Labor Journalism, Labor Feminism: Women at the Federated Press<\/span><\/a> explores the cooperative labor-focused news service, Federated Press (FP). The FP reached hundreds of labor publications and millions of readers and hired many labor journalists. It also fielded stories provided by unpaid rank-and-file journalists who sought to get the stories of their struggles into the news. Those amateur and professional journalists included a number of women. Grieve\u2019s book is a fascinating exploration of both the Federated Press and women labor journalists in the twentieth century. I recommend it heartily. I asked Grieve some questions, but they only scratch the surface for insights into the labor press, factional politics, ways of seeing and what the loss of this kind of coordinated press service and labor newspapers has meant for labor\u2019s story.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Your book is the first about the Federated Press. Tell us why it is important to document the contributions of this news service, and briefly how it operated, and why it mattered.<\/b><\/p>\n The history of the Federated Press matters for the same reasons labor history matters. The press service ran daily news sheets from 1920 to 1956, documenting everything from major strikes to union news, civil rights movements, conservative political and business strategies, and working-class entertainment. It preserves the stories and experiences of millions of Americans who were misrepresented or missing in the mainstream press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The FP operated from three major bureaus: Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. The editorial staff was small and the columnists underpaid, but committed. Correspondents from all over the country, and internationally in the 1920s and 1930s, sent news to the bureaus, where editors condensed it and assembled news sheets containing anywhere from one major story up to seven or eight briefs. The news sheets were mailed every day to subscribing newspapers, where those editors could choose which stories to include in their own papers. The FP aspired to create a labor community through shared news, much like the Associated Press functioned for mainstream newspapers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I argue that as one of many organizations that created political and social networks on the political left during the height of the labor movement, the FP created opportunities and a voice for women. The FP\u2019s women journalists consistently raised the issues pertinent to labor feminists, including equal pay, the minimum wage, maximum hours, opportunities for advancement, and maternity benefits. They wrote stories about gender discrimination that were distributed to hundreds of labor newspapers, urged women to participate in unions and politics, and pressured union and political leaders to pay attention to the demands of women.<\/span><\/p>\n Your book suggests to me that this news service and the way it was organized and structured helped to create a Popular Front, notably beginning in the 1920s, not the 1930s. I looked back at Michael Denning\u2019s <\/b>The Cultural Front<\/i><\/b> to see if it had even been mentioned, and there was nothing in there. Can you explain how the news service worked at the level of culture with a couple of examples?<\/b><\/p>\n Denning\u2019s book argues that the thirties were shaped by more than politics, that theatre, music, movies, comics, and all manner of popular culture reflected a zeitgeist that privileged and celebrated the experiences of the \u201ccommon man.\u201d The labor movement and union membership grew exponentially after the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act, and subscriptions for the FP reached their peak in 1945. Given the atomized way we consume news today, it\u2019s difficult to conceptualize how important the labor press was to community formation during these decades. Although Denning refers to <\/span>People\u2019s World <\/span><\/i>newspaper, an FP subscriber, as a \u201cvoice of the West Coast Popular Front,\u201d the FP\u2019s absence from his study reinforces my point that we should not overlook the importance of the labor press as a pillar of working class culture during these decades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Although I don\u2019t focus on popular culture in the book, the FP certainly included a working-class take on contemporary culture. The service included Bill Lloyd\u2019s satirical column, \u201cDinner Pail Epics,\u201d which used lighthearted jingles and poetry to critique capitalism, politicians, and social trends. Another regular contributor, cartoonist Ben Yomen created Congressman Dripp to lampoon the anti-labor and anti-New Deal Republicans in Congress, while Harold Magin\u2019s comic strip \u201cThe John Smiths\u201d found humor in the daily troubles of working-class life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n FP writers also kept tabs on labor-oriented films, as well as those to boycott, such as MGM\u2019s \u201cpro-slavery\u201d bio-pic of President Andrew Johnson (1942) and Disney\u2019s racist Uncle Remus (1944). Book reviews of Jessica Smiths <\/span>Women in Soviet Russia<\/span><\/i> (1928) and Mary Heaton Vorse\u2019s <\/span>Strike! <\/span><\/i>are just two examples of hundreds of books suggested to working-class readers over the decades.