Today in Labor History Feb 22 Meridel LeSueur, wrote often about women and class struggle was born

[Omaha Steve]

February 22

Representatives of the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers meet in St. Louis with 20 other organizations to plan the founding convention of the People’s Party. Objectives: end political corruption, spread the wealth, and combat the oppression of the rights of workers and farmers - 1892

And this: February 22, 1892 - Representatives of the Knights of Labor, United Mine Workers and 20 other organizations met in St. Louis to plan the founding convention of the People's Party. The party railed against corruption in politics, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the oppression of the rights of workers and farmers.



February 22, 1900 - Meridel LeSueur, a Minnesotan who wrote often about women and class struggle, was born. Read more about her at this link: http://college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/modern/lesueur_me.html

Albert Shanker dies at age 68. He served as president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1984 and of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997 - 1997

Labor history found here: http://www.unionist.com/today-in-labor-history and here: http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?history_9_02_22_2011

[midnight]

1. Nice to find this info....

LeSueur became the chronicler of women’s lives, often overlooked in accounts of the Great Depression, writing of their experiences in relief agencies and on the breadlines. Her novel The Girl, based on stories of women with whom she lived, was written in 1939 but not published until 1978. It describes the harsh realities—poverty, starvation, and sexual abuse—of the lives of working-class women during the Depression and their survival by means of supportive friendships and a shared, communal life. In the stories she published in the thirties in such literary magazines as Scribner’s and Partisan Review, LeSueur wrote treatments of both working- and middle-class women—their experiences of adolescence, marriage, sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, and widowhood—that were often ahead of their time.


Sounds like a good book to teach the economic realities of women without equal rights....