SYMPOSIUM
Retooling the Class Factory: United States Labour
History after Marx, Montgomery, and Postmodernism

Elizabeth Faue ^*

For nearly a generation labour historians in the United States have faced the contradiction of working in a field where scholarship seems to grow exponentially, but the audience declines; where passion about class solidarity blossoms forth, but with no clear or unified objective for that solidarity; and where the most exciting developments - integrating gender, race, and culture into labour history - are viewed as undermining class analysis. As new questions about race, gender, and language have arisen, older certainties about class experience and identity have slowly eroded. In this context, it is hard to predict or envision the scholarly future of the field, because no one knows what to make of the road ahead. Offering to 'bring class back in', refocus labour history on the narrative of the liberal welfare state, or reassert the primacy of institutions in labour history does not answer the needs of the field. 1	1
I come to these questions having spent the last decade organising a labour history conference and having completed my second book, a biography of labour journalist Eva McDonald Valesh and a study of the political culture of labour that she helped to create. 2 In the process, I came to realise the inadequacy of our understanding not so much of the objective conditions of class but of its subjective experience. Valesh came to her career of labour publicist as a working-class daughter. Throughout her life, she constantly straddled class boundaries and identities, and she made her living precisely from negotiating the intersection between class worlds. There has been little effort in labour history to explore the range and malleability of class identity and experience. Retooling the class factory to understand such lives entails not only refitting labour history scholarship to show how class has been 're-tooled' and reproduced, but also retooling our scholarly production in how we think about class.	2
More and more, class to me looks less like a structure and more like an empty vessel into which we pour content. It exists even now in mainstream American culture as an origin story that has lost its claim on the popular imagination. Since the dismantling of the Soviet bloc, it has lost in scholarly sectors as well. The response of some scholars has been to reassert the power of Marxist theory and the social history of labour most associated with David Montgomery while blaming postmodernism for undermining class analysis. For other historians, it is simpler to reject class analysis. This essay is an attempt to summarise my own current thoughts on the subject. By following the injunction of Emily Dickinson, that famous labour historian, to 'tell the truth, but tell it slant, success in circuit lies', I hope to arrive at the future of labour history. Let me lead you back through a personal past.	3
In December of 2000 I was in my parents' home. On the table were some gifts my mother intended to give me as part of my inheritance. There was a certificate of confirmation in Norwegian, dated 1911, from Utica Norsk Lutheran Church in Crawford County, Wisconsin. There was a confirmation photograph of my maternal grandfather Melvin. On the table also lay a copy of The Power of Christ and Other Stories by the Reverend Martin Finstad, translated from the Norwegian. If one looked at the photograph, one could find the good Reverend in his high collar, mutton chops, and a short moustache. Among the other treasures the table held was a photograph of my mother's confirmation. Mrs Finstad stood among the well-wishers, and a card from her, in a clear hand, was there. The folder with the confirmation class revealed shadows where the acid of the paper burned through. Before my mother handed it to me, she pointed out the several boys confirmed at Victory Lutheran Church in 1937 who died in World War II and several girls who, like my mother, married and raised children. My parents' wedding photograph and a rose-coloured candy dish were added to the box as I packed. I spent that week listening to my mother's stories, and those of my father, and have tried to come to terms both with their illnesses and with their histories. I am to pass these memories on. In my family, I am the kin-keeper, the one who holds the family keys until another storyteller comes along. Being an historian by trade as well as by avocation, I find that the duty to pass stories down only increases with time and knowledge. I know as well that the items I have been given and the stories I hear don't fit the labour history I teach or that most people know.	4
