With a sheen of soot and sweat clinging to their faces, hair and navy blue work clothes, the exhausted firefighters gather in front of the TV as the news comes on. Most cradle cups of coffee as if they were votive candles; the smokers drag deeply on their cigarettes.

There’s a heavy silence in the firehouse even though it’s the 6 p.m. shift change, usually a time of boisterous greetings, raucous jokes and dinner prep. This evening, however, there are no diversions. All eyes are fixed on the TV screen, except for those of one man, who sits at a long, central table and stares down, unseeing, at a newspaper.

The video rolls, and the firefighters of Engine 60 and Ladder 19 watch the replay of the fire they helped battle all afternoon. Fire Commissioner Harold B. Hairston appears on camera, live, to tell the city what this gathering already knows: the names of the two firefighters who died in the blaze, Vencent Acey and John Redmond. Most in this station knew the two men, worked with them, attended classes with them, respected them. Amid the somber, navy-clad group in front of the TV, the meaning of the Philadelphia Fire Department axiom “We’re all blue here” comes through powerfully.

Coleen Green lights a cigarette. For the first time in the two years since she joined the department, firefighters have died. And they died on her shift, while she and her platoon members, called in on second alarm, worked hard to quell the fire in the old Gothic-style Rising Sun Baptist Church at 12th and Fitzwater Streets on Jan. 28.

All the rigorous training sessions about job dangers, all the harrowing stories told by 20-year men, couldn’t prepare Green for this moment. From swearing-in onward, she has known that there would come a time when she would go home as she will tonight—wet, cold, tired and emotionally drained— to face the worries of her family, her 8-year-old daughter’s plaintive “That’s why I didn’t want you to be a fireperson,” and her own feelings of grief, frustration and vulnerability. Tonight, Coleen Green feels what every firefighter in the city feels.

Tomorrow, she will climb a long ladder and help hang the black bunting of mourning above the firehouse doors. Then she will go inside with the others in her platoon and wait, once again, for the bells to ring.

Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker: Time was when only men held the jobs enumerated in the nursery rhyme. Now, women fill all those positions, as well as doctor, lawyer and Indian chief. It’s no longer surprising to see a woman carrying the mail or wearing a police uniform or working a construction site. Gender integration has come to many tasks once thought suitable only for men. Some of those jobs required physical strength or mechanical skill, qualifications once assumed to be beyond women. Such prejudices have now died or been laid aside under social and legal pressures.

In Philadelphia, though—especially in Philadelphia—there’s one job from which women have long been barred: the hands-on work of putting out fires. Total exclusion ended in 1985, when three women were hired as city firefighters. But virtual exclusion continues. Female firefighters here represent only 0.2 percent of the total, while the Police Department is 17 percent female. Among the 10 largest U.S. cities, and many smaller ones as well, Philadelphia is dead last in both the number of women firefighters and in the percentage of the force they represent.

The reasons for this are knotty, ranging from skepticism about their physical abilities to biased recruiting to veterans-preference rules to a professional culture that is sometimes female-unfriendly. Yet other cities have faced those same complexities and at least modestly integrated their departments by gender. Los Angeles has 98 women in a 3,000-member fire crew, including an inspector and three captains. Detroit has five times as many women as Philadelphia, on a force that is 43 percent smaller. Atlanta has a female battalion chief; Minneapolis, an all-woman engine company.

The worry whether women can “pull their weight” comes up again and again. “I don’t mind if there are female firefighters, as long as they can do the job,” says a man on a ladder company who, like some other Philadelphia firemen, asked not to be named. “I went to school with a girl who could not raise a 16-foot ladder. If my life depended on her and she couldn’t raise a 16-foot ladder, then I’m toast.” The men who voice such concerns agree that they know male firefighters who either don’t or can’t pull their weight.

