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Victoria grieve as an associate professor of history teaching courses in modern US history and visual culture she received her bachelor's degree studying history English and women's studies at the University of Richmond in 1994 she received her master's in nineteenth-century US history from the University of Georgia and her PhD in 20th century u.s. history from George Washington University she is the proud author of the books the federal art project and the creation of middlebrow culture and little cold warriors american childhood in the 1950s she was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholar Award to teach us history at the University a federal of ministry and Belo Horizonte Brazil next semester dr. grief has been successful both in her career and in her family she's from Philadelphia Pennsylvania originally buzz lived in Philadelphia Richmond Virginia Athens Georgia Austin Texas Washington DC Portland Oregon and Logan Utah she has run at least two dozen half marathons she coaches a girls on the run team at her daughter's elementary school and she is learning to play tennis dr. Greaves presentation today is titled The Forgotten Way of Labor journalism and mid-century feminism please join with me in welcoming dr. grieve thank you to the global Women's Studies Program into the history program and for that wonderful introduction okay so I'm guessing that most of the people in this room are kind of familiar with our sort of textbook history of one of feminism in the United States the usual time line right so women organized in the 1820s 1830s about around the issue of abolition in the process become more fully aware of the magnitude of their own sort of legal inequalities and they organize to demand women's rights as well particularly the vote Seneca Falls in 1848 launching the suffrage movement right or first wave feminism which we can talk more about which would last until 1920 and then what happens well the textbook would have us think that after the successful campaign for the vote women's organizations lost their single issue focus they splintered women became interested in different issues problems movements and they splintered over the Equal Rights Amendment okay labor feminists or industrial feminists opposing the ER a right through the Great Depression through World War two except for Rosie the Riveter and with the fierce emphasis on domesticity in the 1950s feminism was a non-issue okay and then in 1963 somebody published a book right somebody I think published a book and the Kennedy administration's Presidential Commission on the status of women published a report and suddenly feminism was back on the national stage right oh I went too far okay so what I think a lot of people don't know about this story and the part of this story that I'm interested in is this what happened in between 1920 and 1963 okay and I think one way to look at this is if you look at this pamphlet here on the right this pamphlet was published in 1952 by that same person who published that famous book in 1963 okay in 1952 her name was Betty Goldstein she was a reporter for the federated press which was a labor news service and by 1952 she was a journalist for the United electrical Union which was the most radical by far Union in the United States heavily led by many people in the Communist Party okay so in short Betty Ford and Betty Goldstein got her training she was introduced to issues of equality through the labor movement in the 1940s and in the 1950s okay the pamphlet on the left is simply another example by a woman named Eva Lipan she wrote mothers and overalls in 1943 arguing for federally supported childcare not just during World War two right but as a right of families in the United States so my point here is that what we call second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s was led by women who fought these battles in labor unions in the 1940s and 1950s okay the women I will talk about today not all of them became involved in second wave feminism but several of them did okay and these women are the link right there that missing link between what happens in between 1920 and what happens between 1963 and I think they'd be really shocked to find out that people think feminism wasn't going on because it was certainly going on for them so just a few points about what exactly labor feminism is what the demands were with these women we're talking about equal pay better working conditions child care flexible hours maternity leave these should sound familiar right but of course they oppose the Equal Rights Amendment and the fear here was that protective legislation that working women and unions and industrial feminists have been fighting for would be lost if the ER a was passed they were in favor of women's equality but in a in a more piecemeal gradual sort of a way so that women did not lose protective legislation that they felt was was necessary okay so as I said this is this is a work in progress for me it's a book manuscript that I've been working on for a few years and as it's evolved you know I've thought about what I'm trying to do here one of the things I'm trying to hash out and understand is what role journalism has the labor press has in advancing working-class feminism how are the reporters that I will introduce you to how do they think about themselves do they think of themselves as feminists how do they prioritize certain issues how do they fit into a larger union movement so I'm trying to understand how their writing fits into this larger picture and the other to sort of historiographical things that I'm working on are to revise this model