What does all of this have to do with the future of labour history? We have, I think, reached the limits of what the older understanding of labour history that we have inherited from the Progressive Era might teach us about class. To remake labour history, we need to grow beyond three aspects of our legacy which I have summarised as 'Marx, Montgomery, and postmodernism'. Already we have abandoned analysis that focuses solely on the structural relations of class. It wasn't merely cultural Marxism in the voice of E.P. Thompson or Herbert Gutman that drove the nail into this particular coffin. Rather, in a world where skepticism greets structural explanations and predictive models, any theory that posits determining factors is doomed. Moreover, we have come up against the limitations not just of Marx as economist but of Marx as historian. As shown in The Eighteenth Brumaire , the three single most important weaknesses of Marx were his prejudices against politics, community (encompassing religion and ethnicity), and gender. Although the Eighteenth Brumaire remains one of the most frequently cited texts, the reinvigorated labour history of the past decade has upended Marx to place his aversions at the centre of the field.	5
Second, we are beginning to move beyond the work of the first generation of postwar labour historians and its most influential practitioner, David Montgomery. Collectively, this scholarly cohort sought to move away from the institutional slant of labour economists most identified with the Commons School. 3 Despite their revisioning, Montgomery, Melvyn Dubofsky, and David Brody provided an extension - arguably more radical and/or contemporary - of that earlier work. In contrast to Herbert Gutman, who sought to bring community into the heart of the discussion, their work focussed on strikes, labour unions, and elections as the centre of a politicised labour history. If they sought to document and tell the story of ordinary working people, still emphasised political developments, formal public events, and the public workplace. In effect, the work produced in the 1970s and 1980s was strong on institutions while shortchanging culture, community, and the subjective dimensions of class such as identity, gender, and racial politics. The neo-institutional focus was true of some women's labour history as well. 4 Reading most of this work reveals, moreover, the same distrust of community, gender, and politics as Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and thus replicates that work's shortcomings. While some scholars worked at the boundaries of labour history to incorporate women, African American history, religion and community into its narrative, 5 a more common approach was to retreat into neo-institutional studies of labour unions and the state, leaving behind the little-researched and difficult dimensions of class identity or the subjective meaning of these experiences. Simply adding new subjects to broaden the field does not address the imbalance in labour studies that sees women, minority workers, and communities as peripheral to the history of white, working-class men and their struggles. The influence of Montgomery's generation has meant more but not necessarily better institutional histories on the one hand, and the marginalisation of gender and culture on the other.	6
Reading most of this work reveals, moreover, the same distrust of community, gender, and politics as Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and thus replicates that work's shortcomings. While some scholars worked at the boundaries of labour history to incorporate women, African American history, religion and community into its narrative, 5 a more common approach was to retreat into neo-institutional studies of labour unions and the state, leaving behind the little-researched and difficult dimensions of class identity or the subjective meaning of these experiences. Simply adding new subjects to broaden the field does not address the imbalance in labour studies that sees women, minority workers, and communities as peripheral to the history of white, working-class men and their struggles. The influence of Montgomery's generation has meant more but not necessarily better institutional histories on the one hand, and the marginalisation of gender and culture on the other.	7
An important illustration of labour historians' continued dependence on older models is Joshua Freeman's Working Class New York. 6 An intensely personal and regional account, Freeman's book, despite a few bows in the direction of popular culture, is basically an institutional study of New York labour politics. While it opens up discussion of the era after World War II with an argument about metropolitan unionism, the book ironically reveals contempt for the local - as opposed to the cosmopolitan, demonstrates a conscious refusal of gender as a contributing factor in shaping working-class history, and employs an oddly truncated view of politics. A quick look at Freeman's approach, which primarily consists of positivist readings of contemporary newspapers and union documents, leads us to the methodological problems of the new labour history. There is, in fact, no critical intervention for source limitations. Freeman willingly accepts 'working-class experience' in the terms that the contemporary labour reporting sets down, albeit framed by his own political stance. He declines to ask questions about what is absent from the tale or from his evidence. When Freeman encounters the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union, a union of overwhelming female membership controlled by the men who lead it, he does not inquire about union discrimination; he asserts that women did not want to be union leaders. When he retells the story of a union election in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, between