According to Enstad, historians did not cover the earlier years of the labor movement at the beginning of the 20th century any better. She says that the information was actually incorrect. Many women at this time were into popular culture, reading cheap dime novels and wearing stylish clothes. Historians say that the women were therefore distracted from the serious issues that were taking place in the labor movement. The situation was the opposite says Enstad.5 She researched how working-class women used these books and clothes to identity themselves as workers, Americans, and ladies.
Foreign-born working women proudly read books in English to show off their Americanization. Sometimes working-class women felt like ladies when they wore middle-class stylish dress, such as silk underwear. More often, though, they invented their own styles of large hats and piled pompadours, brightly colored clothes, and French heels. Enstad says that this incorrect idea about the working-women's behavior came from the male historians relying on misleading union records.6 This made writers misunderstand the diversity of working-class women's culture and resistance 7(Benson 232).
There were women writing about this period. However, their work was hardly acknowledged. Woloch notes that several middle-class women, such as Elizabeth Butler and Mary Van Kleeck, "conducted...
Such women gained a much better idea of the women's involvement in the labor movement than many of their male counterparts because they worked undercover to learn what was occurring in the real world 9(238).
Kleeck studied New York City's female factory workers and child laborers. For decades she served as director of the Russell Sage Foundation's department of industrial studies, where her work helped bring about legislative reform by providing valuable information on the conditions in various trades. After her retirement from Russell Sage in 1948, she ran unsuccessfully for the New York State Senate on the American Labor Party ticket.
Salmon earned an M.A. In history in 1883. After three years of teaching at the Indiana University in Terre Haute, she was awarded a fellowship for a year's graduate study in American history at Bryn Mawr College. From there she went to Vassar in 1887 and became that college's first history teacher. Her pioneering use of statistical reports helped make her study Domestic Service, a major contribution to both history and historiography.
Unfortunately, U.S. history is still primarily seen through