of waves I don't think in the in the scholarly world that too many people interested in in labor history or in in women's history subscribed to this model of the first wave in the second wave anymore but I think in popular perceptions that's very much alive and well so I'd like to continue to revise that idea and the other sort of historiographical structure that I think doesn't serve us very well is this this idea of an old left and a new left the old left of the 1930s and the nothing happens and then suddenly we have a new left in the 1960s there are so many continuities between these eras don't think that that model serves us very well civil rights obviously an ongoing movement from the old left of the 1930s through the 1940s and into the 1960s civil liberties pacifism worker education the anti-nuclear movements all of these movements continued throughout those decades and women were of course leaders in all of these movements okay so I'm interested in these questions I'm interested in labor feminism I'm interested in trying to figure out how these working-class journalists kind of participated in this so how am I going to answer these questions what am I going to do where am I going to look well I started to read a lot of labor and leftist newspapers so I've read 2 Union papers one is called the timber worker it's the IWA the International Wood Workers of America paper I've read the ILWU used dispatcher which is the longshoremen and where Houseman's Union paper I've read the West Coast communist people's world paper all of these from about the 1930s through the 1950s and I was looking for women write women's names and I won't get into a history of women in journalism here but really prior to the early 20th century women of course wrote for newspapers but they were restricted to the women's pages right society news domestic advice recipes that sort of thing right in the it's not really until the beginning of the 20th century that women begin professional careers on the front pages off the women's pages with their own bylines in newspapers and with world war ii of course that process only increases right as women reporters assume the work of men who have been drafted to fight in world war ii as in many other industries so as I read these newspapers and I see these women's names I begin to realize that they aren't actually the employees of these newspapers what they work for is this organization called the federated press okay and so that is where I went next so I think it's kind of helpful to explain the federated presses like The Associated Press of the left or The Associated Press of of the labor movement mainstream newspapers were not particularly friendly to unions or working people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries so the federated press was created by a variety of leftists really in 1919 as a result of the great steel strike during which labor unions were presented rather poorly and management was seen in a much greater light the goal here was to provide fair and accurate reporting of the labor movement to the labor movement Carl Hessler who's the managing editor of the F P for it's it pretty much its entire existence so the problem with the mainstream press was that it's owned by a different class of people that read it he wanted a labor press that was created by labor people for labor readers okay so the federated press the way it operates is well basically on a shoestring which I actually think has a lot to do with the fact that it had a lot of women reporters but I'll get to that in a second the way it operated is through three regional offices they had an office in DC in office in New York and an office in Chicago and from these three offices a small staff collected news reports from correspondents all over the country they edited them down and they put them on an 11 by 14 piece of paper is these little stories and they mail them to all the subscribing newspapers all these Union newspapers and the Union newspapers can pick and choose what sorts of news tidbits they want to put in their own union publications okay so that's kind of how it worked okay so as I mentioned the staff the actual paid staff of the federated press was very small maybe three editors and Hessler himself who routinely returned his paycheck okay so the federated press relies on correspondence and I think this has a lot to do with with women and journalism in general right one of the women on you too you know she raised a family she could write stories at night you know you couldn't support a family on what the F P was able to provide for its correspondence so I think it attracted a lot of women to work as correspondence okay so the F P tried to maintain a policy of neutrality okay especially in the 1930s with the major labor battles between the American Federation of Labor and the CIO which I'm not going to get into into right now but labor was divided and so Hassler tried to keep a policy of neutrality which is great but it eventually gets them into trouble because they publish Communists and they publish all sorts of people and so in the in the early to mid 1950s Labor's becomes more conservative they cut their subscriptions to the federated press McCarthy's attacking the left in general and so the federated press closes its doors in 1956 okay so there's your little history of of the F P itself okay all right so here is what I think is the fun part okay these four women who as I've told some of you I really love and I'm trying to keep my critical distance from but they are just fierce amazing interesting brave women so part of the trouble with my research here is that a lot of these women had to use