On Pins & Needles: Working Women and Rhetorical Accrual at the Donnelly Garment Company

This presentation examines the repetitive rhetorical labor of women workers at the Donnelly Garment Company (DGC) as they resisted the unionization efforts of the ILGWU. In 1937, when tensions with the ILGWU were at their height, over 700 DGC employees penned short letters that asserted their desire to remain free of union interference. Through their epistolary efforts, the workers established their knowledge of the local labor market, described how they used their wages to support their families, detailed the safe working conditions of the DGC factory, and wrote with great affection about the DGC founder, Nell Donnelly Reed.

Speaker Bio: 

Jane Greer is a University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor in UMKC’s Department of English. She focuses her archival research on the rhetorical performances and literacy practices of women and girls in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is particularly interested in the rhetorical practices that allow women to claim greater economic agency in the workplace. In 2023, she published Unorganized Women: Repetitive Rhetorical Labor and Low-Wage Women Workers, 1934-1937 with the University of Pittsburgh Press, and it received an honorable mention in the Winfred B. Horner Outstanding Book competition sponsored by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.