“Who else is gonna do it if we don't?” Gender, education, and the crisis of care in the 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike

Hanrahan, Nancy Weiss; Amsler, Sarah

Abstract

In 2018, a sequence of powerful education strikes and work stoppages across the United States sent shock waves through the country's public education system. This eruption of collective workers' organization was strongly led by women teachers responding to the current crisis of care, demanding resources, dignity, and justice for themselves, the children they teach, and their communities. While mainstream reports often represent these actions as traditional labor and/or feminist struggles, our research demonstrates that they were sites of more nuanced response to “care extraction” in education, and for understanding how constructions of gender and gender injustice both gave rise to the strikes and shaped their unfolding. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 10 teacher-activists who participated in the West Virginia strikes, we examine how teachers' labor is being transformed in a context of postindustrial austerity, illustrate the complex political identity of the strike actions, and explore the relationship between specific constructions of gendered labor and collective organizing in US public education today.

Citation

Hanrahan, N. W., & Amsler, S. (2022). “Who else is gonna do it if we don't?” Gender, education, and the crisis of care in the 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike. Gender, Work and Organization, 29(1), 151-166. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12739

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 20, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jul 21, 2021
• Publication Date: 2022-01
• Deposit Date: Jul 24, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 22, 2023
• Journal: Gender, Work and Organization
• Print ISSN: 0968-6673
• Electronic ISSN: 1468-0432
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 151-166
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12739
• Keywords: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Gender Studies
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5817605
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ftr/10.1111/gwao.12739
• Additional Information: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Hanrahan, N. W., & Amsler, S. (2021). “Who else is gonna do it if we don't?” Gender, education, and the crisis of care in the 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike. Gender Work Organization, 1– 17, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12739. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.