pseudonyms or aliases or nom de plume because it was dangerous to write for the leftist press in the late 1940s and early 1950s so I'm going to tell you about four women Kathleen Cronin the first set of dates is their life and the second is the time period in which they wrote for the federated press Jesse Lloyd O'Connor Virginia Gardner and Miriam Culkin Kathleen Cronin had about five or six different names and Miriam Culkin you might know by her her more popular or better known name as MIM Kalber she worked with Bella Abzug for a long time she eventually becomes a leader in the second wave feminist movement okay all right so Julia Riccio published under the name Kathleen Cronin and lots of other names and I tried to find women with a diverse set of circumstances and diverse backgrounds julia Riccio grew up in lumber towns in Oregon she remembered walking around with her mom whoever the neighbors called the egg lady right delivering eggs but of course under these eggs she had information about birth control when it was illegal to distribute information about birth control her father was in the IWW he's a wobbly radical labor organization at the late 19th and early 20th centuries so she's raised in Oregon she marries a lumber man right she lives in company housing in a lumber town and in 1935 the International woodworkers of America begin to form in and around Portland she's right there she encourages her husband to join she joins she forms the auxiliary and when this union tries to go CIO right to join the CIO instead of the AFL there's an eight-month lockout so there's violence from the employers and there's violence from the AF of L she starts writing a newspaper she starts writing the timber worker in 1936 she continues writing for the federated press in 1946 she writes for the peoples world which is a communist newspaper she writes for the ILWU dispatcher so she writes for a lot of different Union papers she's a union woman through and through and there's actually been an autobiography written about her it's called sticking to the Union in case you're interested the way I'm kind of organizing my research is by sort of the person and the themes that most interested them Jewellery Tia was most interested in race okay racial issues the feminism that these women embody is embedded in class issues right they don't separate them out right to that extent it's a Popular Front sort of a politics where all of these issues are combined with a larger critique of what it means what equality means all right so Cronin's big story was about the Vanport flood of 1948 the Vanport flood I'll have to give you a little bit of history here so during World War Two Henry Kaiser attracts all thousands of workers to the Portland shipyards to build ships right there's a massive housing shortage and so using pretty shoddy materials they build this this public housing project called Vanport it's in a floodplain of the Columbia River when the war ends Portland Oregon is not known for its welcoming racial policies and so there's a tiny little african-american neighborhood called Albina and so when the war ends there are no further homes open for african-americans no further neighborhoods so Memorial Day 1948 there are large storms and the city government of Portland says totally fine totally safe everything will be fine unionized fire fighters walk around Vanport and tell them that the Dyke is not safe and they should leave their houses well it turns out that they were right okay there's a massive flood it destroys completely wipes out this very shoddy housing project and 18,000 people are left homeless so it creates this really clear moment in Portland's history about well what are we going to do with these people and it's a turning point for civil rights in in Portland and Julia Riccio Kathleen Cronin writes these stories about the Red Cross and about the neighborhood and about the people and about race and that is the issue that she prioritizes but while doing that she writes about how these issues are impacting families and women and schools and children in a way that prioritizes their experiences and how these issues affect women and families rooty is involved in lots and lots of other things she's an activist as well a journal as well as a journalist which most of these women are she loses her civil service job her day job for when they figure out that she's the one who was writing all these stories she's called before the house on American Activities Committee in 1956 as all of these women are okay her last arrest this is why I love her her last arrest was in 1975 she's 68 years old and she and her friend Martina are on fixed incomes right they're retired ladies she's on this Union pension and her electric bill keeps going up so she and Martina get their sleeping bags and their pillows and they go to Portland General Electric and they sit down in the office and they refuse to leave and she makes the police pick her up I mean she's she's like five feet tall maybe a hundred pounds and she relishes this you know she's like I'm not moving you have got to pick me up and carry me out here and they do the cops pick up this tiny woman and drag her out and there are cameras to take her picture and she loves it okay so she's that kind of a lady she's a real firecracker all right Jesse Lloyd O'Connor comes from a really different background Jesse Lloyd was the daughter of Lola maverick who may ring some bells for some of you Lola maverick is the heir to a cattle fortune in Texas she also was one of the founders of the Women's International League for peace and freedom she's one of the women who sent Henry Ford's peace ship in 1915 so her mom is a