Quantity with Quality
Rosie the Riveter’s Pioneering Predecessor
How two women working undercover in factories changed a nation
This is my next story in a series of articles responding to Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s challenge to produce a short quality article with three take home points each day for thirty days.
I have chosen to use Wikipedia’s main page as inspiration, choosing one idea from the “Did You Know” section as topical encouragement.
Bessie Van Horst is an American essayist and author, whose best-known book The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls, published in 1903 included a preface by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Bessie and her sister-in-law Marie went undercover in various factories in the United States, ostensibly to reveal the poor working conditions for women and under-age children in American factories.
Born of money and educated in New York City private schools, Bessie worked for the Saturday Evening Post and co-wrote one book with Marie prior to undertaking their undercover expose.
They began to publish their factory work experiences in a column published in Everybody’s Magazine. The popular series caught the eye of President Roosevelt and he wrote a letter to Bessie suggesting a compilation into a book and that he would write a preface for the publication.
One of Roosevelt’s primary concerns for America at the time was the idea of race suicide (link to Wikipedia definition). As such, Roosevelt used Van Horst’s book as a platform to promote his cause, saying in part:
“But the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race, and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.” — Theodore Roosevelt
What We Can Learn from a Bessie Van Horn’s Undercover Work
It is hard not to believe that Roosevelt hijacked Van Horn’s work to promote an alternate cause. While Bessie and Marie likely sought to expose the poor working conditions it is hard to know for sure their motive at the time. Was it to improve working conditions, or to lobby for a society where women and children weren’t used in the workforce?
Bessie published a later work, The Cry of the Children in 1908 detailing child labor in wool and cotton mills in New Hampshire and Alabama.
Irrespective of motive at the time however, Bessie’s works were ultimately used as fuel to bring better working conditions to American factories.
There is a ton of stuff to unpack from this story, but let’s pick out three points, seemingly at random.
Take home points:
- Be sure you understand or at least accept the motives of others when accepting help. How do you turn down an endorsement by the President of the United States, even if it doesn’t completely jibe with your message? (Rhetorical topic for ponder today.)
- Things change. Clearly the sentiment around race suicide has changed very dramatically in the last 100 years. At least for most.
- Even if you don’t start out with the most honorable of intentions, you can still do good in the world. Maybe Bessie and Marie just wanted to see women at home cranking out babies, or maybe they were truly appalled at work conditions in factories. Who knows? However, in the end their work proved very important in changing working conditions for the better.
Bonus take home point for today: Words have power. Two young women working in factories and sharing their experiences in a periodical magazine influenced a world leader.
What are you writing about?
If you liked this article, you may also like:
Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.
