Early Female Journalists Sparked Movement Toward Workplace Justice

An recent issue of the Star Tribune featured my op/ed about the way journalists of the 1880s and 1890s covered sexual harassment. The piece begins:

“In Minneapolis in 1888, 21-year-old reporter Eva McDonald slipped onto the floor of the Shotwell, Clerihew and Lothmann factory on the banks of the Mississippi, where hundreds of women hunched over long tables, sewing calico shirts and overalls.

The room was reeking and hot. The company had just slashed wages to pennies a day. But the women saved their anger for the foreman's corrosive contempt for his female employees.

If he met them dressed nicely on the street, he sneered that if they could afford such finery, he should cut their wages more. He offered to trade one woman's promotion for sexual favors, shook and swore at another.”

Read the rest here.