Eva McDonald Valesh (September 9, 1866 – November 7, 1956) was an American journalist and labor rights activist. Valesh was an activist for, and reported on conditions of laborers in Minnesota's garment factories. She was also a speaker for the Knights of Labor movement and the National Farmer's Alliance.
Early life Born Mary Eva McDonald, Valesh was born in Orono, Maine in 1866 to John and Elinor Lane McDonald, a couple of Scotch-Irish origin who had immigrated to the United States by way of Canada. Valesh's father, a carpenter by trade, was politically active. Following the timber business, the family moved to Minnesota when Valesh was 11 or 12 years old. She graduated from a Minneapolis public high school at the age of 15.
Valesh entered teacher-training school. However, she found the profession "dreary," and had difficulty landing a job because of her young age. She began writing for the society pages of the Saturday Evening Spectator but was discouraged by the low pay. Instead, she trained as a typesetter and joined the typographer's labor union while continuing to work for the Saturday Evening Spectator. With the encouragement of her father, Valesh began submitting her writing to the newspaper. In 1888, through the recommendation of Minnesota Knights leader Ignatious Donnelley, Valesh became more involved in the labor union and began to pursue investigative journalism, writing columns for the St. Paul Globe.
Minnesota journalist and labor activist
Undercover reporter Valesh started writing a column for the St. Paul Globe under the pseudonym Eva Gay in 1888. Her first piece was titled "'Mong the girls who toil," which opened with: "Working girls and their lives. How little the outside world knows of them. And yet, there are thousands of them in Minneapolis." Valesh wrote of guarded factories, where supervisors sought to prevent information about working conditions and pay from becoming public. As a result, the reporter proposed "to carry Globe readers with me through a series of articles and show the life, home life and shop life, of the working girls and women of Minneapolis." She described the crowded conditions and "stifling" air in three garment factories. Valesh detailed several common themes among the female factory workers she interviewed, including that they were paid by the piece, rather than for their time, that many were self-supporting or supporting other family members with their wages, and that wages had been cut within the past year. Of the women she spoke to, weekly wages averaged from $1.75 to $4 (though some earned as much as $7 or $8 per week), with average room and board costing from $2 to $3 weekly.
According to Rhoda Gilman, writing for Workday Minnesota, a Minnesota-based labor news organization, by the late 1880s, factory work in Minnesota had attracted large numbers of young women from rural areas, with the promise of a more exciting life and the chance for improved pay. However, the "mills and factories that employed them would today be called sweatshops." Two weeks after Valesh's piece came out, women workers at the Shotwell, Clerihew and Lothman garment factory went on strike, in part as a response to a new pay cut. It was the first women's strike in Minnesota, and Valesh gained notice, as some credited her with helping spark the strike. The Knights of Labor, a workers organization, helped organize and encourage the strike. During the 1880's, the organization had gained membership and encouraged strike action across the United States. However, by 1888, the Knights organization was beginning to lose some influence. The strike itself was only partially successful. Public opinion in the weeks following the strike generally supported the women workers, with some newspapers hailing the "striking maidens." In a bid to draw workers in, the company promised to pay new workers a minimum of $3 per week, up from $2. However, the company refused to fire a supervisor some of the workers considered abusive, nor guarantee that all the women could have their jobs back. As time went on, many of the women found work elsewhere, and some people boycotted the products of the factory. A few months later, the factory shut down.
On April 15, 1888, another Valesh column,"Working in the wet," was published. This article exposed conditions in several laundry works in Minneapolis. In the column, she reported that conditions were very poor. She described how a laundry had several tiers of work, with the wash room being particularly wet, hot and poorly ventilated. Within it, many of the workers were foreign-born. "It's no good to hire American girls to run these heavy machines, those girls wear out too quick," explained one interviewee. Valesh went undercover to one laundry, posing as a job applicant. She found that starting wages as a sorter taking in the bales of soiled laundry were $3.25 per week, with the chance to make $4.25 weekly with experience. The bookkeeper explained that women were expected to work around ten hours per day, five days a week, but could work sitting down and earn a year-end bonus after a few years of service to round pay up to $5 per week. When Valesh spoke to the workers, she found a different story, with the women often working up to 12 hours per day, not the advertised 10, that the hard physical work precluded sitting down, and that very few workers lasted long enough at the job to earn the promised bonus.
