We Kept Our Towns Going by Phyllis Michael Wong - 9781611864205

We Kept Our Towns GoingThe Gossard Girls of Michigan's Upper Peninsula\nAuthor(s): Phyllis Michael Wong\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Michigan State University Press, United States\nImprint: Michigan State University Press\nISBN-13: 9781611864205, 978-1611864205\nSynopsis\nWITH A FOREWORD BY LISA M. FINE, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITYMichigans 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 nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 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 Peninsulas 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 .