Women Industrial Workers in the Twin Cities, 1860s–1945

For women to earn wage income in the 1800s, they first had to overcome the conventional, and often legal, strictures that led to the saying, “a woman’s place is in the home.” In the early twentieth century, technological and economic change—as well as two world wars—transformed the industrial workplace, and much of daily life. In Minnesota and throughout the US, the women’s suffrage movement overlapped with these changes and helped the campaign for economic and social equality, including the right to work.

St. Paul was the head of navigation on the Mississippi River and developed as a wholesale center in the 1860s. To reduce the uncertainties and expense of having merchandise shipped in, a number of companies started to make more of their stock locally. Shortly after its establishment in 1861, the wholesale dry goods house Auerbach, Finch, Van Slyck and Co. created a manufacturing department with over five hundred “girls” operating sewing machines powered by steam. They made from 4,000 to 6,000 oat and bran sacks and export bags daily, as well as tarpaulins, wagon covers, awnings, tents, and underwear. The women were almost all young and single; most had acquired sewing skills in their homes and needed little additional training. A visitor remarked in the 1860s that the scene reminded him of New England cotton mills, which had employed women since the 1810s.

Another successful wholesale dry goods store, Lindeke, Warner and Schurmeier’s, opened in 1878 to offer a full range of merchandise. On the top floor, 125 women sewed tents, awnings, tarpaulins, cottonade pants, and outfits for miners and lumbermen. The sewing machines were arranged in long rows powered by a line shaft.

In the 1860s and 1870s, a cluster of agricultural-implement manufacturers and related processing industries formed in the Twin Cities, making plows, harvesters, and threshers. Some companies, including Walter Wood Harvester Company and the American Grass Twine Company (both in St. Paul), had several thousand workers, including women. The International Harvester Company, a vertically integrated conglomerate based in Chicago, eventually monopolized the market nationally as well as locally, where they had warehouses, showrooms, and affiliated manufacturing operations.

In Minneapolis, manufacturing was more mechanized, with factories clustered around the waterpower at St. Anthony Falls (Owamniyomni). At least one company had a significant female presence: the Minneapolis Paper Mill Company. Built in 1866, the mill grew to produce one million tons of print paper annually. It had a workforce of eighty, including about forty women. The Minneapolis firm Northwestern Knitting Company, later known as Munsingwear, was founded in 1887 by investors who saw an opportunity to hire women. It moved to a site away from the falls, where it became the largest manufacturer of underwear in the world with the largest garment factory in the country. It employed over 2,500 women, the most of any company in Minnesota.

In 1888, twenty-one-year-old St. Paul Globe reporter Eva McDonald visited local factories undercover to observe the working conditions of women. She wrote over forty hard-hitting articles under the pseudonym Eva Gay, including one that chronicled the story of over 400 women working ten-hour days, five days a week, in a dark, wet basement at the Cascade Laundry in Minneapolis. “It looked more like a rat hole than a place where women were forced to work,” she wrote. “The steam, darkness, heat and smell from dirty clothing made a disgusting combination…Such a work room is a disgrace to humanity.” One of the workers said that most of the laundry staff were foreign born, as “Americans wear out too quick.” At another laundry McDonald visited, she was appalled that the women’s washroom was on the same floor as the men’s, but not even separated by a partition.

McDonald became a nationally renowned labor organizer. Speaking at a rally in Indianapolis in 1891, she reported,

“I made a round of the factories and shops of Minneapolis, and also of the school houses, and I found that the average pay to women was $5.18 per week, while at the same time I found that the actual living expenses were $6.25 a week….What does this mean? It means that life is simply a tug and a struggle to keep the wolf from the door, with none of the sunbeams to drive out the shadows.”

Rapidly changing industrial practices greatly reduced the need for physical strength, and made it easier for women to work in the factories. Industrial factories also required more workers, leading companies to locate in cities with a large labor pool. The Crex Carpet Company, one of the largest manufacturing firms in St. Paul, was close to a residential district, so many of its 300 women workers could walk to work. Over 80 percent were single, and most lived at home and contributed to a family budget.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Twin Cities hiring patterns by gender paralleled national trends. The 1900 federal census reported that approximately 20 percent of women older than sixteen were gainfully employed, compared to over 90 percent for men. Only 5 percent of married women worked, compared to 46 percent of single women. The so-called “marriage bar” greatly limited employment opportunities for women in all fields. At Munsingwear, 80 percent of the woman workers were single in 1918, but there were notable exceptions: many of the cleaning crew who worked the overnight shift were married Polish immigrants.

In a bid to attract more women workers and to reduce turnover, companies made factories more appealing. The American Can Company, a national conglomerate, built a branch plant on Prior Avenue in St. Paul in 1907. It installed a tennis court, dressing rooms, flower beds, and well-kept lawns for its 300 workers to “make things pleasant about the factory.”

Griggs, Cooper & Company started as a food wholesaler in Lowertown St. Paul in 1882 and branched into manufacturing in the 1900s. It acquired a large parcel on University Avenue adjacent to the Minnesota Transfer rail yard, then built a model industrial plant in a park-like setting with an aggregated floor area of over thirty-seven acres. The company employed women at its cracker and candy factories (built in 1912 and 1913) as well as at plants that produced coffee, tea, spices, syrups, and preserves (built in 1919).

During World War I, women workers were needed to replace the five million men serving in the military. Of the estimated nine million women who mobilized, some found work in the military and some on the nation’s farms, but most went to work in factories at jobs that were previously done by men. Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Company, which made steel components for buildings, engines, boilers, mining machinery, and tractors, employed women in 1917 and 1918.

World War II brought an even more severe labor shortage. Eleven million Americans served in the armed forces, and six million civilians supported the effort in the factories. Between 1940 and 1945, the percentage of women in the national workforce increased from 27 percent to 37 percent. By 1945, nearly one of every four married women worked outside the home. Most sizable companies in the Twin Cities area had military contracts, and many hired women. Women employees of International Harvester Company made anti-tank guns, military shell coverings, and motor trucks at its plant in St. Paul at 1550 University Avenue.

In 1942, Ford Motor Company received contracts to build the M-8 armored vehicle and to make over thirty component parts for airplane engines. For security reasons, Ford’s Twin Cities Assembly Plant was divided into two parts. On the aircraft side, about 80 percent of the workers were women who wore uniforms, described as “a horrible kind of overalls.” Clerical workers had to wear a jacket, navy blue slacks, safety shoes, and white socks. One woman was assigned to test drive the finished armored cars alongside men on a specially built track at the rear of the factory. Over 3,000 people worked at the plant during the war—far more than during peacetime.

After World War II, Ford needed only 1,800 workers, and the company expected that women would quit to make way for the returning soldiers. Many, however, refused to leave, with one saying, “I’m going to stay here till they carry me out on a stretcher.” With the acquiescence, if not support, of the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, male workers mounted a campaign of intimidation and physical harassment, leading many women to quit. In 1957 the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that only four “Rosie, The Riveters” remained. “They are vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts, some 450 to one…The present assembly line is not geared for employment of women.”