In a time when women’s roles were often confined to the home, a group of determined women stepped out of the shadows to make their mark on history. The award-winning book, We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, documents six decades (1920-1976) when rural women supported their families, sustained downtown male-dominated businesses, and stuck up for their rights on the picket line.
Photo from Michigan State University Press
This book offers a rare ground-level view of two undergarment factories in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U. P.) where women assembly line workers sewed bras and corsets for the H. W. Gossard Company, an international clothing company. Invisible no longer, the collective voices from 100 factory workers and their families stitch together diverse experiences and perspectives of these remarkable women.
The moniker “Gossard Girls” has its roots as early as the 1940’s, according to Laila Poutanen, who worked in two undergarment factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn. Gossard Girl was a term often used by workers (women and men) in conversations among themselves and in conversations within and outside of their communities. The phrase conveyed an identity to and connections between hundreds of diverse women workers: single, underage, married, divorced, immigrant, and second generation.
“Those were different times compared to today,” reflected 81-year-old Nancy Valenzio, former Gossard Girl and assembly line worker (also known as piece rate worker). Generally speaking, until the late 1960’s a husband, not a wife, was expected to provide for the family. Marriage, housekeeping, and rearing children were women’s primary avocations. However, Nancy, a single mother, represents a group of women who never married.
In 1947, Nancy, the middle sibling of 9 children, quit high school and left Republic, a small iron ore mining town. She moved to the bustling city of Ishpeming, where she joined two sisters at the H. W. Gossard factory. With few employment options for women in small cities and towns, Nancy was pleased to be one of 600 women working in one of the largest Gossard undergarment factories in the Midwest. “Everybody was going there [Ishpeming] at that time for a job.” She would work in at least eight different areas during her 25-year tenure: bar tacking straps, attaching bows, attaching bar tack tiny bows, burning lace with a hot wire for decoration, packaging bows, folding and boxing bras for shipping, elastic binding, and elastic tabs. At the end of her workday, the piece rate worker tallied up her “units” and converted the units into money. Nancy added, “[o]f course, they [office payroll workers] checked to see if you made a mistake.”
Nancy exemplified important abilities—such as flexibility, resilience, and diligence-- in an assembly worker. With few options for single women in small cities and towns, Nancy was pleased she had a job. She would be even more pleased, when after recovering from a car accident and giving birth to her daughter, the Gossard Company rehired her. In those days, having a child outside of marriage was not discussed. “I suppose we were lucky [the factory] was there. I don’t know what else I would have done… But you know, they had health benefits and that was a good thing. They had free mid-day meals in the basement of the factory for a period of time. That was great. They had a health benefit and a small pension based on a sliding scale of our years of work. We must have got those from the union.” When multiple factors caused the Gossard Company to close its factory in Ishpeming, the single mother was upset. “It was very scary. Well…what am I going to do now? For a whole year, I didn’t work. We got some unemployment and some TRA or something (Trade Readjustment Act)... Everybody got money in one lump sum.” Nancy would find other employment, but more importantly, in 1984, she completed requirements for her high school degree --- a point of pride for her, her daughter, and granddaughter.
Cecilia Kangas’s story represents women whose family economic situations forced them to lie about their ages. In some cases these underage workers, not their parents, chose to help their families. “I wanted to help my family,” said 99-year-old Cecilia Marra Rovedo Kangas, the third oldest of nine children. Her parents were one of many Italian immigrants who found work in the U.P.’s mining and logging industries in the early decades. Her father, a shift boss, worked in the mines; her mother “took in roomers” to supplement the family’s income. The oldest daughter in her family, Cecilia said, “I was mama’s helper with all the babies and everything else. In them days, boys were supposed to be educated not girls.” Cecilia completed 8th grade and then refused to attend high school, saying to her mother, “You can’t send me to college. Why should I go to high school? I might as well try to get a job somewhere.”
The Marra family lived behind Ishpeming’s Gossard factory --- a convenient location when the 14-year-old lied about her age in 1925. Her first day was memorable. She learned to thread an industrial electric Singer sewing machine. “They showed you how to the thread the machine, and they gave you some scraps to sew on the machine. I was doing that for a while when I said to the girl next to me, ‘When is that noise going to stop?’ She said, “What noise?”
Young Cecilia would have to adjust to the constant noise from hundreds of industrial machines. She did, and for the next four decades, she would be known as a ‘top-notch’ operator. Nonetheless, many years later, Cecilia blamed her hearing loss on the constant drone from industrial machines. Being known as a ‘top-notch’ operator was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because she exceeded the company’s minimum, and a curse because skilled workers like her were tapped to work on sale samples for brassieres and corsets. Cecilia’s daughter, Gina, said her mother “worked on those because she was very good, but she hated it, because she earned less money. She had to take more time.”