peace activist and a feminist right her father is William Burroughs Lloyd who is the son of the muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd and the heir to the Chicago Tribune fortune so she's got two majors she's doing well right so she goes to Smith College she gets a degree in economics and like lots of other curious lefties I guess at the time she's fascinated by what's going on in the Soviet Union okay so in the 20s she goes to the Soviet Union and she works as a reporter for the London Times and the Federated Press so she starts to send stories to the FP about what's going on in the Soviet Union she comes back to the US in 1929 she continues working for the federated press and Harvey O'Conner who's the editor of in the New York office says you know what I think it might be a good idea for you to cover the the textile strikes in North Carolina and Kentucky because our last reporter well he got shot at but I think because you're a woman you'll be fine this is her future husband so she does she goes down to Gastonia and it's it's a war zone it is a war zone between these striking textile workers and Jesse Lloyd takes the the tack of talking to mothers okay about how this strike impacts them how the stretch-out system of Labor and the textile mills impacts them how they have to put their children to bed then go to work work all night and come home because they know their children be asleep home safe while they're doing that so her take on these these strikes is one that focuses on women's experiences during these strikes okay so she marries Harvey O'Conner in 1930 and they're both activists and writers throughout their entire lives she is very interested in the peace movement as her mother was so she continues well throughout the 20th century advocating for an end to nuclear arms and the arms races and Vietnam and all of these issues okay she also one of the things that I'm interested in about O'Connor is that her class position really enables her to do these things right her independent income McCarthy can't touch her in the way that McCarthy goes after most people which is having the blast blacklisted or losing their jobs so she has this privileged position which I find really interesting and I'm trying to kind of figure out how that works that how that class dimension works and in her case okay two more Regina Gardner was raised in a completely apolitical household she grew up in Oklahoma her father was a banker her mother died when she was relatively young she attended one of the first journalism programs in the country at the University of Missouri before that journalism was something you did on the job okay which clearly discouraged women from pursuing the job right this way they could go to school and get a degree and she did in fact work were her way up from the women's pages she worked for small-town newspapers on the women's pages for years until she landed her first big job at the Chicago Tribune in 1930 now the Chicago Tribune is a an extremely conservative newspaper okay so her sort of moment comes in 1937 when she is covering the Memorial Day Massacre okay another steel strike in Chicago in 1937 and there's widespread violence and workers and protesters are killed so she's there covering this she submits her story the paper comes out the next morning and the coverage is completely opposite essentially of the story that she submitted so the paper saying that strikers attacked the police and there was violence on the part of the strikers and it was she just had this this weird moment of realizing the importance of the press and how the politics of the situation were just wrong so she joins the newspaper guild she joins the Communist Party okay and she probably gets fired from the Chicago Tribune so of all of these women I think Virginia Gardner is probably the biggest troublemaker from the from when she joins the Communist Party she essentially creates her career okay for the next several decades this is one of her earlier stories she worked for the federal federated press for a pretty short time she was in their Washington office during World War two she has a lot of stories about child care and when Virginia gardener took over this job she could not enter the National Press Club in Washington DC right it was the quintessential sort of boys club there was a ticker going you know where they could get the news and submit it to their newspapers but she couldn't go in there unless she was invited by a colleague to the cafeteria so she literally she has at this point she's a single mother it's 1942 she's not getting child support she has a full-time job which she can't really do because she can't enter the national press building so she becomes probably the most outspoken feminist she calls herself a feminist whereas these other women don't necessarily claim that that sort of word so Virginia Gardner works for the federated press she works for the new masses and the daily worker and masses and mainstream and people's world so she also works for the leftist and primarily the communist press throughout her life and when she wasn't working for them she worked in factories okay so she also was Union woman working-class and a journalist okay so all of those sorts of identities at once okay she brings up some interesting issues for me in that you know you you would like to think that as a member of the Communist Party and working for these leftist organizations that they had good experience as employees as well mm-hmm you know sometimes it turns out that on The Daily Worker the assumption was that she was getting child support from her ex-husband and so she was paid as a single person right so for