Carhartt Brought Us Together, to Be Girls

Four years ago Women on Site was four women who felt alone at work and started talking about it. Last month we were standing inside the Hearn Generating Station shooting for Carhartt. If you had told us back then that Carhartt would send us a hat, we would have lost our minds. A hat. That would have been the whole story.

It started the day before. A room in Toronto, a rack of new women's workwear, and a team waiting to fit us. Rylie, Constanza, Tessa and Samara, trying on pants that were built for us. Not shrunk down, not a men's 30 with a different tag on it. Built for us. We didn't say much about what it meant, because we didn't have to. It was in the room with us.

The morning came early and we knew by noon it would be pouring. Four of us heading for the Port Lands, wipers going, all admitting they were nervous. Excited, scared, grateful, all of it at once, individually and collectively. We talk ourselves down constantly. It's a nice opportunity, it's just a shoot, it's not that big a deal. It was a big deal.

Then the Hearn. A coal plant that went up in 1951 and shut down in 1983, with ceilings you can't find the end of and enough space inside to hold twelve Parthenons. The stack out front is 705 feet, still one of the tallest structures in this country. It was raining hard enough to come through the roof, water falling from the top of that building down to the floor while a full crew set up around it. Lights, cable, a trailer, people who do this for a living moving like they'd done it a hundred times, because they had. That building was put up by tradespeople in 1951. Bricklayers, sheet metal workers, ironworkers, electricians. Seventy five years of weather and it's still standing. Tessa is a mason. Samara is sheet metal. We noticed.

What stood out was that they wanted more than photos. They asked about the work, the sites, what it's actually like out there. They asked where WOS came from and why four women started it, and then they sat and listened to the answer. That's the part that isn't going to show up in a single frame.

At the end of the day the four of us ended up in the trailer, laughing, trying things on, being ridiculous, being girls, in a trailer, in a dead power plant, with Carhartt. Nobody was the only woman on the job. Nobody was managing how she came across. Nobody had her shoulders up around her ears. A whole team of women, some of them Carhartt's own, and all of us there for women by women.

Women fought for this long before any of us picked up a tool, and most of them never got a day like the one we had. We're standing on their work and we know it. The gear is coming and we can't say much about it yet, but what we can say is that women are being asked what they need and someone is actually building it. Change isn't coming. It's here and we're in it.

Thank you Carhartt.