ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that volatility in the automotive industry, manifesting in the threat and reality of layoffs, combines with a powerful form of rural industrial masculinity, at the intersection of class and gender, to exclude women from the benefits of the best working-class jobs in rural Ontario communities. Women were permitted access to rural industrial workplaces in the twentieth century in Ontario as long as their presence was restricted to jobs that could be constructed as women's work. Rural women face economic conditions like urban women in many ways, but with added disadvantages such as limited employment opportunities and restricted access to training, transportation and childcare. Charlotte Yates and the author have argued recently that manufacturing continues to be critical to the Canadian economy and labour market, especially in Ontario, despite the prevailing rhetoric of the information economy. One of the interesting things about investment in the Ontario automobile industry is that it is associated with rural location decisions.