years she was paid as a single person while she was a single mother and there were pay scales here's a a single person's pay here's a single person with one dependent which was assumed to be the wife here is a single person with three dependents etc so she becomes the most sort of outspoken feminist at the time okay here's my last journalist okay Miriam Koken kind of a New Yorker through and through she was raised in the Bronx she was raised during the Depression with her mother and her brother her parents also were divorced she goes to Hunter College New York University where she meets Bela Abzug and right out of college and she says this in an oral history that's in the archives at Hunter she says I'm one of the lucky ones that graduated at the right time she graduated in 1943 and she's all these opportunities for women to to become journalists so she finds a job within six months with the Federated Press and she stays with them from 1943 until they closed their doors in 1956 she starts out as a reporter she covers the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco but she also like Betty Ford Ann who she worked with in the New York office during at this time she cuts her teeth on labor issues right and I don't think she needed introduced to these issues perhaps as Virginia Gardner might have needed since she grew up in Depression era New York but she she cuts her professional teeth in the labor movement on these issues okay in her later career so in the late 1950s she raises two daughters in 1961 she's one of the founders of women's strike for peace in 1971 she and Bella Abzug joined forces as Abzug runs for a congresswoman from New York they work in the Carter Administration together and she writes many many many books and articles about women's political participation she has this famous quote said you know a stag Senate there were no women in the Senate at the time she said a stag Senate is a stagnation okay encouraging women's participation in the political process the last she the last organization she helped to co-found was the women's environmental and development organization or we doe in 1990 and there are a global women's organization that today are in in in interested in how climate change unequally impacts women in developing nations and so it's still a very active organization so all of these women I think predate the term intersectional feminism so I don't think feminism was not happening from 1920 to 1960 and I don't think that intersectional feminism is new right I think that that's exactly what these women were doing right we're talking about a working class movement coming out of the unions working with activists and all other sorts of different movements in the civil rights movement in the pacifist movement right it's multiracial its multi-ethnic these folks are concerned with in corporate greed and marching in the streets about it right they are writing routinely Julia Riccio writes routinely about police brutality against african-americans in the 1940s and in the 1950s there's an organization called the American Association for the protection of the foreign-born if you were a really outspoken radical and you didn't have citizenship you were deportation efforts Harry bridges for example was routine to try to silence those voices by deporting them okay civil liberties McCarthy the O'Connor's were very active in creating an organization to protect civil rights against McCarthy's abuses in the 1940s and 1950s so I think that that's one of the values of knowing the names of these women it's not to me this isn't an add them and fill in that gap kind of a woman's history it's an add them to the story and the story changes right in how we think about old left new left and how we think about first wave second wave and how we think about are we having waves or this is there all this intergenerational between Gen X and first wave and second wave and fourth wave and I don't think so right because I think that this period of feminism is doing what you guys these young people today think what I never did that before right we're gonna do that but I think there are some models right and I think there's a really sort of vibrant feminism going on today and I think that's just how it goes with a movement that's both an intellectual tradition and a social movement at the same time it's messy right there are radicals and conservatives and moderates and whatever but I think that these women and this time here he can really provide some ongoing inspiration I suppose thank you very much for your attention and I'm happy to open a conversation or answer any questions oh sorry you have a response as dr. Victoria Greaves talks demonstrates academics we often categorize history and other things in order to discuss it but these categories often hide the true complexity and variety that may be is in that category in the case of feminism which is a hugely broad spectrum of opinions and movements and people we find strength in this very diversity feminism is a movement that demands action as the labor movement forced change by unit by unionizing educating and agitating feminist women who are involved and we still are as we move forward and demand more in women's rights and global human rights we can remember that the legacy of women is not static and it is something that we can look to as we march and move for change and learn from their examples of action we can also remember that the intersections of class and gender and racial identity and marriage and children and all of these things with all aspects of identity help us in fighting what we believe in [Applause] alright okay so now we are going to have a Q&A