a man running for office and a woman candidate, he simply asserts that the woman was contentious and the man more in tune with labour leadership. The municipal employees' union is comprised, like the teachers' union, of predominantly female and minority members. While Freeman points out that the working-class of New York is not predominantly industrial, and incorporates municipal workers as a central factor in the city's labour politics, he accepts, without question, the construction of 'working-class New York' as masculine and even, to a great extent, industrial and white. Ultimately, Freeman ignores the fact that the New York working class was and is disproportionately female and increasingly composed of racial minorities. And yet, the story of women and minority workers is not simply an interesting sidelight, but an integral factor in how working-class politics 'worked' in New York. By accepting without question the 'story' of the working class as told in the rhetoric of journalism and of the contemporary labour movement, Freeman winds up with a history of working-class New York that may have the blessing of neoinstitutionalists but remains flawed by the dream of unified class experience. Only by questioning the methodological limitations and founding assumptions of this institutional - and historically white and male - perspective can we shift the ground of labour history. 7	8
Third, there is labour history's encounter with postmodernism. Beginning in the 1970s, historian Joan Scott and other feminist scholars addressed the flaws and shortcomings of the new labour history. Scott's response, later published as Gender and the Politics of History , began as an attempt to deal with the methodological problems of labour history of which we spoke above. She wanted to understand how silences developed about women workers despite documentation that they had, after all, been there at the making of the working class. Her work, in exploring the discursive strategies of working-class protest and labour movements, revealed how sources, selectively read with the purpose of constructing a radical working-class history (read male and white), ignored evidence and helped to make invisible working-class women's past. Gender ideology, Scott argued, could be used not merely to define women as domestic creatures and men as public actors but to construct politics and history in male terms. Those influenced by Scott, including myself, 8 subsequently explored how labour politics defined class, solidarity, and community as masculine, even as the terms and politics of class shifted over time.	9
After re-discovering the social construction of reality as the most down-to-earth version of postmodernism, however, labour historians have retreated from the postmodern posture that all experience is mediated by the medium (in most cases language) in which it is captured. To begin with, the solution of postmodernism had created its own problems. Not, as left critics had it, that 'there is no there there' (materialist reaction to the linguistic turn), but rather that postmodernism failed to significantly alter the narrative of labour history. The very language of postmodernism antagonised some labour historians. Even writing that was relatively 'jargon-free' was characterised as 'gender history', and thus another field. Isolating studies of labour ideology, 'mainstream' labour historians saw them as tangential to the 'real' history of the working classes. Yet, labour history did not escape from the encounter unscathed. The textual analysis that was the innocent route to postmodern scholarship remains entrenched for good or ill in labour and working class history, whether in analysing metaphors, representations, and tropes in the language of labour or through the discursive analysis. 9 Since postmodernism as an approach to labour and working class history has failed, and certainly the militant resurgence of neo-institutionalism indicates that, we need to ask what lessons we can learn.	10
My own response has been to return to exploring the subjective dimension of the working-class past in order to rethink the origins, meaning, and consequences of 'class' in history and historical scholarship. For the last ten years I have been committed to looking at what Carolyn Kay Steedman evoked in her book, Landscape for a Good Woman , namely, the development of class-consciousness as a 'learned position'. As Steedman argued, children, who have not yet entered the realm of production, 'still reach understandings of social position, exclusion, and difference'. 10 Thus, class consciousness as 'a way of understanding the world that can be conveyed to children' has been absent from even the new labour history. To get at the subjective dimensions requires us to explore kinship, education, work, community, leisure, and the state as the font not only of how class is formed, but how it is culturally and materially transmitted. 11	11