<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, FP reporters publicized summer school programs for working women, such as Bryn Mawr, and announced new offerings at labor colleges such as the California Labor School and Brookwood Labor College. There was a self-conscious awareness of the importance of these cultural aspects of working-class life. Helen G. Norton wrote in 1930 that organized labor had to focus on building its own cultural enterprises to \u201cmold people\u2019s minds during their leisure hours\u201d (FP, December 1, 1930).<\/span><\/p>\n That is so interesting. I was thinking as I read it that from the 1920s onward, with all the intense repression, divisions and factionalism, FP managing editor Carl Haessler organized a media front that brought together labor journalists of various ideological leanings that ended up reflecting issues of working class life from the bottom up. This was journalism from below. The women you profile did not agree politically, but their ways of seeing elevated women\u2019s issues. Tell us why you chose the four women you profile in the book\u2019s chapters, and how their way of seeing the news was different from the men in the service.<\/b><\/p>\n Jessie Lloyd O\u2019Connor, Julia Ruuttila, Virginia Gardner, and Miriam Kolkin dedicated their lives to the labor movement and believed deeply in its potential to create a democratic society. Their careers span the lifetime of the FP and allowed me to explore how feminism moved from the labor movement to the mainstream. Betty Goldstein, better known as Betty Friedan, worked for the FP but her story had already been brilliantly explained in Daniel Horowitz\u2019s book, <\/span>Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique<\/span><\/i> (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Miriam Kolkin\u2019s career bears a remarkable similarity to Goldstein\u2019s, but Kolkin remained relatively unknown. These four women were among the most prolific and longest tenured writers for the FP, so I had access to their published work, and they left sizable archival collections of personal papers that allowed me to explore the interplay between their personal lives and careers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the book I suggest several ways that these journalists saw the news differently from their male colleagues. An early example involved how they covered the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. While male reporters tended to focus on high-level politics, Jessie Lloyd O\u2019Connor and Anna Louise Strong talked to women about their daily lives, visited hospitals and factories, and tended to insert themselves through use of the first person in their stories. All of these factors combined to create news stories that depicted ordinary people\u2019s lives in the midst of historic upheaval, and what they hoped would be the beginning of a socialist nation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To put it perhaps too bluntly, the FP\u2019s female reporters saw women where their male colleagues did not. They interviewed women strikers on picket lines outside textile mills, published studies gathered from the US Women\u2019s Bureau, and reported on women\u2019s organizing in industries that unions overlooked, such as hairdressers, laundresses, and flight attendants. Male FP reporters very rarely focused on women.<\/span><\/p>\n You suggest that the women and the way they looked at the news also increased the coverage of issues of concern to other minorities, that women\u2019s perspectives clearly made a difference in what was considered labor questions. Can you give an example of how your book discusses this.<\/b><\/p>\n The women I discuss in the book understood marginalization, discrimination, and invisibility not just theoretically, but from lived experience. Each of them had experienced discrimination at some point during their career, and each of them understood how class and gender intersected in particular ways to limit working class women. World War II highlighted a problem working mothers had always struggled with: the lack of childcare. According to working women, this was not an individual, personal problem, but a social and labor issue that required a comprehensive solution.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another reason why these women were attuned to racial issues is because the CIO insisted on racial unity to overcome employer strategies of hiring minority strikebreakers and keeping wages low. Racial antagonism favored employers and kept workers from cooperating. FP reporters regularly published stories about racial discrimination, often gathering news and stories directly from the NAACP, the Urban League, and other organizations representing racial or ethnic minorities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/book-cover.jpg\")
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