Eva McDonald
By Lorna Benson
June 1999

RealAudio 3.0 | Slide show

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 the 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.

22-YEAR-OLD EVA MCDONALD 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. McDonald took a job as a typesetter after high school, but it was her work with the local drama group that jump-started her reporting career. The editor of the St. 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.

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

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 near by said, "Oh, 'tisn'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 are used just the same. The smell is awful then; some of the girls get sick almost every day."

At the North Star Woolen Mill 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 & Lothman's clothing factory in Minneapolis, women were paid just $3 a week. At the time, a week's stay in the cheapest boarding house cost $2.50.

Shortly after Eva McDonald's first article appeared, the seamstresses at the clothing factory went on strike.

Girl Worker: We were 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 doctor said I was simply starving myself at that rate, and must have better food. That's the reason I am in the strike.

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.

Faue: There was an interesting shift going on in public speaking at the time. In the late 1880s and 1890s, if you were a public speaker, you were long-winded; and you used a kind of classical oratory. Jack McGaughey taught her to talk without notes, and talk frankly to people, not to use big words, to find examples to hook into them. She got up and absolutely dazzled people because she tells them relevant stories, and keeps the stories relatively simple.

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

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 should not the working girl?

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 Farmer's Alliance. A former lieutenant governor and congressman, he was also one of the most well-loved speakers in the state.

Donnelly was impressed by McDonald'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.

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

McDonald's youth and down-to-earth speaking style made her a highlight of the program at farmers' meetings. Donnelly 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.

Faue: She was particularly popular among farm audiences because in the 1880s many farm daughters were coming to the cities to work in the factories and the shops. These farm families are 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 reports of people coming up to her later, crowding around her on the platform, completely connecting to her, and wanting to ask her how its like to be a working woman in the Twin Cities.

It soon became apparent to Ignatius Donnelly that the young Eva McDonald was not the impressionable girl he had initially thought.

Faue: Donnelly tended to think of himself like Jack McGaughey. He was going to teach her how to be this orator, a politician. I think the reports from the road suggest that she already does well in both categories and he actually, I believe, starts to grow jealous of her.

Eva McDonald's fearlessness and her rapport with the farmers began to rankle Donnelly 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 wife.

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.

Even worse for Ignatius Donnelly 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, McDonald refused and went on to win with a two-thirds majority.

Faue: They're furious! She's taken a prime plum away from them. This means that she gets to go out on the road by herself and pickup fees by herself. And she's not even a farmer.

Donnelly and his supporters immediately sought to derail her. They tried to have the election overturned because, as a woman, McDonald was not a 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.

Man: We do not deny Miss Eva's ability, nor her convictions. But we think she permitted herself to over-estimate 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.

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

The triumph of Donnelly and his supporters that year marked McDonald's return to her labor roots and, ultimately, her return to obscurity. She remained in the national reform scene for several years, serving as a national lecturer for the People's Party in the early 1890s, and speaking at many national labor meetings.

Although Eva did not found a labor union or lead a prominent strike, her life was extraordinary for her times. While other reform-minded women were working for the suffrage or temperance movements, Eva McDonald, stepped directly into the man's world of labor politics. Her audacity challenged their views on women in the working world-through her speeches, and by her own example.

Historian Elizabeth Faue.

Faue: I think she's incredibly fascinating, although my favorite line about her is that she's a woman of great significance and no importance. Her life as 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 peoples' lives, we need to understand that both of those are important to understand ourselves and our history. We can see in lives like McDonald's how we ourselves confront issues of discrimination or social discrimination as she confronted them.

Eva McDonald left Minnesota for the east in 1896. In Washington D.C., 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 politics, McDonald moved to New York where she spent the last 25 years of year life as a proofreader for the New York Times.

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 Stricklin and Hillary Rhodes for their additional voicework. Leif Larson helped with music selections.

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.