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LORNA BENSON: It's All Things Considered on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Lorna Benson. The late 1800s was a turbulent time in Minnesota, a tide of popular discontent with the power of the railway magnates, bankers, and corporations, led to the rise of organizations, like the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor, to fight for the ordinary American worker. In this segment of our Minnesota Century series, the story of a young journalist, Eva Mcdonald, her work exposing the harsh conditions endured by women in the new factories propelled her into the forefront of the very male world of labor politics.

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22-year-old Eva McDonald was an unlikely labor leader. The daughter of a carpenter, she came to Minnesota from Maine with her family when she was nine years old. MacDonald took a job as a typesetter after high school. But it was her work with the local drama group that jumpstarted her reporting career.

The editor of the Saint Paul Globe heard McDonald was a good actress. He proposed she work as an undercover reporter in the local factories to expose working conditions for women. McDonald's first article called Among Girls Who Toil appeared in March 1888. It was followed by nearly 50 more. Elizabeth Faue, a professor of history at Wayne State University is writing a biography of Eva McDonald.

ELIZABETH FAUE: She dressed in old rags appeared, I'm sure, kind of waif-like. And because she's so small, even though she's 22 years old, she probably looks about 15. Shows up at the factory door and applies for a job and does her investigating by literally going into these places, sitting down at the lunch bench, and talking to the women who work in the factory.

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EVA MCDONALD: When I got to the factory, I found myself breathing an atmosphere whose distinguishing characteristics were a smell of new cloth, dust, heat, and sewer gas. "Where does the sewer gas come from?" I asked as an extra-strong whiff made me feel faint. A stout German girl nearby said, "Oh, it isn't very bad now. But most every day, the water isn't running in the toilets for an hour or so at a time, but of course, they're used just the same. The smell is awful then. Some of the girls get sick almost every day."

LORNA BENSON: At the North Star Woolen Mil in Minneapolis, a blanket factory, McDonald found that women had to work for 10 hours a day with no ear protection against the deafening roar of 83 looms. At the Shotwell, Clerihew and Lothman's clothing factory in Minneapolis, women were paid just $3 a week. At the time, a week stay in the cheapest boarding house cost $2.50. Shortly after, Eva MacDonald's first article appeared. The seamstresses at the clothing factory went on strike.

SPEAKER 1: We are forced to strike. My wages lately were not enough to pay my board. I managed to exist on $1 a week. I was taken sick, and the doctors said I was simply starving myself at that rate and must have better food. That's the reason I am in the strike.

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LORNA BENSON: McDonald covered the strike for her paper, and it was at one of the strike meetings that she first met John McGaughey, a prominent Knights of Labor leader. McGaughey heard her speak to the women and was impressed with her boldness. He started to tutor her in public speaking, taking her around to union meetings where she could try out her voice. Again, Elizabeth Faue--

ELIZABETH FAUE: She got up and absolutely dazzled people because she tells them relevant stories. She keeps the story probably pretty simple. She speaks in their language. She uses examples from their lives.

LORNA BENSON: After a year of mentoring, Eva McDonald gave her first public speech in Duluth. Her topic, the need for women workers to organize, was an unusual one in the early days of the labor movement.

EVA MCDONALD: A girl's living costs almost as much as a man's, and she likes as much amusement and refinement and other good things as a man. But if a woman does the same work as a man, she gets paid a third or half less than him. The men organize and benefit by it. Why shouldn't the working girl?

LORNA BENSON: McDonald quickly became part of the inner circle of labor leaders in Minnesota. Despite her young age, she attended labor study groups with the men and began speaking on her own from the back of her father's grocery wagon. In the late 1880s, the leaders of the Minnesota farmer and labor groups joined forces in a political alliance to elect their own third-party candidates. At the time, Ignatious Donnelley was president of the Minnesota Farmers' Alliance, a former Lieutenant Governor and Congressman. He was also one of the most well-loved speakers in the state.

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Donnelley was impressed by MacDonald's speaking ability. In the summer of 1890, he asked her to travel around with him to help recruit workers for his third-party movement. He recorded in his diary his impression of McDonald as they drove by wagon to a meeting near Winona.

IGNATIOUS DONNELLEY: The great variety of scenery, the different scents that fill the air, all made the drive most enjoyable. I quoted poetry by the yard. Miss McDonald is a very bright girl quick and apt, but not poetical. Her mind bearing the traces of the hard battle by which she raised herself from the living grave of the factory room.

LORNA BENSON: MacDonald's youth and down-to-earth speaking style made her a highlight of the program at farmers meetings. Donnelley began to take note of how the women gathered around her in, as he described it, a curious exhibition of feminine sympathy. Again, historian Elizabeth Faue--

ELIZABETH FAUE: She was particularly popular among farm audiences because in the 1880s, many farm daughters were coming to the Twin Cities for a few years at least to work in the factories or the shops. These farm families were absolutely terrified for what might happen to their daughters, and here's a woman who has experience as a working woman, who knows what the cities are like, and there are some reports of people literally coming up to her later, the mothers of these girls, the fathers, and crowding around her on the platform, and just completely connecting to her and wanting to ask her how it's like to be a working woman in the Twin Cities.

