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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Elizabeth Faue. Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 249. $35.00.
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As the "new" labor history grows older, it has been made wiser by recent interdisciplinary efforts to understand the cultural formation of identity, the meanings of class, and constructions of subjectivity. This book reflects those efforts as it explores the life of Eva Valesh, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century working-class labor journalist whose writings many women workers, along with their middle-class allies, found to be "calculated" and "cunningly devised." As the socialist Theresa Malkeil wrote of Valesh in her fictionalized account of the 1909 uprising of 30,000 shirtwaist makers, "there ain't no worse plague than a false labor leader" (p. 178). How to understand the career of this labor activist who "dyed her hair red into the eighties, smoked black twisted cigars, and wore green silk pajamas" (p. 1), if not through the lens of shifting class meanings and the contradictory operations of working-class desire and gender identity? |
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