In their fury and caprice, disasters reveal often-hidden aspects of the natural world and the social world.
Sociologist Alice Fothergills new book Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood (State University of New York Press), a substantially revised version of her dissertation, tells the story of the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, N.D., through the perspectives of dozens of women who lived through it. The book, which melds academic analysis with the voices of the women Fothergill interviewed, is a compelling unpacking of an enormous event, a once-a-century flood that pushed 60,000 people out of their homes, and a intellectual corrective to past decades of male-dominated disaster study.
I wanted to capture stories that hadnt been told before, says Fothergill, an assistant professor of sociology. Disasters are understudied, generally. What struck me in graduate school was that this is one area of social life where we hadnt done the studies. We see disasters as these random acts of God, as indiscriminate. But they reveal social structures, social relationships. Its a great context to study all the classical sociological themes.
Many of the women Fothergill spoke with had epiphanies in the aftermath of the flood, changing and realizing new strengths. Some changed careers and left abusive relationships. But Fothergill found themes of continuity as well; much of the disaster work, in which members of the community found themselves filling sandbags or volunteering at relief centers, broke on gender lines, with women spending more time cooking and talking care of children than responding in the public sphere.
This is a particularly crucial point for Fothergill, who has also studied volunteerism in the context of the Sept. 11 terrorism strikes in New York. Pitching in, she says, is a major part of coping, so women who cant volunteer because of family responsibilities may be losing an opportunity to feel like they have given something back to the community. A sense of giving something back was particularly important in Grand Forks, Fothergill says, because her research again and again found that many flood victims felt violated by the event itself, which was so damaging to their private space, and deeply stigmatized by the charity they had received in the wake of the disaster.
The stigma of welfare, the ideology that it is someones own fault if they are poor, is so strong that you can be hit by disaster and feel ashamed about needing help, Fothergill says. People told me again and again, I had to swallow my pride and go to Red Cross.
With her first book now in print, Fothergill is working on a variety of disaster-related projects. Shell soon follow up on her previous work with new Sept. 11 volunteers to see if they stayed engaged, and shes considering a project analyzing the publics perception of risks from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