There are men, though, who do only “see blue” when they look at another firefighter. One is Lt. Thomas Glennon, officer of Coleen Green’s engine company. Glennon was raised in department tradition: His father was a Philadelphia firefighter back when hoses weighed 80 pounds and fittings were solid brass. Of Green , he says, “She’s very aggressive. Coleen only had a year on before she began driving [the engine]. That’s above the median. She does everything that each of the firefighters on the platoon does.” Glennon believes resistance to women, which he attributes to the department’s “clannish” nature, is lessening.

“At one time,” he says, “if you weren’t Irish, you’d have a tough time being accepted on this job.”

That’s one hurdle Coleen Green won’t have to jump.

The woman from City Personnel was blunt: Your hair will have to be shorter, you can’t wear earrings, you may have to use the same bathroom as the men, and you’ll have to sleep in the same room with them. Coleen Green wasn’t worried. “Having three brothers helped a lot,” she says. “I was the only girl all my life growing up, so it wasn’t going to be a real drastic change.”

She had been a nurse’s assistant; becoming a firefighter signified a step up in salary, benefits and job security. And it was more than that: Following rocky teen years in which she dropped out of high school, worked at a doughnut shop, married at 18, had a child at 19, and split up with her husband the next year, she had resolved to get her life back on track. She passed her high-school equivalency test, took extra night classes and learned all about her obstetrical and critical-care hospital duties. “I realized how much I could achieve,” Green says. She thought of getting her R.N. certification, but that “seemed so far off.” Then she heard the firefighters’ test was being held.

Green thought that if she passed the test and achieved a good ranking, she would become a paramedic. (Paramedics, who also do dangerous work, are part of the department, though they are not firefighters.) Green spent hours studying in the Torresdale rowhouse she shares with her second husband and now three children, then took the test at Northeast High.

She scored 94 out of 100—not enough to get into the academy, since veterans of military service are given an extra 10 points. Then Green learned that as the wife of a disabled veteran (her husband lost sight in one eye while serving), she was eligible to use his veteran’s points. Bingo! Ten plus 94 gave her a score of 104. She would be the first—and is still the only—nonveteran female hired as a firefighter.

There was a physical exam to pass as well. The department had long ago discarded the requirement that firefighters be at least 5-foot-6, so Green, at 5-foot-2, was acceptable (a male cadet in her class was shorter). She was told she’d have to be able to lift heavy objects. “They never said what ‘heavy’ was,” she says. “But I walked in there with the self-confidence that I had been lifting patients for years.”

In February 1992, at age 28, she became one of two women attending the 11-week program. The would-be paramedic then made a major career adjustment. When fire training began, she discovered, “I really liked it. I was charged.” From that point on, Coleen Green was determined to be a firefighter.

Although it’s rare for a cadet to wash out at the academy, female trainees often have to work hard to develop their physical skills and to deflect the flaw-seeking gaze of some male cadets. Green and Cathy Ramer, the other woman cadet, were assigned to separate class platoons. “We would meet in the ladies’ room to clean up at the end of the day and compare how it went,” Green says.

Some days, it didn’t go so well. There was the time a male trainee told Green that he didn’t think she belonged in the department. “I told him, I want to be here. I’m sorry you don’t feel that way.’” His comments hurt, but she was prepared for them. “If I went in with the illusions that I was going to be totally accepted, they would have been crashed to the ground.”

Most cadets’ biggest worry is the academy proficiency test, taken several times during training. For it, they wear their bunker gear (boots, helmet and specially treated black coat and pants). With their faces covered by a breathing-pack mask, they have to roll a 50-foot hose line, shoulder it, walk to the fire tower (a three-story training building), put down the hose, pick up another one, and climb to a room where a hose hangs out a window. Then they have to pull it up into the building and let it back down again. Then on to another room, where, using a sledgehammer, they have to knock a tire mounted on a rim over to a wall. Then they have to descend the stairs, pick up a 16-foot ladder, position it on the wall and take it down. Next: retrieve a long hooked pole (for tearing down ceilings), extend and lower it 15 times. Finally, they heft and haul more hose.

Cadets must finish the exercise before their 15-minute breathing packs run out. If it does, they have to start over. Green’s pack ran out once during her training. She often spent lunchtime learning to move the intractable tire.