Additional columns on similar themes followed. The recurring column often featured Valesh going undercover to see conditions for herself, trying out unskilled domestic work, various types of factory jobs and clerk positions. Valesh appeared so young and unassuming that she could easily go undetected. Factories that employed women in Minnesota began to pay attention, and tried to avoid being "tricked" by the young reporter. However, she was able to slip into workplaces without consequence for more than a year.
Even as Valesh began traveling and speaking, she continued to work for the Globe as editor of the labor section. She directed the coverage of the Minneapolis and St Paul street railway strike of 1889. Later, Valesh worked for the Minneapolis Tribune.
In 1895, Valesh traveled to Europe, intending to write about factory conditions there. She was reportedly shocked by the terrible working conditions and by the number of mothers who worked at the factories. She was able to finance most of the trip by selling these articles, some of which appeared in the American Federationist.
Speeches and activism
By 1889, Valesh was more directly involved with the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance and the following year, she joined the Alliance and Populist campaign lecture circuit throughout the Midwest and New York. She advocated for an eight-hour workday. Valesh was not the only woman speaking on behalf of populist labor causes. Both the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance sought female members and elevated woman speakers; Valesh's peers included lecturers Sue Ross Keenan of Oregon and Emma DeVoe of Illinois. Within a few years, Valesh became associated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1891, Valesh was invited by Samuel Gompers, then the president of the AFL, to speak at the national convention, which took place in Birmingham, Alabama. She delivered a lecture, titled "Women's Work." She also toured with Gompers, speaking alongside him. In one such speech, Valesh spoke in Indianapolis on October 1, 1891 to a crowd of female factory workers. She pointed out that female workers were paid half as much as men, that their wages often did not cover the cost of living, and that the respect women may once have been afforded as industrious members of a small community was gone. Women were denied the right to vote, and treated as cheap and dispensable labor: 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. When my grandma was a girl, she was accounted the belle of the little village in which she lived, because she had the reputation of spinning three miles of flax a day. What round of the social ladder could her granddaughter occupy today if she worked in a factory, no matter if she spun 1000 miles of flax a day? Society has no round for the working girl of today, not even a bottom round. There is no economic reason why women should be forced into the factory or shop. Employers argue they can obtain the services of women for less money than they can that of a man. I don't doubt that, and I don't blame employers for wanting to have their labor done at the cheapest cost. But the more I study this labor question, the greater am I impressed with the fact that human machinery is ever on the decrease. If an old loom wears out or a wheel breaks, it costs $20,000 probably to repair the damage, but if a woman breaks down, she is cast out and twenty fresh others step up to take her place at the same old starvation wages.
In 1893, Valesh spoke at the Chicago World's Fair before an audience of 25,000 union-members.
Political career In 1888, at the age of 22, Valesh ran as a Democrat for the Minneapolis School Board. She was the first woman to ever run for the position and did not win. Although women were allowed to vote in school board elections, some women voters considered her too working-class.
Valesh spoke on behalf of the Farmer's Alliance during the 1890 elections, and was subsequently elected by Farmer's Alliance members to the position of state lecturer for the Minnesota chapter in January, 1891. Later that year, she was elected assistant national lecturer for the Alliance.
In 1896, she introduced populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan when he campaigned in Minnesota.
Return to the East Coast Shortly after her reporting trip to Europe in 1895, Valesh moved to Washington D.C. and lived with Samuel Gompers and his wife, Sophie. She worked at the AFL head office and continued reporting.
Muckraking reporter By 1897, through a connection at the Minneapolis Tribune, Valesh was able to secure a low-level reporting job at the New York Journal, a William Randolph Hearst publication. She moved to New York City and worked in the city room of the paper. At first, the job was a struggle. Valesh was an outsider with few connections and was paid only if her pieces appeared in print, and then only by the number of inches of space the print took up. Although she was able to get some small pieces published, by the end of her first three months, she believed her position at the paper was becoming untenable. One of her editors, Charles Edwards, was against women reporters, saying of her, according to Valesh, that "I just don't like a woman on the paper, that's all. I've got nothing against that girl." Another editor, she discovered, had given her an "impossible assignment" that several other reporters had already failed to do, with the plan of firing her for cause when she could not complete it. The assignment was to identify a young woman who had committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid and write an article about her. Through a connection, Valesh was able to discover the identity of the woman and write the article, saving her job and paving the way for better subsequent assignments.