Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit

by Eliese Colette Goldbach

After all, I was just a newbie who hadn’t yet absorbed one of the unspoken rules of the mill. You weren’t supposed to point a finger at a problem and identify it directly. You couldn’t say that you didn’t like being called QuackQuack, and you couldn’t say that people were misjudging you because you were female, and you certainly weren’t supposed to reprimand old men for referring to a fellow woman by a derogatory name. In the mill, you were supposed to bottle up the problem and let it come out in an unrelated way. If someone calls you QuackQuack, you flick him off for some other reason. If someone misjudges you because you’re a woman, you work harder to prove yourself. You believe, for a moment, that it solves something, but the guy still calls you QuackQuack behind your back and people still assume that you’re a ditzy woman who doesn’t think things through. The problems still exist; they just morph into something else.