Near the end of training, the rookies received their assignments. Green’s posting was Engine 60 in Grays Ferry (engine companies provide hoses, water and first-response medical aid). Engine 60 also serves as the city’s hazardous materials (haz-mat) unit. The assignment excited her. Going there meant not only absorbing more firefighting essentials, but learning haz-mat details as well: chemical interactions, special equipment and decontamination procedures.

In a department where gossip moves faster than memos, everyone at Engine 60 and Ladder 19 (which shares the station) knew they were getting a woman. They heard she was going to the B platoon (all firehouses operate on a four-platoon, or shift, system), so the men on the A began razzing the other team. “It was like, ‘We’re the men—you’re gonna get the woman,’” says Joseph McComeskey, an A platoon member who is now one of Green’s good friends. Then the information switched: The new firefighter would be going to the A shift. “So we got busted back,” McComeskey says.

Coleen Green heard that A platoon was coming to the academy for special training. She didn’t know about the firehouse banter her appointment had stirred, but she was nervous anyway about meeting the men she would soon be working with. As she left a classroom one day, she was stopped in the hallway.

“Are you going to 60?” the unfamiliar face demanded.

“Yes,” she said.

The burly man fixed her with a hard stare. “You’d better be able to drag me out of a burning building,” he said.

Heart pounding, the 128-pound Green replied, “It might not be the most graceful exit, but you’ll get out.”

She thought about that encounter, worriedly, through the rest of training. Several days after starting at her new station, the same firefighter came up to her and said, “You know I was only kidding, don’t you?”

Welcome to the department, Coleen.

When people ask Philadelphia’s female firefighters about their work, the recurring questions are Where do you sleep? Where do you go to the bathroom? and (for the married ones) what does your husband think about your job? Those queries reflect the fact that firefighting is more than lugging hose, raising ladders, getting stinking dirty, and risking your life to save someone else’s. It also requires co-workers to live together.

Platoon members spend four days a week with each other, in two 10-hour day shifts and two 14-hour night shifts. When not out on emergencies, firefighters stay in the firehouse, living like family. They eat together, sleep together, watch TV together and pool money to buy supplies, food, newspapers, video games. They do house chores, from mopping floors to washing dishes, and work duties, like cleaning vehicles and monitoring the fire radio. They hear each other’s telephone conversations. They share a bathroom. They know who snores.

This part of the job is so important that cadets are instructed in the cardinal rules of firehouse life: Be the first to arrive at the station and the last to leave. Be the first to do housekeeping chores and the last to stop. Never make the person who paid for a meal come looking for you for money. Make the bed of the first one on watch.

The bunkroom, where firefighters sleep fully clothed on lumpy army-type beds, offers night-shift workers a place to rest when alarm bells aren’t ringing (they often go off several times a night). Some men accept that lack of privacy in a bunkroom means having female co-workers sleep next to them. Others, especially some married men, worry about the appearance of impropriety. When Leslie Turner, a 27-year-old single woman, arrived at her station at Fourth and Arch Streets, “they gave me a bed far away from them.”

Bathrooms create greater discomfort. Each firehouse has one big bathroom, complete with several sinks, urinals, stall toilets and showers (the last are virtually never used). There’s also a single bathroom, usually meant for officers. The door to the main bathroom is supposed to close and lock, but, as Coleen Green says, “We’re talking city property here.”

So most firefighters (women and men) knock before entering, a system that is not always perfect. Turner always knocked. Then one day, after a tough fire, she just walked in, right past two men standing at urinals. “I was tired,” she says. “I didn’t even notice them.” After that, they asked her to use the small bathroom. When one man told Green he couldn’t cope with her using the common bathroom, she also switched and now shares the officers’ facility.

