When mining, construction, and other death professions are discussed in feminist publications, they are portrayed as examples of the male power system, as "male-only dubs." However, when Ms. magazine profiled female miners, the emphasis was on how the woman was forced to take a job in the mines because it paid the best, and how taking such a job was the only way she could support her family.*4
Ms. could never acknowledge that the male-only clubs of hazardous occupations paid best because of their hazards and had been male-only exactly because men risked their lives for the extra pay to support their loved ones. They could not acknowledge that almost no woman worked in a mine to support a husband. Or that, if the woman they were profiling had a husband, he would have gone to the mines — not her. This double standard — of the death professions being a privilege when men did them and an oppression when women did them — has made two generations of men feel a bit unappreciated.