The lunch table was full of people in the same boat: Single mothers who are trainees in the hydraulics and pipe-fitting trades, thrown together and traveling to a place none of them could quite imagine.
“I don’t know how I want to say this,” said Lillian McEwan, who is 31 and a mother of four. “But I trust you guys more than people that I’ve known all my life.”
For a moment, silence. Then it seemed everyone spoke at once. Hands reached out to touch. Heads nodded in understanding.
“We’ve all had our hearts broken,” said Shannon Heidelberg, 36, who is raising a 12-year-old and a 2-year-old. “But there’s no one here who’s going to turn around and hurt you.”
Here in Wyoming, a state with the highest gap in the United States between a woman’s wage and a man’s, and a divorce rate 30 percent above the national average, some women are finding a new way to storm the economic barricades.
They are working with an unusual nonprofit organization, Climb Wyoming, which takes women who have absorbed a few of life’s body blows — bad or absent men, drugs, public assistance and jail are all common stories — and combines free job training with psychological counseling.
But Climb Wyoming’s real core insight is female solidarity — that the group, trained and forged together more like a platoon than a class, will become an anchor of future success. New skills can go only so far in changing a life, the group’s trainers say; sometimes it takes a sisterhood.
“We look for groups that are ready to work together and make a change together,” said Ray Fleming Dinneen, a psychologist and co-founder of Climb Wyoming, which four years ago began training go-it-alone American mothers for male-dominated jobs that rule the state’s industrial-energy economy.
Wyoming has a reputation, well-earned, as a rawboned place where the wind blows hard and a two-hour drive to a one-horse town is not uncommon. Suicide rates and the number of people working more than one job are among the highest in the nation. Methamphetamine use, as in many other rural states, has become a social scourge.
But a deep thread of feminism, Western-style, also runs deep. In frontier days, it was about politics. Women demanded and received rights here that were long in coming elsewhere. They began voting in 1869, half a century before most other American women, and elected the first statewide female officeholder before 1900. In 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross became the nation’s first female governor, elected to complete the term of her late husband.
But somehow cowboy egalitarianism bumped up into the hard reality of economics. Most jobs that Wyoming has created in recent years, as the state’s oil, gas and coal industries have boomed, are tough, dirty, outdoor occupations that pay well and that are dominated by men. Service jobs that most women get have not kept up. Wyoming also ranks near the bottom among states in the proportion of women who have higher education degrees or own businesses.
“To have led in some of those areas and now to have fallen to be the worst in the country in the gender-wage gap, something’s wrong,” said Nancy Freudenthal, the wife of Governor Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat.
Freudenthal, a lawyer who worked on women’s economic issues in private life, kept at it as first lady and is credited with helping Climb Wyoming expand statewide from here in Cheyenne. The group’s $1.8 million budget is about 70 percent public money, mostly federal grants, and 30 percent private donations and foundations.
More than 500 women have gone through the course, about one-third in nontraditional fields like welding and truck driving, two-thirds in office and medical work like phlebotomy.
Many women deemed unprepared for Climb Wyoming’s journey are put on waiting lists and directed toward other programs that could help them get ready, like high school equivalency or drug-treatment programs. That self-selection keeps classes small, attention by counselors intense and success rates high, but it also means that not every woman is immediately helped to a new career. And some probably fall through the cracks.
But for those who are accepted, the level of passion is often intense. Freudenthal was at the Home Depot in Cheyenne a while back, his wife said, when he was spotted by a group of early graduates buying their first tool belts. They told him how their lives had been changed for the better.
