We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Phyllis Michael Wong joined her husband at Northern Michigan University when he was president from 2004 to 2012. In Marquette, on the shores of Lake Superior, she learned about the “Gossard Girls,” women of all ages who worked for H. W. Gossard Company in the Upper Peninsula (UP). Teenage girls, young single women, married mothers, and widows sewed apparel, mostly undergarments, and processed paperwork from 1920 until both Michigan factories closed in 1976. Wong's interest started with a 2007 club project to celebrate “women who made a difference.” She researched Geraldine Gordon Defant, an organizer with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) who was at Gossard in the 1940s.In 2010, Wong spoke at a Women's History Month event where several former Gossard workers shared differing perspectives on the same past situations. Wong realized she could gather their “collective voices” and artifacts and help create an archive at the local history center. Over several years, she conducted ninety-six oral histories and facilitated the making of a memorial quilt. She also pursued the publication of We Kept Our Towns Going, which serves as an homage to the women's contributions to the UP and as an effort to broaden labor history. Wong emphasizes that women took pride in their skills, income, and economic role in a region that usually highlights its mining history. She also wants to expand the history of women in the textile and apparel industry to include these workers in the UP, who have not often been part of labor studies.With these as goals, the book reads like a work of mainstream public history—a preservation of the women's oral histories and reportage from local newspapers that are Wong's core primary sources. It is not a scholarly monograph that attempts to place this history into conversation with particular historians or frameworks; rather, it is an endeavor to claim a presence and value for the Gossard Girls. As a labor historian with interests in gender theory, racialized class formation, intersectionality, organizing strategy, and global trade, I wanted more. As an educator who has spent as much of my career outside the university as in it, I admired the book's desire to open space for women's voices, share locally grounded stories, and expose more readers to women's labor history.The book begins with a foreword by Lisa Fine, professor of twentieth-century labor history at Michigan State University. It provides a succinct scholarly framing that places the book with Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach's Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (1978) and Jacqueline Dowd Hall et al.’s Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987). All three rely on oral histories and center workers and their conceptualizations of their daily lives. The foreword is also the only part of the book with notes. The author and publisher made the decision to simply list sources at the back, most likely to appeal to nonacademic readers and save cost and time. It is unfortunate that they were not able to create a notes section that listed sources used by page numbers, but we know the realities of current press budgets. The book also does not cite where the oral histories are located. I searched online and found thirty-six listed under “Gossard Interviews” in the John M. Longyear Archives at the Marquette Regional History Center. The archivist believes Wong most likely kept the other sixty transcripts because those women did not give her permission to make them fully public.We Kept Our Towns Going then advances through an introduction and nine chapters before closing with a helpful glossary, sources, and index. Each chapter covers a set span of history, starting in the 1920s and culminating with contemporary memories of the factories and Gossard Girls. Each chapter concludes with a brief biographical summary of two or three women who contributed oral histories. These honor the women workers, speak to general readers, and share personal life details that a regional labor history cannot include. The book's specific information about the towns of Ishpeming and Gwinn, illumination of the thoughts and decisions of women workers, and counternarrative to the traditional history of the Iron Range are valuable contributions to labor history. The book offers new primary sources and ideas for labor historians who study women, the textile and apparel industry, and mining. It also makes reference to Canada and migration, raising questions about border relations and the dynamics between the UP, the upper Midwest, and Canada.Most scholars will have frustrations. Wong makes little attempt to balance the oral histories and local newspapers with more diverse primary sources, including union papers. Although the newspapers have titles like Mining Journal and Iron Ore, Wong presents their reporting without interrogation. She uses several letters and reports from the ILGWU Chicago Joint Board Records at the Kheel Center, but only to tell her general history of organizing at Gossard in the 1940s. With few references to local, state, or national politicians, political parties, or labor law, the ILGWU appears to be acting in a void.I hope We Kept Our Towns Going leads readers deeper into labor studies and materials that include gender and feminism, race, and global trade. Instructors who assign the book for undergraduates will have to guide them to engage with it critically while respecting its contributions. In addition, nostalgia permeates the book, as it does much local public history with its mission to connect visitors or viewers to place-based stories. Using it as a foundation for a seminar, an instructor could lead discussion in ways that help students to appreciate the women's labor and quest for financial stability, autonomy, or friendship while also provoking questions about memory-making and culture. Chapter 8, “Remembering the Gossard,” is particularly rich for this purpose.The book is a generative and illuminating collection of stories and descriptions that can pull historians in new directions and prompt questions about women manufacturing workers of the UP and the Canadian-US border. It is also a tribute to Wong's decision to use her status and access to resources to collaborate with the women of the UP on this regional labor history.

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