By following on these insights, we come to recognise that friendship and kinship networks and communities offer individuals their first and only continuous experience of class. To begin with, for most members of the working class - both male and female - experienced sporadic unemployment, frequent changes in jobs and/or multiple jobs, and periods of inactivity due to illness, accident, or family need. As the Lynds pointed out in their classic work, Middletown , interrupted employment defined the working class. Work experience and sporadic workplace organisation and resistance have been for the most part episodic and non-continuous for most working class people 12 while community origins and family identities persist and retain continuity. The sporadic nature of work experience thus underlines the importance of social reproduction for studying class, and that approach remains, for me, the best model for a revitalised labour history. 13	12
The concept of social reproduction leads me to the question which frames the narrative of Cheri Register's recent book, Packinghouse Daughter : 'How did workers become working class?' Because labour historians have so often assumed that the workers are already at the factory gate, dressed for work, fitted for their station in life, we don't often consider how they got there. Following the trail that led from respectable farm families through misfortune and alcoholism to the factory door, we might start not from a structural understanding of class as having been made in the relations of production (that both are historical and yet at the same time never changing) but from the subjective experiences and material artifacts of class. What struck me in reading Register's book, emerges from the family life stories I have so recently gathered, and surfaced in the biography of Eva Valesh I have just finished is that winding up in the working class is a contingent outcome, not a structurally determined one. Exigencies such as accident, misfortune, miscalculation, personal failing and collective panic, the precarious hold on social status and economic security - neither the new nor the old labour history paid much attention to how uncertainty and risk shaped class identity and experience. Uneven attachment to wage work, uncertain connections to working-class identity and politics, and the cross-class and trans-class character of many working class lives complicate how we understand class and interrupt the narrative of labour history in a way unrecognised by Marx, Montgomery, or the postmodernists.	13
There is, after all, the Reverend Finstad to explain. My maternal grandfather, Melvin, had been orphaned at age 12 when his mother died in a fire in Minneapolis. His father, a Norwegian cabinetmaker who had emigrated to the states in the 1880s, abandoned Mel and his sisters and brothers to the good graces of farm families who took the children in. Mel worked for a family in southwest Wisconsin's tobacco country. In those years, he was treated not as a son or nephew but as a farmhand. The farmer must have been religious, because he let my grandfather go to church. There he was educated and confirmed by Reverend Finstad. The Lutheran minister, seeing a devout and kind young man, took him under his wing and acted as a father to the orphaned boy. The ethnic and religious community (Norwegian immigrants dominated the region), the memories of his early family life, and the kindness of this particular minister fostered in my grandfather the desire for more education and a stable married life. In many ways, it was the difference between a man defined by poverty with an indelible and inescapable working-class identity and a man, like my grandfather, whose aspirations for education and 'desire for the things of the earth' (as Steedman would have it) were passed down to his children and grandchildren. Not being able to forget his origins in a respectable immigrant middle class, he became a worker, but a worker with a difference. A wobbly, a farmer-labourite, and one of the original members both of a church and of a public employees union, to what class could he be assigned? What class identity did he impart and transmit to his heirs?	14
We have to follow the trail further. My grandfather Melvin married Myrtle, the orphaned (again, abandoned to distant and cruel relations when her mother died) daughter of a failed farmer. As a practical nurse (effectively, a domestic servant), she earned enough money to go to normal school in Madison, South Dakota, where Melvin met her when he was working on a threshing crew. He enlisted in the army during the early days of American involvement in World War I. A few years after the war was over, Myrtle abandoned South Dakota and her degree. She went to Minneapolis, where she reunited with my grandfather after he had served his tour of duty. They lived in the city in a small house, raised two children, and bought a second house with his veteran's bonus.	15
After many years away from the tobacco farms on which he had laboured, my grandfather still returned to the region to visit his sisters Margaret and Anna and the Reverend Finstad. The man who had fostered my grandfather through his difficult adolescence kept tabs on his life. He came to celebrate the confirmation of Mel's daughter and sent a gift to her for her wedding. The ten or fifteen dollars that bought the candy dish which she gifted to me, was a sign of stability and domesticity but also of mobility. Having been abandoned to the rural working class, my grandfather did not rise significantly above his station. He worked as a stationery engineer and janitor for more than 30 years. And yet, his daughter wore good clothing and married in a church, and he owned a house with a fireplace, a dining room, and an upstairs. His children took music lessons, finished high school, and read books. His small bank account paid for some part of his eldest grandsons' tuition at college. This is a story of immigrant and rural working class origins and intergenerational aspiration and mobility. Where does it fit in Montgomery's Fall of the House of Labor ?	16
