Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism - Softcover

Faue, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801484650 ISBN 13: 9780801484650

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Eva McDonald Valesh was one of the Progressive Era's foremost labor publicists. Challenging the narrow confines placed on women, Valesh became a successful investigative journalist, organizer, and public speaker for labor reform.

Valesh was a compatriot of the labor leaders of her day and the "right-hand man" of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. Events she covered during her colorful, unconventional reporting career included the Populist revolt, the Cuban crisis of the 1890s, and the 1910 Shirtwaistmakers' uprising. She was described as bright, even "comet-like," by her admirers, but her enemies saw her as "a pest" who took "all the benefit that her sex controls when in argument with a man."

Elizabeth Faue examines the pivotal events that transformed this outspoken daughter of a working-class Scots-Irish family into a national political figure, interweaving the study of one woman's fascinating life with insightful analysis of the changing character of American labor reform during the period from 1880 to 1920. In her journey through the worlds of labor, journalism, and politics, Faue lays bare the underside of social reform and reveals how front-line workers in labor's political culture―reporters, investigators, and lecturers―provoked and informed American society by writing about social wrongs. Compelling, insightful, and at times humorous, Writing the Wrongs is a window on the Progressive Era, on social history and the new journalism, and on women's lives and the meanings of class and gender.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"Elizabeth Faue interprets the life of Eva Valesh with verve and insight. What a story! From the 1880s, when she exposed deplorable working conditions in St. Paul/ Minneapolis, to 1909 when she joined elite women in the National Civic Federation and denounced socialism in the ranks of New York's garment workers, Eva Valesh's career illuminates a little-known trajectory that carried her and others from the political left to the political right in labor reform. "--Kathryn Kish Sklar, author of Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900

"Writing the Wrongs is a beautifully written and analytically sophisticated book about an important, complex topic, one which, when properly unlocked as it is here, opens an array of interrelated issues in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to our comprehension. Elizabeth Faue is wonderfully grounded not only in Valesh's life but also in the work cultures of newspapers and their departments, from the composing room to the journalist's desk."--Peter Rachleff, Macalester College

"I am impressed with what Elizabeth Faue has accomplished. She carefully situates Eva Valesh in each of her venues-the printing trades, the world of garment workers and labor reformers in 1880s Minneapolis, the Populist lecture circuit and electoral machine, the national AFL office, and the life of labor journalists in the early twentieth century. In the process, she engages many of the key questions in women's and labor history: the limits of craft unionism, the rise and fall of Populist radicalism, especially in regard to the effort to build a labor-farmer electoral alliance, the strengths and weaknesses of cross-class alliances in support of women workers' struggles, the plight of women workers who were also mothers and political activists. Well written and researched, the book should find a ready audience among scholars concerned with the lives of working women."--James R. Barrett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

About the Author

Elizabeth Faue is Professor of History at Wayne State University and the author of Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0801484650
• ISBN 13: 9780801484650
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272