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. 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. 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 1893, Valesh spoke at the
Chicago World's Fair before an audience of 25,000 union-members. In 1896, she introduced
populist presidential candidate
William Jennings Bryan when he campaigned in Minnesota. == Return to the East Coast ==