The factory was, according to Cecilia, “a hard-working place where the girl sitting next to you was trying to beat you to see if she could make more money than you.” And yet, this hard-working place felt like a family during times of crisis. When Cecilia’s first husband Amelino died in a drowning accident, their dream to send their only child to the University of Michigan was in jeopardy. Cecilia’s Gossard family stepped up. She never forgot the generosity of 140 women, those in her seaming department, but also many from other departments. The typed list bears Cecilia’s handwritten note: “The Gossard Girls gave me a gift.”
When the factory closed in 1976, the Gossard family stayed close. Cecilia joined the Golden Age(ers) Club, a social and philanthropic group of over 100 former workers. Members met in restaurants, church halls, or other public places. President Rose Collick and Treasurer/Secretary Evelyn Corkin convened the meetings, which began with a flag salute followed by the singing of God Bless America. “We had lunch,” recalled Rose, “usually pasties [pronounced pass-tees] from Ralph’s Italian Deli on Highway 41 or Tino’s, a family restaurant in Negaunee.” A pasty is a hand-held meat and vegetable pie brought by Cornish immigrants who worked in the U.P. mines. Cecilia added, “and we played friendly games of bingo, where winners won 25 cents. For Cecilia, the gatherings were opportunities “to listen to each other.” Making money and listening to each other was what Gossard Girls had been doing for over half a century.
“We took charge in a small town… It’s a woman’s world now,” observed 82-year-old Elaine Peterson, one of many Gossard Girls in Ishpeming’s factory who went on strike in April 1949. During the four-month strike, she worked as a shift captain supervising pickets, while also serving on the unions’ grievance committee.
Beginning in 1941, the arduous journey to a union shop required buckets of courage, resilience, and determination to traverse roads paved with potholes, secrecy, and fear. However, economics, not social justice issues, were what drew Elaine to the best paying job for women in Ishpeming in 1944. In one year, the 18-year-old machine operator saved every penny to buy a Model A (a car mass produced by the Ford Motor Company in the 1920’s and 1930’s) for $100 cash, while also paying room and board at home. Though she enjoyed making money, she became increasingly troubled by some department heads who favored one operator over another. This favoritism or preferential treatment created “a lot of turmoil amongst the girls themselves,” said Elaine, but “not much was done because there was no one to back them up or verify it.”
Frustrated, Elaine secretly signed a union card in 1946 in support of assembly line/piece rate workers joining the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). “Until the day you went out on strike, you did not know who was for the union. You didn’t know who to trust…If [management] ever found out, [pro-union operators] were either given very poor bundles or let go,” she recalled. Elaine didn’t tell her family; neither did she tell her closest friend, a machine operator. Four years later, the Model A, a symbol of Elaine’s economic power, transported Gossard picketers to Gwinn’s non-union factory, 26 miles from Ishpeming.
Elaine also served on the union’s nine-member negotiating committee, a rare opportunity for the committee’s youngest member to help draft guidelines, procedures, and responsibilities. Years later, Elaine reflected on what she learned. First, “never give in, be stubborn, make your point, and stick to it.” Second, “when you are all unionized, you have a lot going for you.” Under the guidance of two strong female leaders (Geraldine DeFant and Ruth Craine), Elaine and several hundred pro-union Gossard workers never gave in. The camaraderie of women workers supporting each other kept pickets going. The ILGWU provided daily free meals for picketers and qualifying families. Pickets earned $10-15 per week for their work, and the union provided educational classes. The Gossard Company settled four months later (August 1949), agreeing to, among other things, a union shop. Ishpeming’s Gossard strike in 1949 is historic in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. According to Elaine, during the 1940’s “there weren’t many women who stuck up for themselves.” Furthermore, their collective efforts 85 years ago are significant within the history of our national women’s movement during the 1960’s.
Additionally, stories about Gossard’s male workers highlight what it was like to work in a women-dominated environment. Men comprised 10% to 15% of the workforce, largely working as cloth layers, cutters, or sewing machine mechanics. Heartwarming stories from children of former workers illuminate a special time in their lives. Fourth grader Michael Morissette, spent afternoons at Ishpeming’s factory for a year. Joan Luoma and her brother played games on the first floor. Jerry Harju’s memories center around his “stay-at-home-dad.”
We Kept Our Towns Going offers a rare lens into the world of factory work from the perspectives of assembly line workers, as opposed to perspectives from management. These jobs were critical to the family when a husband got hurt in the mines, got sick, or died. Additionally, in those families where the income was supplemental, the children, especially daughters, could attend college, teach, or become nurses. Invisible no longer, women’s stories show women empowered economically, politically, and socially.
We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is available for purchase here.
