We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by Phyllis Michael Wong

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by Phyllis Michael Wong Sharon Carlson, Professor Emerita Phyllis Michael Wong. We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022. Pp. 196. Images. Glossary. Paperback: $19.95. Phyllis Michael Wong’s We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula offers a glimpse into the lives of working-class women who earned a living by performing piecework in the Gossard Company factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn, Michigan. The H. W. Gossard Company had its origins in Chicago beginning in 1900, with the first plant built in 1904 in nearby Belvidere, Illinois, about 70 miles northwest of Chicago. Other plants followed, including the construction of two in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula— Ishpeming in 1920 and Gwinn in 1947. Wong provides compelling stories based on nearly one hundred interviews with former Gossard employees and their family members. Many of these women were first- or second-generation immigrants with few options available to them other than working as a clerk in a store. The Gossard Company employed women of all ages and life circumstances. While some employees worked to provide extras or earn money for a few years before marriage, most of the women needed employment at the Gossard factories to support their [End Page 134] families. The company paid higher wages than other limited job opportunities available to these women. Gossard’s labor force was consistently 85 to 95 percent female, and over the decades, the more than 1,500 women employed by the company came to be known as “Gossard Girls.” The steady employment and camaraderie described throughout the book demonstrate the value of the company to the employees, their families, and communities. Accounts by former employees who began working at Gossard at age fourteen or fifteen—lying about their age to gain employment—may make their situations seem exploitative, but many of these young women were grateful to find employment and earn desperately needed income for their families. For single and widowed women, as well as married women whose husbands had more precarious employment in the mining industries of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, employment at Gossard not only kept their families afloat but also sustained the economies of Ishpeming and Gwinn. These women also felt a sense of pride in the lingerie they produced, including bras, girdles, and corsets that were sold across the United States by major retailers such as J. C. Penney and Montgomery Ward. The stories raise more questions that fall beyond the scope of this work. There are frequent references to “favoritism” by female and male supervisors. Did any of the female employees experience sexual harassment? There is one reference to employees terminated because of pregnancy, but with a primarily female workforce, this must have happened frequently. Workers were split on whether to organize, and it took seven years before the Ishpeming women voted to unionize. The factory in Gwinn did not vote to unionize. The Ishpeming women went on a sixteen-week strike in 1949, resulting in pay raises and mandatory union membership for nonmanagerial employees. By the 1970s, fashions were changing, and garment work was moving overseas to reduce production costs. Both of the factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn closed in 1976. Wong’s account reminds readers that the history of women’s work outside the home is long and complex. Women worked out of economic necessity and found other benefits and personal enrichment too. She ends the book by encouraging readers to seek out community stories and contribute additional histories. One hopes that readers take up this mission because of the numerous examples in the garment and textile industry alone in Michigan. The corset factories in Kalamazoo and Three Oaks and the silk mills in Belding are just a few examples, not to mention the numerous other industries where women worked. [End Page 135] Sharon Carlson, Professor Emerita Zhang Legacy Collections Center Western Michigan University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan