Book review: Thick skin -- field notes from a sister in the brotherhood

Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood*
by Hilary Peach

Anvil Press (2022)

*winner of Wilfrid Laurier University's 2023 Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction 

Review by Amanda Le Rougetel

In short: Five stars; highly recommended. Buy the physical book; its weight (451 grams/15.9 ounces) belies the deftness of the prose contained within

A FINELY OBSERVED, beautifully written account of a woman’s experience as the oft lone female welder on the job site. Crusty characters, foul language, sexist treatment, and good pay just about tell the tale.

Without ever overtly teaching about welding or laying blame for her often less-than-honourable treatment, Hilary Peach brings the reader in to her trade and describes through story and characters what she saw on the worksites, how she experienced it, dealt with it — and survived it.

Whether the worksite is in Peach’s home province of BC, across the US border, or down East in the Maritimes, her work takes her to small towns that are sometimes remote. For weeks on end she lives in low-end motels, a rented room in a local’s house, or in the employer’s work camp. Loneliness in these make-shift homes is as constant a companion as the cold shoulder and bullying are in the workplace. What sustains Peach is her persistence in wanting to do the work of a welder — and in knowing that she has a right to do that work, no matter how alien she might seem to her ‘brothers’ in the trade.

Peach takes the reader through the full length of her career, from rookie status to quality inspector job, by dropping us into various worksites along the way. The book is divided into three parts, each one consisting of site- or incident-specific stories that are gripping to read. Her writing is vivid, her experiences skillfully told with dialogue and details she kept track of in journals over the years. 

For example, the conversation between Peach and Lawrence in the chapter titled “I wouldn’t take you with me” illustrates her strength of character, her wit, and her tenacity in making connections with (some of) the guys she was partnered with on the job. The chapter opens with Lawrence stating unequivocally “I would never take a woman with me out on the high iron.” It ends four days later with the two of them buddies, leaving the job site together, stringing their colleagues along with a private joke only the two of them understand. In between, Peach has inched her way into Lawrence’s mind as a human being with excellent welding skills who happens to be a woman and who has, through her conversational gambits, opened a new world to him of art and music, of food and bars — places she would, or would not, take him. He is intrigued, asks questions, they talk, and, over time, hostility is replaced with acceptance.

The book’s title is not expanded on in detail until page 263, when a full chapter is given to anecdotes that explain ‘thick skin’. This paragraph excerpt illustrates Peach’s strategic approach to the culture of her chosen trade: foul language is one thing, a foul attitude is an entirely different matter.

    “I have always loved language and have been fearless in it. To move in language is to swim. It is flight. At its best, language is wide open, a wondrous and free commodity, like water. Like snow. I didn’t always buy the argument that rewriting workplace jargon would create a safe and and welcoming space. Words make up the script, and aren’t as harmful as the thinking behind them. That’s not going to change by regulating the dictionary. When someone consistently used misogynistic language, he was self-identifying as misogynist. This was useful information to have if I had to work beside him for a night, or a week, or a month. I liked to know where people stood. The futile task of trying to cleanse a vocabulary was not going to change anyone’s mind.”

Dropped into the narrative are mentions of Peach’s personal life — a boyfriend here, a love interest there, along with references to producing art shows in between jobs. Her website describes her as “recording artist and producer of unusual art projects”; no details are provided in the book, but the scattered references make clear that Peach has a whole universe beyond her trade that surely must sustain her during her times away working. We don’t need to know more; it is enough to know that this woman has deep reserves of creative energy — the book in our hands is proof of that.

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If welding is a trade of skillfully applied heat melting specific solids, then this book is beautifully strung together words about a woman’s experience in that trade. You can listen to Hilary Peach read from the book and share stories from the trade here (on a segment of CBC Radio's long-running IDEAS program).