There’s a risk, though, in that segregation. Dorothy Covey, an eight-year veteran, was banned from filling in on one battalion chief’s division because he said the bathrooms didn’t lock. Years ago, when African Americans first arrived at firehouses, some whites didn’t want to share beds, bathrooms or kitchens with them. Even though some gender segregation may not be as hateful, it makes it easier to form an all-male barrier to exclude women from the team. “There have been Jim Crow-type experiences, where men refused to talk with women or eat with women,” says Brenda Berkman, a Brooklyn firefighter and past board president of Women in the Fire Service, which is based in Madison, Wis.

In his office, Fire Commissioner Harold B. Hairston steers visitors over to an 1850 engraving of a chaotic fire scene, with dozens of men, horses and water wagons everywhere. “Now,” he says, “find the black guy.” There is an African American in the picture, helping extinguish the flames, but it’s easy to miss him: He’s down near the bottom.

During the 19th century and a good chunk of the 20th, blacks were excluded from firefighting. Integration didn’t come easily. “I can tell you stories about ‘black beds’ and special cups,” says Hairston, who is African American and a 29-year department veteran. In the early days, he adds, no one would have imagined a black officer, let alone a fire commissioner. “Someday,” he says, “there’ll be a woman sitting here, and she’ll be sitting here because she deserves to sit here. I don’t see any reason for it not to happen.”

Firehouse culture puts new firefighters through a stream of practical jokes, such as night-watch phone calls telling the new person to test the lights and bells (when she or he does, and wakes up everyone else, the goat gets mocked for days). There’s mild hazing (Vaseline-coated phone receivers, fire tools hidden in bedclothes) and endless teasing about everything from job performance to sexual performance.

The humor directed at females often centers on gender. Coleen Green heard “woman driver” jokes after she dinged the engine while navigating a narrow South Philadelphia street. On a crew that watches four hours of TV fishing programs on Saturday mornings, she was twitted when she brought in needlepoint projects. Then there was a news photo of Lorena Bobbitt’s knife that turned up as a bookmark in material she was studying for a promotion test. And, in keeping with a station tradition of humorous birthday cakes, the men had Green’s cake decorated with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

However, there’s a difference between firehouse foolery and hostile aggression. In New York City, female firefighters have had their car tires slashed, their equipment tampered with and their lives threatened—apparently by male firefighters. Anti-female anger in Philadelphia’s department has never gotten close to that, but some men have shown signs that they feel threatened by the presence of women.

Once, when watching a soap opera in the kitchen of the station where she was assigned, Diane Jackson Mercer became the target of one man’s nasty comments about women and soaps. When she disagreed with him, he shot back, “Yeah, that’s why you joined the Fire Department—because you want to be a man.”

Most of her platoon witnessed the conversation. Mercer just walked out of the room. “It hurt me,” she says. “I didn’t join the Fire Department because I wanted to be a man. I joined because it was a challenging job, the pay was great, and I could handle it.”

Coleen Green doesn’t like to talk about the negative experiences, which she says don’t reflect on how most male firefighters have treated her. But her friend Joe McComeskey remembers this incident: They were at a fire with other engine and ladder companies. Their officer told them to wait near the trucks. Hearing that command, a male firefighter from another station said, “She should have stayed inside and made coffee.”

“Coleen’s face went red,” McComeskey says. “…She was stompin’ around. Her feathers were up.” He shakes his head. “She has to prove herself at every company.”

Commissioner Hairston believes his department should better reflect the community, and that means recruiting more women. He believes that women who want to can become excellent firefighters. “A lot of times, we have little rules that prevent people from doing things…[such as], ‘Can this person move a 300-pound guy?’ Well, how many 300-pound guys can move a 300-pound guy? You set a reasonable standard that everybody ought to be able to perform.”

Female firefighters agree. “What we might lack in upper-body strength, we make up in technique,” says Leslie Turner, who had trouble raising ladders until she learned the right way. “When I got my technique down, then I was slamming those ladders up like crazy.” Fighting a nighttime blaze once, she fell through a factory roof. She held onto her hose line, found a secure beam and wiggled onto it. “Thank God for hips!” she says.