My family's origin story has another source in the life of my paternal grandfather and grandmother. I have a picture of them, respectable second-generation French (Alsatian) and German townspeople in rural Minnesota in 1919. When my grandfather Louis was kicked out of his parents' house at the age of eight (his father had trouble supporting his many children on a failing farmstead), Louis taught himself to read and learned the skills he needed. Because his father had once been a property owner, his way was not as difficult as perhaps it might have been. Louis lived with an uncle and grew up around his family, including the progressively alienated brothers and sisters who abandoned the town one by one. My grandfather became a good mechanic and carpenter. After being hired at the creamery in the small Catholic town of St Michael, he married a propertied farmer's daughter, Lillie. He quickly advanced in the business and he built a house in town with the help of his brother Bill. Soon Louis became manager of the creamery. He and my grandmother lived a prosperous life with their six children until the agricultural depression hit after World War I.	17
Losing one child to the Spanish influenza (the town of St Michael witnessed two to three funerals a week in the fall of 1918), my grandparents were still reeling with grief when Louis was fired from his position. Times were hard. Someone's son needed the job, and he was the only Protestant in a Catholic town. Louis reentered the itinerant working class at age 50 and took his tools on the road. He became a mechanic who traveled to creameries throughout the region and sent back whatever he thought he could to my grandmother and the children, whom he had moved to the Twin Cities. My father, his fourth son, was born in Minneapolis just months after his brother's death. He grew up, unlike his siblings, as the son of a worker, not a manager.	18
Listening to my father's story, I can hear him bitterly remember that his mother died at age 70 on a morning when he was busy working. She was still employed at that age in a hospital laundry, washing the linens in hot bleached water and ironing sheets on the great mangle. She had taken up the job in order to help support the family and enable them to buy the four-room house they lived in. One morning, while Louis and Lillie were washing up the dishes, she died of a heart attack. Poor health care, poor nutrition, and the strain of work had led the way. When my grandmother died, my aunts found a black rose in her drawer, a memorial of her son's death forty years before. When my grandfather died seven years after his wife's death, the house for which my grandmother sweated was sold. Her seven children each received $2,400 as an inheritance from their father. My father also received, from his mother, a ruby and clear glass sugar bowl. It was, he told me when he gave it to me, his favorite thing.	19
Money, uncertainty, and risk determined much of working-class experience; so too did the response of working-class men and women toward these uncertainties --responses that varied from my maternal grandfather's tight hold on his coin purse to the resignation and grief with which my paternal grandfather, a talented mechanic, accepted his itinerant round. My paternal grandmother's lifelong grief over a son's death may not be markedly different from a middle-class woman's grief, but that death was associated with unemployment and loss of social standing. My other grandmother's good china, a prized possession, was regularly on view; my mother's china sat in a cabinet until her death, for she had no dining room in which to display it. These are responses unassociated with the class feeling of union and class politics. Yet material goods serve as talismans of and markers in emotional history of the working class. Recently I read letters my father, Vincent, had written to my mother, Yvonne, during World War II, and they too made me see how class affects the private history of the working classes. In a sometimes pleading, sometime defiant tone, my father asked his future mother-in-law to consent to his marrying her daughter. The stumbling block was an engagement ring. My father wrote:	20
[Yvonne] also said, that you said, I never loved her because I never bought her a ring you know as well as I, that I never could buy her the kind of ring I wanted her to have, I always had hopes of getting a job good enough so I could buy her what I thought she deserved. A boy or a man should go with a girl until he is sure he loves her before buying a ring, even if it isn't so good because this is a different situation. I am in the army drafted you know and I think a ring should be in this case enough. 14
