The book “We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula” is the focus of the March 9 U.P. Notable Book Club Zoom event. The book’s author is former Northern Michigan University First Lady Phyllis Michael Wong. (Photo courtesy of the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association)

MARQUETTE — Former First Lady of Northern Michigan University, Phyllis Michael Wong, will have the chance to talk about her book, “We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,” during the March 9 session of the U.P. Notable Book Club.

The Crystal Falls Community District Library, partnering with the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association, has scheduled author events with winners of the UP Notable Book List. The 27th event will feature Wong’s book, which presents a history of the H.W. Gossard company and the thousands of women it employed in Ishpeming and Gwinn.

“These jobs changed both the lives of the workers and the entire community itself,” the UPPAA said in a news release.

The book club events are open to all Michigan residents free of charge.

The March 9 event will begin at 7 p.m. on Zoom. Contact Evelyn Gathu in advance at egathu@crystalfallslibrary.org or 906-875-3344. As with all club events, UPPAA recommends that participants borrow a copy of these books from their local library or buy them from a local bookseller in advance to best prepare for the session.

The UPPAA provided a biography of Wong, who says that oral histories provide the nuances help make history more vibrant.

As a researcher who has spent much of her life listening, recording, and reacting to the stories of people’s lives, she has consistently proven this assertion, it said.

Among her early historical research was her graduate thesis focusing on the history of childhood in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Later, she would take oral history interviews of Great Plains residents for the Barnes (North Dakota) County Historical Society.

Her latest book is about women working at the Gossard Company factories in the U.P. in the 20th century, and what impact they had economically and socially on their small, rural hometowns.

Phyllis, a native of the San Francisco Bay area, would follow her father’s sage advice of “listen, talk little, listen” in her roles as a historian: educator, including as a writing instructor and director of online learning, and 30-year member of the university-level academic world, including as First Lady at NMU (2004-12) and San Francisco State University (2012-19). Among her favorite First Lady accomplishments is co-founding the “One Book, One Community” county-wide reading program at NMU.

Wong’s book about the Gossard Girls is detailed on the Michigan State University Press website.

“Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the 19th and 20th centuries,” the description states. “But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s.

“As the Upper Peninsula’s mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls’ income sustained both their families and the local economy. During this time the workers showed their political and economic strength, including a successful four-month strike in the 1940s that capped an eight-year struggle to unionize.”

Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women, it says. It also illuminates the way the Gossard Girls navigated shifting ideas of what single and married women could and should do as workers and citizens.

The write-up also states, “From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor.”

UPPAA President Victor R. Volkman wrote about Wong’s book in the U.P. Book Review, noting that it deserves to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Allan Koski’s comprehensive “Empire Mine Cascade Range: Michigan’s Largest Iron Mine” as a document of immense sociological and historical importance in U.P. labor history.

“Indeed, there is a fascinating synergy of the two industrial giants as many women signed up as Gossard Girls to manufacturer corsets, brassieres and foundation garments when their husbands were involved in strikes at Empire Mine and other CCI (Cleveland-Cliffs Inc.) job sites,” Volkman wrote. “But let’s back up a bit first…Wong’s quest to document the working life of Gossard Girls began in 2008 when she was a researcher at Northern Michigan University and would crystallize a few years later at a Women’s History Month lecture where the idea for a comprehensive history was born.”

Over the next 10 years, he said, Wong would research primary sources, such as letters written by union organizers, but more importantly, she took a staggering number of oral histories from the surviving women.

“As such, she has knowledge at a system level of how the assembly line worked from top to bottom to produce complex products with up to 40 assembly steps,” Volkman wrote. “But more importantly, she knows the unique human story behind the story — the motivations and trials of women who in the aggregate produced more than a million undergarments per year at the peak.”

More information about the U.P. Notable Book list, U.P. Book Review and UPPAA can be found on www.UPNotable.com. More information about UPPAA can be found at www.uppaa.org. UPPAA welcomes membership and participation from anyone with a U.P. connection who is interested in writing.

Christie Mastric can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250. Her email address is cbleck@miningjournal.net.