session so if anyone has questions they'd like to ask if you could line up at the microphone right there and I'm going to start with a question of my own so I am curious I have a specific question about Jesse Loyd O'Connor in particular you said that she wasn't in like it was a higher privilege if you will if I can use that word then some of these other women who seem to have like a direct hand in these issues and I was just wondering what motivated her to cover these issues and be a voice for this labor this labor movement if you will if she didn't have a hand in these specific issues I think part of what I'm trying to understand is how how these women were raised and how that impacts where they go like what extent does your family have on your politics in some ways she comes from a very liberal reformist family a very political family and I wouldn't say that she didn't have a direct hand in these things when she married Harvey O'Connor she agreed to work as a journalist she agreed to live as a journalist wife and she kind of followed a carnegie model right she gave away enormous amounts of money to these causes throughout her lifetime so she was a journalist and she participated in writing they moved to Pittsburgh together to cover strikes there they moved to various parts of the country they moved back to the Soviet Union for a while to cover events there so I think she lived these things partially out of sort of idealism and commitment and she just thought these things were important the luxury she had was that she could act on them without worrying about how she was going to get her next meal right we're not and not everyone who was interested in progressive causes had that luxury you talked a lot oh hello oh there we go okay I'm just gonna like eat the microphone so you talked a lot about in your remarks about how so much of that labor history and labor feminism has been lost and how much of that do you think is attributable to the institutional political resistance to the labor movement that persists to this day I think quite a lot of it I think there is far more women's history taught than labor history in a lot of ways my students when you know when we talk about those big names in women's history they know those big names but they don't know big labor events they don't know about big strikes so I think you know one of the bigger gaps might be labor history because when you read labor history you can the women are not missing right from the story of labor history and they're not missing from the story of feminism obviously but I think if if there was more attention to working class unions and labor history in general we may be this kind of story about feminism would be better known as well ok so I was listening about Kathleen Cronin and she was super interesting you mentioned that she was interested ok is this better ok I'll just talk a lot how about that I can do that real easy ok so um Kathleen Cronin you said she was interested in racial issues racial interracial interest issues said that totally wrong but anyway so so she was covering at one point they'll be in a town that was overcome by a flood and I was kind of wondering if you could tell me more about her strategies for interviewing the african-american minority within feminist groups to kind of protect the validity or like make sure that their story was as represented as they said it or if she didn't need partnerships with African American women or anyone within that class yeah Kathleen Cronin was a as she called you know a union woman through and through and she worked really hard to integrate the unions in which she was evolved she would go to the n-double-a-cp offices in Portland routinely to gather news from the African African American community in Portland and the ILWU the International Longshoremen's and where Houseman's Union which is a mouthful was in an integrated Union as well so she had access to African American perspectives and she followed up on them right and she chased down stories of police brutality in African American communities where really in mainstream newspapers that was not reported it was not of interest but she for whatever reason was really interested in exposing these sorts of things right her other major story was uncovering a story of corruption within Portland city government where businesses were paying off judges to convict people of minor misdeeds and then put them in jail during it and then a farmer on Sauvie Island which is right near Portland could use convict labor on his farm okay so she was she tracked down these stories and she was really an incredible investigative reporter and those were just the issues that really motivated her so she made it happen she talked to union member she talked to the n-double-a-cp she talked to the police she she made it happen [Music] okay okay I'll still talk into it so my question was wondering about was I guess the influence of Marxism into the desire for a lot of these women to promote labor feminism because you know you mentioned a connection a lot with you know the Communist Party that's a lot of them and I'm just learning with that a what that influence was into their into their mindsets and into the beliefs that's a great question and I'm trying to figure that out actually so Virginia Gardner and Miriam Culkin were both members of the Communist Party Gardner stayed in the party for a long time kokin left the party about the same time she left the federal federated press with with the denunciations of Stalin right in the 1950s and so I'm trying to figure that out the policy of neutrality at the federated press accounts for the reason that Virginia Gardner was only