvested basket willow, wove baskets, and taught women and nonbinary students how to forge bottle openers, knives, and awls out of steel rods. In the Summer of 2025, I spent many weeks with Meredith Hart, a furniture maker, in her workshop, filming her at work as she built a stool. Shortly thereafter, I Danielle Ackley, a natural builder and natural building educator.
As the project progressed, I moved away from conversations about the social context of work—including interactions with coworkers and instances of discrimination—and began to focus instead on a close-up look at the relationship tradespeople have with their work. This process, which I refer to as close narrative, was adapted from the idea of “shallow depth of field in photography,” which focuses in detail on one part of a scene and leaves the rest blurry.
I noticed in my filmmaking that I was drawn to close-ups of hands at work and began to wonder what the equivalent of that would be in interviews. In response, I developed a set of questions focused on their personal relationships with their work that left the social context—interactions with customers, coworkers, teachers, etc. blurry. Questions focused on their interactions with their tools, their hands, and their skills. I asked about their experiences learning and developing trades skillsets, focusing—crucially—on the ways their trades skillsets have adapted from other parts of their lives.
Danielle, for example, talks about how, as a student recently in a continuing education woodworking class, she was nervous to use the bandsaw—a tool she was unfamiliar with—even though she had been using table saws and circular saws for years as a builder. And then she did it and her teacher said it was perfect, and she realized it’s exactly like sewing. She went on to describe: QUOTE. This put me in mind of my own experience as an electrician. ____. Angela, furthermore, talks about how, as both a metalworker and basketmaker, she works between what is considered in the contemporary United States to be stereotypically
My intent in developing close narrative is to offer a method that does not rely on the narrative arc or social context to tell stories but instead .. This is partly to offer an alternative to news stories of women in the trades which highlight struggles and overcoming.
My intent is for this project to continue growing, evolving naturally over time to reflect my growing practice. The film of Nikki__
Women’s skilled labor is not a modern phenomenon.
As Elizabeth Wayland Barber notes in Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years (1994), women’s skilled labor is not a modern phenomenon.
Records from the
Middle Ages show women working as blacksmiths, barrel-makers, masons, carpenters, etc
Yet, during the transition
to capitalism, women were systematically expelled from the trades. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch (2004), describes how the 15th-century campaigns to exclude female workers from workshops were fueled by narratives portraying tradeswomen as "witches" and "shrews" (96; 100-103). BATTLE OF THE BREECHES
And yet, by the 1800s,
a new narrative of femininity emerged, portraying women as so refined and gentle that they could not work in jobs as heavy, dangerous, and dirty as the trades (Federici:103).
During the World Wars, women were compelled back into the trades. During WWI, the number of women in the British building trades rose from 7,000 to over 31,000 (Ellison, April 24), and during WWII, the number of women in the construction industry in the United States rose to ten percent[1]. The narrative trope of surprise features heavily in accounts from these periods; a 1917 entry in the Building News and Engineering Journal noted that the high level of skill exhibited by women bricklayers, carpenters, and woodworking machine operators was “a development which few would have predicted” (Ellison, April 24).
During World War II, Lumberjills served in the Women’s Timber Corps in England, felling trees with axes, hand-sawing them into lengths, and operating sawmills. Yet when the Corps was disbanded in 1946, its members were excluded from official government benefits and victory commemorations—an erasure that set the stage for subsequent narratives of novelty and surprise when women would once again “enter” the trades (Tyrer 2007).
Meanwhile, a parallel but inverse narrative was taking shape as the rise of factory production caused many hand-based trades to lose commercial relevance, initiating a transition from male to female dominance. Willow basketry in the UK, for example, was an exclusively male trade until the middle of the 20th century, at which point, believing the trade to be endangered, existing basketmakers began to accept female apprentices[2].
While this may seem like a feminist win, as basketmaking transitioned from male to female dominance, it was, in the process, trivialized, feminized, and rebranded as craft. Basketry famously has been one of the crafts most subject to trivialization through the spread of the derisive phrase “underwater basketweaving,” coined in the mid-twentieth century as a shorthand for useless skills. In this way, grand narratives do more than just gatekeep who can enter a trade; they gender the trades based on who is performing them, altering the way skillsets are understood and valued.
Today, as trades re-open to women, tradeswomen are portrayed once again as tough trailblazers, crossing into the uncharted territory of male work and male skills. News articles about women in the trades highlight the ways we defy the odds. This portrayal, while true in some regards and flattering in others, ignores the long lineage of women’s skilled work and reinforces the myth that tradeswomen must cross a threshold into a world of difficult and unfamiliar skills in order to succeed in trades jobs. This not only fails to capture tradeswomen’s experiences developing their skillsets but has the effect of deterring other women and nonbinary workers from entering such professions, giving the impression that trades work is only accessible to exceptional individuals brave enough to venture into a foreign domain.
Craft and Trade
The Working Hands Project intentionally includes occupations that span what we think of in the contemporary United States as crafts and trades. While it’s possible to come up with a list of stereotypical distinctions between these two terms—trades are more utilitarian while crafts are more decorative; trades use dangerous tools and heavy materials while crafts use softer, lighter, safer materials; trades take place in public while crafts are done within the household; trades produce items and services essential to daily life whereas crafts produce nonessential items—these distinctions break down when we try to apply them cleanly to specific occupations.
In the United States over the last century, the definition of trades has narrowed from what it once referred to—including barrel making, horse shoeing, stonewalling, thatching, shoemaking, etc.—to primarily refer to the building and auto trades. The remaining trades have been reassigned either as “crafts” or as “historical trades.” I attribute this increasingly narrow definition not to the inherent qualities of building and automotive skillsets, but to the fact that these are the occupations most able to resist offshoring and mechanization. A house is too large to be built in a factory or shipped from overseas, and it would be prohibitively expensive to offshore repairs of our vehicles. Today’s trades, therefore, are those of yesterday’s trades most immobile and resistant to mechanization.
But through the lens of utility, a woven basket still holds objects, a shoe still protects the foot, and a quilt still keeps us warm. What’s more, containers and shoes and blankets are not anachronisms but essential daily items in the contemporary United States. What has changed is not the essential utility of these objects nor the skill required to make them, but the fact that making them by hand is now comparatively more expensive. Consequently, The Working Hands Project operates on the premise that the modern distinction between craft and trade is a reflection of market value rather than the inherent nature of the work. For this reason, I have chosen to intentionally overlook these distinctions.
This choice is a markedly feminist one. As described above, the gender division within trades often shifts alongside changes in their market value. Trades that are commercially viable are typically male-dominated; as their market value wanes, they frequently transition to female dominance and, in the process, lose their status as a trade. Of the remaining oak swill basketmakers in the United Kingdom (formerly an exclusively male trade), three out of four are women. Similarly, Norwegian rope making is kept alive today by two women at the Hardanger Maritime Center. To add to this, it is worth mentioning that participation in the building trades is currently waning; Conversely, in countries where the manufacture of goods makes up a significant portion of commerce, men still engage in work that we categorize as crafts in the United States—such as male cloth weavers in India.
By removing the division between craft and trade, I am not only asserting that crafts are equal in skill and utility to contemporary trades but also reasserting the long and often-forgotten history of women’s work in the trades.
About Me
My career has centered on vocational training.
In 2012, I worked as an instructor and case manager at a workforce