We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan's Upper Peninsula by Phyllis Michael Wong (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan's Upper Peninsula by Phyllis Michael Wong Patricia Majher We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan's Upper Peninsula By Phyllis Michael Wong (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 190. Appendix, sources, index. Paperbound, $19.95.) Author Phyllis Michael Wong successfully bridges the divide between scholarly and popular history with We Kept Our Towns Going, a compelling account of women who defied the social conventions of their time to [End Page 198] help support their families and fuel the local economy. The story starts with Henry Williamson Gossard, a Kempton, Indiana, native who established a women's undergarment business in Chicago in 1900. On a buying trip to Europe, he was introduced to an innovation in corset design: front lacing. He took a chance and had 150 of the new garments made by a local dressmaker, then sent them back to the States, where they quickly sold out at a very high profit. That success prompted him to add the product to his existing line. As the years went on, Gossard retooled his factory to keep up with demand, and also began looking for other places to expand production capacity, eventually building factories in Logansport, Indiana, and Belvidere, Illinois, as well as Drummondville, Quebec, Canada. Then Gossard executives visited the Michigan city of Ishpeming. It wasn't long before a contract was inked to purchase and convert a former department store in this Upper Peninsula iron mining town. And, starting in 1920, hundreds of women were hired to work there, assembling pre-cut pieces of fabric into an array of foundation garments. The employees—who came to be known as "Gossard Girls"—were thankful to find good-paying jobs that offered free lunch, humane working conditions, and, if one stayed long enough, pension benefits. Through the Great Depression and two world wars, the Gossard Company provided steady employment to more than 1,500 women. (The manufacturer, which later opened a second UP factory in Gwinn, closed all of its Michigan facilities in 1977.) Wong uncovered the Gossard Girls' story while serving as a researcher at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. In the university's archival collections, she pored over newspapers and other material published during the company's fifty-seven-year history. From these resources, she was able to document the many steps in the assembly process, the skills required by specialists, the concept of piece work, how much the women were paid—even descriptions of their lunch menus. Equally important—some readers might argue more important—were the firsthand insights she gleaned by conducting interviews with over one hundred former Gossard Girls. The women were generous with their time and open about their opinions. Dozens of their quotes are sprinkled throughout the book, with extended space devoted to twenty of the retirees. When Wong asked these women what initially drew them to work at the Gossard factories, many cited the uncertainty [End Page 199] of living on the Marquette Iron Range: how mining work stoppages and, later, closures impacted the fortunes of almost every family in town. The undergarment factory was one of the few employers that could guarantee a steady income for women and help them bring stability to their home lives. The Gossard Girls also helped to stabilize the local economy by using a portion of their paychecks to patronize the shops in downtown Ishpeming and Gwinn. The ability to provide secondary support to their families or, in the case of single and widowed women, to make a comfortable living for themselves, gave them confidence to last a lifetime. Working at the factory also served to expand their social networks. Those ties were strained only once, during the 1940s, when outside organizers identified garment manufacturers, including Gossard, to unionize. A four-month strike pitted friend against friend. Wong's chapter on this subject, which includes an account of a car accident that injured nine picketers, expertly connects the Gossard story to the larger union struggle that was (literally) being fought in the automotive centers of Flint and Detroit almost five hundred miles away, and in the nation at large...