there for two years she could not do it she could not maintain that neutrality and so she was repeatedly sort of chided and saying you have to try to prevent to present both sides of the story and when you read her stories you can hear a lot of Marxist terminology and vocabulary that you don't hear from Cokin and it might be a personality thing but Gardner was a troublemaker and she I don't think could not do that I don't think she could prevent that analysis from entering into her journalism whereas Koken could I think and so it's interesting question to me because I'm trying to also understand how the left functioned during this time there was there were really blurry lines on the left communists work with non communists and progressive and liberal and it was really kind of messy right and the Communist Party allowed women positions of leadership long before the two mainstream parties allowed leadership positions for women so I'm interested in how women entered the Communist Party for those reasons because they could be leaders in that party they could be influential they could be union leaders so it's sort of a blurry area for me still but clearly you know the federated press itself was trying to maintain sort of a political space where they couldn't be attacked and Gardner was not able to do that whereas Culkin was able to do that thank you hi so I was wondering about the opposition that these women faced with in labor unions and cuz I mean I know there's there's the progressive of the 30s and 40s about labor unions but that is not necessarily like women's rights focused so I was wondering how much struggle did they have even getting their foot in the door to do the research and reporting that they did I'll use Betty Ford Anna's an example even though she's not up here so one of the editors in the New York office his name is Mark stone right as veterans returned from World War two women lose those jobs right and mark stone was not a fan of working with women and he actively tried to get you know rid of the women in that office and Betty Ford and said fine I'm out of here and she went to the UE Kolk instead so even within these progressive spaces where you hope to see better you know there were a lot of those same sorts of issues that feminists in the 1960s realized when they joined you know SDS or the civil rights movement right they expect some higher level of equality and may or may not have founded Riccio worked in in in unions that you know she worked from the auxiliaries often so you have these organizations for the women union members so i don't know that there was terrible resistance to them as union members like in the newspaper guild for example and routine never really talks about resistance she was she wasn't having it a lot of the time she sort of made things happen so i don't you know other than these sorts of institutionalized places like on the daily worker and the pay issue or you know trying to get rid of women after world war ii there are plenty of examples like that and not being allowed into the National Press Club so they did I mean they faced all of these sorts of institutionalized sort of obstacles to their work and lack of childcare and it's just sometimes amazes me that he could do everything they did so I wanted to ask you mentioned that for sure Cathleen Cronin and also probably Virginia gardener lost their jobs after they were discovered in as journalists or social activists do you know or think that these for women's work led to protection against this type of termination for women who came after them no I don't because I don't think I was a gender issue it was a political issue right it was a leftist political issue so McCormick who on the Chicago Tribune is a notorious conservative and he tried to get rid of the newspaper guild people of all genders right so it was a political issue so that's why Virginia Gardner was fired and yeah Riccio worked for the city government as a clerk and when they realized that she was writing for the for the labor press and sort of exposing the poor performance of the city government she also was was fired so I don't think that that instituted any sorts of employment protection for women later and under McCarthy there were no sorts of employment you know guarantees for her communists or you know accused communists either so you mentioned kokand involvement and advocating for women to be more involved in politics have you seen or heard of any significant statistical increase in women being involved in politics after or during her time advocating yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't say that Koken was personally responsible for that right we're talking about the feminist movement as a whole being responsible for increasing women's political participation and participation in many many many other fields but that was an issue that was really important to her and I think what she brought from the labor movement was unless you're participating politically your voice is not going to be heard so I think she learned that through the labor movement she learned how to publicize issues on the federated press all of these women learned how to demonstrate right and how to be in the streets and how to make their voices heard they learn that as did civil rights activists from the labor movement from Highlander Folk School from you know for all these institutions that existed from the old left they were training grounds for these folks and so I would not attribute that to Koken but that was an issue that was very important to her that she took into the second wave feminist movement from these earlier experiences thank you very much yeah [Applause]