LORNA BENSON: It soon became apparent to Ignatious Donnelley that the young Eva McDonald was not the impressionable girl he had initially thought.

ELIZABETH FAUE: Donnelley tended to think of himself like Jack McGaughey, but she clearly didn't have the same affection for him. But like Jack McGaughey, thought of himself as a mentor for Eva McDonald, this young girl. He was going to teach her how to be a good orator and a good politician. I think the reports from the roads suggest she's already very-- does well in both categories. And he actually, I believe, starts to grow jealous of her.

LORNA BENSON: Eva MacDonald's fearlessness and her rapport with the farmers began to rankle Donnelley and his followers. In particular, her speeches became increasingly frank. At the Alliance state convention in 1890, before an audience of 500 men she berated the Farmers' Alliance for failing to allow women as full members and overlooking the special hardships of the farm life.

EVA MCDONALD: If I were convinced that the women of the rural districts of this state are carefully educated, well clothed, well fed, and not overworked, I wouldn't say a word about their absence from the convention. But if the average farmer is a slave, then his wife is a slave of a slave. Her position is fixed by his and is always a little the worse of the two.

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LORNA BENSON: Even worse for Ignatious Donnelley and his faction, Eva began to challenge their leadership. Much to his annoyance, farmers at the state convention nominated her for the key post of state lecturer. Although he pressured her to withdraw, MacDonald refused and went on to win with a 2/3 majority.

ELIZABETH FAUE: They're furious. I mean, she's taken a prime plum away from them. This means that she gets to go out on the road by herself and pick up the fees by herself, and she's not even a farmer.

LORNA BENSON: Donnelley and his supporters immediately sought to derail her. They tried to have the election overturned because, as a woman, MacDonald was not allowed to be a full member of the alliance. They also launched an attack on her in their newspaper, questioning her sense of womanly propriety.

SPEAKER 2: We do not deny Miss Eva's ability nor her convictions. But we think she permitted herself to overestimate herself. Her abilities are such that if she will come out from behind this presuming on account of her sex, cultivate the womanhood, which has distinguished the eminent members of her sex, and above all, let the sad wants of humanity inspire her to more of the tender and less spitfire, a grand future will yet await her.

LORNA BENSON: The controversy only heightened McDonald's celebrity in reform circles. She bluntly ignored demands that she take up more lady-like occupations and set off on a statewide lecture tour, riding in the caboose of freight trains in order to make her schedule. Six months later at the Alliance National Convention in Omaha, she was named assistant national lecturer, another prestigious post which enabled her to speak at important reform meetings across the country.

But just as MacDonald started to take the national stage in the alliance movement, national clamor for a third political party in 1891 swept Ignatious Donnelley to the leadership of the New People's Party. Back in Minnesota, Donnelley immediately threw the weight of the Farmers' Alliance behind the new party, effectively stripping his labor opponents, including Eva McDonald of their political platform.

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The triumph of Donnelley, and his supporters that year marked McDonald's return to her labor roots and ultimately her return to obscurity. Although McDonald did not found a labor union or lead a prominent strike, her life was extraordinary for her times. Historian Elizabeth Faue--

ELIZABETH FAUE: I think she's incredibly fascinating, although my favorite line about her that I've used over and over again is that she was a woman of great significance and no importance. Her life has a lot of meaning. But it doesn't have a lot of traditional historical importance.

And I think that when we think about history and about people's lives, we need to understand that both of those are important to understand ourselves and our history, that we can have meaning without necessarily winning the Nobel Prize or becoming president, and we can see in lives like Eva's some significance for how we ourselves confront issues of gender discrimination or social inequality as she confronted them.

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LORNA BENSON: Eva McDonald left Minnesota for the east in 1896. In Washington DC, she took a job editing the monthly journal of the American Federation of Labor. After eight years, still frustrated with the male-dominated world of labor politics, McDonald moved to New York where she spent the last 25 years of her life as a proofreader for The New York Times.

To see pictures of Eva McDonald and a few of the factories she wrote about, visit our website at www.MPR.org. our story on Eva McDonald was written by Nancy Blakestad, produced by Annie Feidt, and researched by Kate Kuhn and Rosemary Esber. It was edited by Stephen Smith. Catherine Eaton was Eva McDonald. Thanks to Scott Rivard, Alan Stricklan, and Hilary Rhodes for their additional voice work. We had help with music selections from Leif Larsen. The Minnesota Century Project on MPR is supported by Sarah Kinney, Professional Real Estate Services, matching people with property for 21 years. Coldwell Banker/Burnet, Crocus Hill Office.

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