This image and those on the two following slides focus on Doris McKinney and her family. They are part of a series of portraits taken by photographer Milton Rogovin of steelworkers in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York, beginning in the 1970s. Doris McKinney was a single, divorced mother hired by Republic Steel in 1977. She was referred by a work incentive program attached to the family welfare benefits she was receiving at the time. McKinney was part of a wave of female hires that resulted from an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruling that identified hiring discrimination at a number of steel mills and required affirmation action hiring (of women, minorities, and protected classes of people) to address it.
Rogovin also worked with an oral historian, Michael Frisch, to record the worker’s explanations about their work and other stories, material compiled with the photos in a book called Portraits in Steel. McKinney said of this picture: “Most of my friends that saw this picture, they'd say I look like I was from outer space. But at the time, I was working at Republic Steel and I was a burner, so this is my burning outfit, because you have to have long sleeves, because the sparks are flying, shields on the shoes, you know. And this is a burning torch, and what it is, is these are pieces of steel that haven't met up to the specifications, they're quite long, so they burn them in sections so that the crane can pick them up, and they'd be placed in boxcars and shipped out. I think they melt them back down. And there's the burning goggles, and the reason the hat's sitting so high is I guess because I had my hair rolled up [laughs]. Because you know when you get off from work, you always still try to be a lady, even though you’re working in a man’s job, doing a man’s job, when you take off all of this here, you still want to be a woman.”
Milton Rogovin, Doris McKinney, Republic Steel, 1978, gelatin silver print, Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy, 2011.145.55