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  • Women’s Work and Politics in WWI America: The Munsingwear Family of Minneapolis by Lars Olsson
  • Erika Kuhlman
Women’s Work and Politics in WWI America: The Munsingwear Family of Minneapolis
Lars Olsson
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
xiii + 301 pp., $89.99 (cloth); $84.99 (paper); $64.99 (ebook)

Lars Olsson’s insightful book on the intersections of labor, capital, and the First World War in a midwestern American city supports newer scholarship on the blurred lines between the Great War’s presumed home fronts and battle fronts. In the early twentieth century the most horrifyingly bloody war in world history neatly lined the pockets of Minneapolis’s industrial capitalists, who directed their employees to sew underwear worn by US soldiers heading to France. The Northwestern Knitting Company, renamed Munsingwear in 1919, used paternalistic and patriotic strategies to ensure the concern’s success during wartime. In a nutshell, this book reinforces the notion that World War I was good for the American economy.

Part of this success, at least for this particular company, lay in keeping labor activism at bay. In his logically arranged chapters Olsson explains the political and social setting of Minneapolis’s economy from the 1880s to 1920, then offers a history of the Northwestern Knitting Company specifically. This is followed by a gendered analysis of labor at Northwestern, the thwarted attempts by labor to organize workers there, and the company’s resistance to those attempts. Last, Olsson discusses the special circumstances brought about by Minneapolis’s immigrant workers and wartime conditions.

Munsingwear’s gendered division of labor aided the company’s efforts to keep workers complacent when it came to labor problems. Scientific management provided an overall strategy of creating an efficient workforce; this was an accepted part of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the way that perceived gender differences were used to maintain general social norms in this period is instructive. Olsson delves into productive work and reproductive work at Munsingwear to demonstrate how gender was used to maintain the notion that men’s work provided family support, while women’s work ended at marriage. Olsson explores how some processes, such as the washing of fabrics — traditionally a woman’s job — were made more intricate and identified as male. Conversely, some office work, such as bookkeeping, stenography, and typing, became feminized at Munsingwear, and according to Olsson this feminization was more evident in Minneapolis than nationwide (111). In both cases, the overall objective was for men to provide family wages, while women were not expected to remain employed once they had passed the “marriage bar.” One-third of the women employed at Munsingwear collected paychecks that placed them at or below the official subsistence level in Minneapolis.

These circumstances would seem to make the company ripe for unionism. Olsson proposes three reasons that “Munsingites” resisted efforts made by union organizers to unionize their shop. First, the antiunion and antisocialist Minnesota Commission of Public Safety (MCPS), formed in 1917 as a wartime measure, was successful. The MCPS [End Page 160] allows Olsson to demonstrate the connections between war and high profits. The MCPS’s ostensible purpose was to keep people “safe” from foreign threats, but its real reason for being was to link immigrant labor activism to disloyalty during wartime. A second circumstance preventing workers from joining unions was women’s perception that they were not welcome in male-dominated unions and that their work was temporary and premarital. Finally, Olsson explains that Munsingwear workers’ lack of interest in unions stemmed from “their class position in a wider context” (154). In Minneapolis in the early twentieth century, this meant that many female employees left their work in summer months to help with the harvest at their family farm in rural parts of the state.

Olsson explains several times throughout the book that while a significant portion of Munsingwear’s workforce were female immigrants or the children of immigrants, mostly from Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, Munsingwear’s financiers and company directors hailed from the eastern United States and were of Anglo-American heritage. This was true of many of Minneapolis’s elite industrial capitalists. Olsson argues that...

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