Many of the letters intermix fears about the war with stories of camp life and assertions of love. The frequent subtext was my father's uncertainties about his education and whether he was good enough to provide for the woman he loved. My mother's letters show her as eager, youthful, jealous and then affectionate, pleading and then demanding. To the extent that class set the horizons of their expectations and their circumstances (he a private in the army, she a clerk in a store), it shaped their emotional lives as well.	21
What concept of class provides an understanding of these circumstances? To get at questions of class identity, experience, and even the origins of class politics, we must see class not as a firm structure or unitary process but as unstable by definition. It isn't just that means of class identity shift from epoch to epoch but rather that individuals rework and recreate class relations and location over the life course. While there are political organisations and social institutions that define themselves as 'working-class', they do not, generally, represent all working class people. We must consider, once again, both the dynamic relationship between a class in itself (who belongs to a structurally defined working class?) and a class for itself (such as an exclusionary labour movement) and what labour leader Samuel Gompers called 'class feeling'- the emotional context of class that is the prerequisite but not sufficient condition of class politics. The suppleness and variability of class requires us to move to a definition of class that is sensitive to such gradations - a concept that the progressive era labeled 'social distinction'. That term encompasses class phenomena more complex than fixed positions within social hierarchies to show the shadings and gradations of status and honor, money and power. 'Social distinction' provides, in effect, a more finely tuned concept of how class difference is both constructed and attributed.	22
At the beginning of the twentieth century, working class men and women understood that the new relationship toward work - one defined by declining independence in labour and deteriorating skill and increasing dependence on daily or weekly wages or contract payments - gave rise to new social distinctions. Similarly, in working-class communities, working-class people drew social distinctions along racial and ethnic lines even as tensions developed between old and new immigrant workers. A working-class history sensitive to the gradations of class inherent in social distinctions would stress the divisions between blue-collar and white-collar workers, the political and social differences between ethnic groups and religions within working-class communities, and the new layers of control and management over their lives. It also would highlight how social elites and social workers intruded into workers' leisure and community lives and disrupted traditional social distinctions. These changes gave new meaning to the experience of being 'working class'. 15 We need as well to add the factor of memory. The memories of 'how we became upper class' and 'how we became working class' with all their gradations and distinctions are an important part of how class worked and continues to work.	23
When I look at the family portraits, these early ones taken in professional photographers studios, I start to ask how the picture of an immiserated working class, 'born at work', in the words of Robert Bruno's Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown , 16 arises. Bruno grounds class solidarity and class identity firmly and exclusively in the workplace, in seeming contradiction to his earlier discussion of how his own family origin mattered. Yet, work and the workplace have changed in the course of the twentieth century. Work is now more informational and service-oriented than industrial. It is more subcontracted and part-time than union contract labour. The labour force is increasingly and soon to be majority female; it is not just Midwestern and industrial but southern, public, and clerical. Shifts in work, such as the introduction of new industries or deindustrialisation, are part of the subjective experience of class. At the same time, however, as we contemplate rewriting labour history to include subjectivity at work, we should capture not only the steel factories and unions of Bruno's book and those of Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel , but also the familial and community context where the social reproduction of class relations begins and ends. Finally, we need to correct the lapse that Bruno and others have made in writing books to celebrate working-class fathers in which women are almost entirely absent. It seems ridiculous, but in 2001 we must continue to assert that women are working-class too.	24
As I compare the glass candy dish and crystal sugar bowl, the book written by Finstad, the small fragments of linen bought at great cost to a family without sufficient means for health care or education, I realise that all of these signs of respectability don't fit within the portrait which United States labour history now provides - even those subjective accounts by Bruno and Metzgar and the multitude of left autobiographies that have recently been published. 17 It isn't just because the GI bill or the union movement laid the basis for mobility out of the working class, but the character and thus the very instability of class identity and class position made certain that for each generation the working class was born anew.	25
