Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

Eva McDonald

Eva McDonald, c. 1885. (Minnesota History Center)

So March 1888 found McDonald picking her way through treacherous downtown Minneapolis, pursuing her first newspaper story. The late-winter blizzards had stopped, leaving icy ruts and ankle-deep pools of slush. Textile warehouses and flour mills powered by St. Anthony Falls lined the railroad tracks along the Mississippi. Boardinghouses, some cheap and run-down, others more spruce, housed the women who came to town from the cornfields and prairies that rippled over much of the state. They were drawn by the promise of regular wages and the excitement of city life. Like them, McDonald was increasingly interested in standing at the center of things.

At the Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman clothing factory, one of her first stops, McDonald took the freight elevator up. A little over a year before, Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx, had visited town to lecture on socialism. Facing a packed crowd, she used female Minneapolis factory workers as an example of those abused under the current system. Some earned $1.50 to $2 a week for ten-hour days, she said. The audience and the newspapers scoffed at her claims—wages couldn’t possibly be that low—but McDonald herself knew stories about mistreatment at factories throughout the city, and Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman in particular. In January, an exposed sewing machine mechanism installed in the floor of Shotwell caught a woman’s skirt and dragged her to the ground, causing permanent injury.

Wage details could be hard to come by—some companies posted guards at the factory doors or enlisted supervisors to eavesdrop on those who might be complaining to reporters or union representatives. The women themselves were reluctant to talk, afraid of being fired or embarrassed by their meager pay. Going undercover was a way in, and McDonald adopted the pseudonym “Eva Gay.”

At Shotwell, more than two hundred women hunched over sewing machines at long tables, making overalls, jeans, and wool pants—sturdy clothing for miners and farmers. Neat paint on the walls couldn’t hide the sewage smell or sweltering temperature of the overheated room. A woman with a German accent explained that the water rarely ran in the toilets, and they couldn’t open the windows because of the cold. When McDonald, feeling woozy, asked if it made the girls sick, the woman said every day some of them requested a pass from the foreman to step outside for fresh air. McDonald asked why they couldn’t go out without permission and got a suspicious glance in return.

“Don’t know. What do you want to know for anyhow?”

McDonald moved on.

As she conducted more sly interviews, McDonald found wages even lower than she expected. A girl sweating over a pile of calico shirts earned 3.5 cents per shirt—the ones the boss didn’t rip up as subpar—about $1.75 a week at a time when a week’s lodging alone might cost $3. Women were paid as though their income was a bonus, supplementing that of husband or father, but many provided their family’s only money and had younger siblings to support. And wages were only going down. Cuts had come in January, and the company threatened more. A girl sewing overalls who used to receive 12 cents per pair now earned only 7.

But more than the smell and the wages and the long hours, the women at Shotwell objected to their boss. The superintendent, H. B. Woodward, begrudged them pleasure and seemed to relish their humiliation. If he met an employee in the street wearing a nice dress, he’d sneer that she imagined herself a lady. Clearly, she earned too much, he’d say, and suggest cutting her wages even more. Violent, he threatened to kick one employee down the stairs. When men in other departments leered at the women, Woodward ignored it. He hired one candidate to work as a supervisor, then never gave her the promotion. The woman would say later, hinting at what couldn’t be stated outright, that she wasn’t sorry “when she learned some of the qualifications necessary outside of skill.”

“If your foreman insults you, why don’t you complain to the proprietors?” McDonald asked.

“What’s the use?” another replied. “If we don’t want to put up with the way we’re treated, we are told we can leave. They can find plenty glad to get a chance to work at any wages.”

The mid- to late 1880s were a charged time for American labor. In 1885, the Knights of Labor, the first national industrial union in the United States, had established its power by striking and forcing railway companies to rescind a wage cut. The organization threatened another strike in the fall when railroads planned to lay off union activists, and the company backed down again. These high-profile successes led to Knights of Labor’s membership increasing from 104,000 in July 1885 to 703,000 the next year. Unlike the competing organization, the American Federation of Labor, the Knights admitted women. They, and other unions, were gaining momentum. But in spring 1886 in Chicago, a nationwide protest in favor of the eight-hour workday spilled out of control. On May 3, police shot strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day, at a rally in Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb, and, in the rioting afterward, eleven people were killed, including seven police officers. Known anarchists, several of whom had been elsewhere at the time, were rounded up, tried with little evidence, and hanged.

In some minds, unions became associated with criminality, dynamite, and explosions, even if they hadn’t been directly responsible for the Haymarket violence. In light of the bad publicity following the anarchists’ trial, Knights of Labor membership declined. Union issues, like the eight-hour day and the promotion of strikes, became increasingly polarized. And the question of women in factories performing physically demanding work became a particular focus. In the fall of 1886, a year and a half before McDonald became Eva Gay, Helen Stuart Campbell’s series for the New-York Tribune, “Prisoners of Poverty,” had detailed the lives of garment industry workers, paid by