Gear and equipment have become lighter in recent years, so some departments have eliminated strength tests in favor of task assessments. Houston tested 460 firefighters to set standards. The new criteria were not “developed to help women get into the department,” says Houston’s John Holleman, “but that has been one of the side benefits.” Los Angeles offers weight training and a paid tutorial to prepare women for the fire academy and a required physical abilities test. “Women in fire service are still pioneers,” says Capt. Steve Ruda of the Los Angeles Fire Department. “When their male counterparts realize they are meeting the same standards, it makes it easier for males to accept them.”

One creature was unabashedly vocal about preserving the firehouse at 31st and Grays Ferry Avenue as an all-male zone: Bleve, the station dog, an aging, overindulged Dalmatian the shape of a child’s wagon. (Her name’s a haz-mat acronym for boiling liquid escaping vapor explosion.) “She barked at me for the first three weeks I was here,” Coleen Green says. The two are now pals, especially since this year Green manages the fund that keeps Bleve in biscuits.

In the two years Green has been with Engine 60, she’s earned a reputation for diligence and determination. That esteem began as it does for all rookies. A male firefighter explains: “How you get rated is by what you do on your first job. When it comes to going in, if you got the tip [of the fire hose] and if you don’t do it, you ain’t worth nothing.”

Green had to wait only a week. The weather was wiltingly hot when the call came in: a “good job” (a big blaze) in the upper rear bedroom of a rowhouse. Her platoon was “first in,” so they had the initial chance to stop the fire. Green was told to take the hose tip. “I think the officer had the insight to know if I do well with the tip, it would help my acceptance,” she says.

She was first up the inside stairs (the residents had evacuated). There were flames ahead in the hallway and bedroom. Part of the floor had fallen through to the kitchen and was burning. Green passed the tip down to the firefighters on the first floor to extinguish that blaze, then took it back and knocked out the fire ahead of her as she moved to the back of the house. When the flames were out, “I was hot and I was beat, but everybody else was pretty hot and beat, too. They all said, ‘Good job.’ It was a team spirit kind of thing.”

And here’s what the men were thinking: “If she would have dropped it, you would have heard about it from here to there,” Joe McComeskey says, sweeping his hand beyond the firehouse to indicate the entire eastern part of the city. “Everybody asked, ‘How did she do? Did she back out?’” When they realized she had faced the fire, “That’s when we said, ‘OK, Coleen, you’re all right.’”

“She had to prove more than a guy,” he adds. “And I’ve seen guys black out on their first job.”

The jobs aren’t always exciting: smoky blazes in dumpsters, alarm-system calls, haz-mat leaks in laboratories, acrid car fires. And on one of the worst ice-clogged, snowbound days this year, she delivered her first baby. But real fires break out regularly, and when they’re over, Coleen Green is part of the exultant crew back at the station, happy as a box full of puppies. That chest-bursting feeling is part of what firefighters love about what they do. “I’m really having a good time,” she says.

Then comes the rare day when the worst happens and the post-fire gathering is grim. Green would never mention what she did at the fatal Rising Sun church fire. More firehouse rules: There is no “I” or “me” in firefighting. She scowls when prodded for details of a role she sees as no different from what any other firefighter did, or would have done.

Engine 60 arrived on second alarm. Green, Lt. Glennon and another firefighter unloaded ten 50-foot hoses and hooked them up. The other firefighter was holding the deluge gun, but there was no water. Green and he dragged it near the church, then she went to consult their officer.

She came upon one injured firefighter sitting against a fence. He told her he was OK, but others were still inside. She could see a group of firefighters trying to get one of the trapped men out the church’s narrow windows, so she went to help. He was a big guy whose breathing pack had run out, and he was becoming disoriented. The firefighters were trying to get him to move toward a space they had opened; in his confusion, he started going the wrong way. Green stuck herself through one of the skinny windows, grabbed him and propelled him in the right direction. “That’s all I did,” she says. She then went to help with the deluge gun. “I never really got to see him successfully rescued.”

He was. It was what any firefighter would have done.