Work has certainly changed, but so too have families. The ethnic make-up of the labouring classes has shifted to include more Asian, Hispanic, and African Americans, and the growing numbers of Arab, Persian, Russian, and East Indian immigrants suggest the picture has become increasingly complicated. The key thing that we must remember is that those consigned to the working class, those who work for wages, own few tools of their trades, walk home with small paychecks, and participate in a world of increasingly cultural diversity, have found their ways into the proletariat from the peasant and artisan past and from farms, family misfortunes, catastrophes and accidents. They have arrived not just at the factory door but also at the internet, the home office, and the drive-up window.	26
What finally can we learn from my family stories - or that Eva Valesh? What strikes me now is that mothers are as important as fathers in the path to the working class. Even while Valesh constantly claimed to be the 'daughter of a workingman' and ignored her mother's influence, her life in rebellion against the constraints of working-class women's lives was undoubtedly shaped by her mother's upwardly mobile aspirations. Throughout her career, Valesh combined labour advocacy with mainstream journalism. Early on she wrote for the St Paul Globe and Minneapolis Tribune as well as reform journals for the Farmers' Alliance, the Knights of Labour, and the American Federation of Labor. Valesh's role as a woman labour organiser and writer opened up opportunities for her to work for the Hearst newspaper in New York ( New York Journal-American ) and later to serve as writer and assistant editor for the American Federationist under Samuel Gompers. She finally served as a publicist for elite women reformers and edited a journal for women's club members. In all of these positions, Valesh proved herself capable of combining an evolving style characteristic of mass circulation newspapers with the partisan engagement required of labour reformers. As journalist, editor, and publicist for labour, the Democratic party, and social reform, Valesh relied on a presentation of self that drew upon her own origins in the working-class even as it celebrated the skills and talents that freed her, as Ignatius Donnelly once wrote, 'the living grave of the factory room'. 18	27
By virtue of her work, her social ascent, and her gender, Valesh's life exhibited the social tensions facing those who crossed the class divide and the contradictions of women who entered male-dominated trades and professions. In journalism, labour activism, and politics - even in her youth as an apprentice typesetter, Valesh made her living in the public world of men. She was trained as a skilled worker at a time when most women working were engaged in domestic service work or semi-skilled factory labour and she was a prominent labour organiser at a time when labour unions routinely restricted women's access to unionised work. At the same time, she showed the same boldness in crossing over to the respectable politics of social reform and women's club work. Eva's story is about the journey she made as a working-class daughter who found home among the daughters of plenty. Still, she accepted that her significance lay not solely in individual achievement but as representative of a type of experience, that of the working-class son or daughter destined to rise above her station. She was, in her own words, a 'talented girl', one who stood apart from the lot of workers and earned the opportunity to rise above the shop floor; but she was not unique. Such stories emerged in many of Valesh's reporting of working women's lives, in the tenement and in the factory and above all, in their seeking an education for a life beyond the factory door. 19	28
We can find in working-class biographies and the family stories I have told how class identity is malleable and capable of absorbing central contradictions: aspirations for mobility and loyalty to the labour movement; memories of a better past, and hopes for a better future that co-exist with getting along with a none-too-pleasant present; how one might strive for social mobility through education and abandon it when the road to the middle class becomes too lonely, too rough, or too costly. Understanding that individuals can be trans-class and have loyalties and lives that place them on the margins of working-class experience, ultimately alters the narrative of labour history.	29
