The great thing about Susan Working is that she has never quite fit in. In the early 1970s, she arrived on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley, and gravitated swiftly to the fringe. Already out as a gay woman, she fell in with feminist and left-wing action groups, and never finished her degree. Searching for work that would extend her social and political convictions (rather than conflict with them) she began driving trucks for an organic food distribution company, delivering goods around the Bay Area. It was hardly a typical choice for a woman at that date, but she enjoyed it thoroughly. Difficult physical work was involved, as she would load and unload several trucks’ worth of boxes a day. This was her first experience of the pleasures of bodily exertion—a girl growing up in California before the days of Title Nine (the law mandating gender-equality in funding for school sports) was unlikely to think of her body in athletic terms—and it left a lasting impact.

Truck driving also brought her into a deepening involvement with politics, specifically those surrounding questions of unionization. Through the 1970s this was a presiding concern of hers. She worked with a grassroots networking organization called Tradeswomen, which sought to recruit and retain women in male-dominated trades; and eventually, bored with the repetition of being a delivery woman, and encouraged by a neighbor who worked in a small local chairmaking shop called Pacific Atlas, she decided to try her hand at production furniture. That’s how Susan Working got into the furniture business—through left-wing politics. Not the dreamy idealistic kind that many people in the studio craft movement subscribe to, but the rough-and-tumble kind, as practiced on the blue collar front lines.

You might expect a woman with this kind of life story to be hard as nails, or at least strident. But not so. She’s as open-minded a person as you’ll find in the craft world. She is interested in almost everything, and rarely makes up her mind for good. (In a recent artist’s statement, plaintively entitled Why Am I Still Making Stuff?, she poses the question: “what if we imagine history as multiple, contradictory, and fluid, and ourselves as permeable and available to this multiplicity?”) She’s not only receptive to new ideas, but comes to them with the enthusiasm of an art school student. As she points out, she may be fifty-four years of age, and in possession of an enviable store of technical woodworking know-how, but in many ways she is still coming into her own.

This is partly a matter of biography. When she began working in that San Francisco chair production shop, she was one of three women and a handful of immigrants, all under the training of an old hand named Charlie, who responded to their efforts in the time-honored shop floor tradition—just enough advice and very little praise. Like the other woodworkers there, she was given responsibility for fabricating all parts from wood selection up to assembly (which was handled by a separate team). Eventually, Working felt confident enough to strike out on her own, trying to find work as a trade furnituremaker, but the casual and not-so-casual sexism she faced in this endeavor was discouraging. She recalls prospective employers telling her they felt they would be doing her a disservice by hiring her, because she would inevitably be the first to be laid off if there were a downturn in business.

At the time when Working joined Pacific Atlas, she also began taking classes in the nearby studio of John and Carolyn Grew-Sheridan, well-known in the Bay Area furnituremaking community. Through them she came to know something of the world of studio craft, and eventually she decided to pursue making one-of-a-kind furniture as a new career. She started her own business in late 1985, first subletting shop space from the Grew-Sheridans and eventually setting up her own studio in Oakland in 1992. Her activities were varied: she made one-of-a-kind pieces and short-run production lines for interior design firms in the Bay Area, along with occasional individual furniture commissions. In 1996, she began teaching classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and swiftly realized that she was a natural instructor, but that without a higher degree she wouldn’t be able to pursue that interest.