These stories and meditations return us to the basic questions with which I began my story. We find, by sifting through of subjective tales of the working-class past, that material goods beyond bread and subsistence mattered; that pride came in the purchase of a crystal candy dish or an engagement ring; that social distinctions (such as that between an employed municipal worker and his unemployed and drafted future son-in-law) played a role in class experience; that the political cast of class relations altered class experience, and that class is unstable by definition. The important questions that are yet to be answered are these - one of origins (how did workers become working class?), of definition (how is class defined in the midst of social and economic uncertainty?), what does class mean (the subjective experience of class), and how class identity is constructed (through self-advertisement and the public visibility of labour politics, as well as cultural expression). All of these questions exist at the level of the individual, of the institution, and of the community. The connections between them call for research and writing strategies that get beyond the institutional and beyond the level of a poorly defined working-class community to the underlying issues of how class is reproduced and shaped within a changing world.	30
Endnotes * This paper is based on a presentation at a symposium organised by Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney on 12 October 2001. 1. See Howard Kimeldorf, 'Bringing the Unions Back In (Or Why We Need a New Old Labor History', Labor History , vol. 32, no. 1, 1991, pp. 91-103; Scott G. McNall, Rhonda F. Levine, Rick Fantasia, Bringing Class Back in Contemporary and Historical Perspective , Westview Press, Boulder, 1991; Ira Katznelson, 'The 'Bourgeois' Dimension: A Provocation about Institutions, Politics and the Future of Labor History', International Labor and Working Class History , no. 46, 1994, pp. 7-32, among others. 2. Elizabeth Faue, Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism , Ithaca, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2002. 3. Elizabeth Faue, 'Reproducing the Class Struggle: Class, Gender and Social Reproduction in U.S. Labor History' in Irmgard Steinisch (ed.), Labor History and the Labor Movement: Recent Trends in the United States and Canada , Mitteilungsblatt zur Erforschung der europaeischen Arbeiterbewegung series, Bochum Institute, Ruhr-Universitaet, Germany, 2001, pp. 47-66. 4. Ava Baron (ed.), Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor , Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991. 5. See the work of Peter Rachleff, Kimberly Phillips, Tera Hunter, Beth Bates, and, to a lesser extent, Eric Arnesen. The latter's rejection of community as an important factor in workers' lives leads him into the opposite direction to Rachleff, et al . 6. Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II , New York: Metropolitan Books, New York, 2000. 7. For a study that grounds the longstanding antipathy of history to women's past, see Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999. 8. See 'The 'Dynamo of Change': Gender and Solidarity in the American Labour Movement of the 1930s', Gender and History , vol. 1, no. 2, 1989, pp. 138-158; see also the essays in Baron (ed.), Work Engendered , for examples of women's labour history that employed Scott to redefine labour history. On masculinity defining class politics, see as well the wonderful book by Julia Swindells and Lisa Jardine, What's Left? Women in Culture and the Labour Movement Routledge, London, 1990. 9. For an example of a recent work that relies, perhaps to the neglect of archival research, on a postmodern reading of texts, see Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century , Columbia University Press, New York, 1999. 10. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman , Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1987, pp. 13-14. 11. Ibid , p. 123. 12. We might emphasise the high level of geographic and occupational mobility noted in Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in the Nineteenth Century City , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1964; Charles Stephenson, '"There's Plenty Waitin' at the Gates": Mobility, Opportunity, and the American Worker' in Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher (eds), Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working Class History , State University of New York Press, Albany, 1986, pp. 72-91, and the high rates of unemployment documented in Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts , Cambridge University Press, New York,1986; Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture , Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1929. 13. Faue, 'Reproducing the Class Struggle'; see also Kathleen A. Brown and Elizabeth Faue, 'Social Bonds, Sexual Politics and Political Community on the US Left, 1920s-1940s', Left History , vol. 7, no. 1, 2001, pp. 7-42. 14. Vincent to Myrtle S., 23 December, 1941, letter in the author's possession. 15. May King Van Rensselaer, The Social Ladder , Henry Holt, New York, 1924. 16. Robert Bruno, Steel Worker Alley , Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1999. 17. See Brown and Faue, 'Social Bonds'. 18. Donnelly diary, 18 June 18 1890, Ignatius Donnelly papers, microfilm edition, reel 147, fr. 464, Minnesota Historical Society. 19. In a talk to club women, Valesh wrote revealingly, 'I ask you to keep your eyes open for the occasional talented girl among the workers'. Eva McDonald Valesh, 'Women in Welfare Work', American Federationist ,15 April 1908, pp. 282-84.

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