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Project Summary

Using this project, I wanted to continue to learn about labor history in Oregon, as it is an area I haven’t studied as much as some others, and I wanted to use primary sources as true snapshots in this project which would be revealing about the period in which they were written and would change based on historical events that I was already familiar with. I felt that using newspapers to do this would be fitting, and as newspapers have become less prevalent with the advent of technology, I thought it would be interesting to see them immortalized and compared side by side using my DH Capstone project to do so. The question that guided my research had to do with how Oregon Historical newspapers from around the state, including articles about cities around the world, reflect changing attitudes towards women’s participation in the workforce in Oregon from 1910-1975. I chose this period as I felt it was a period with an overarching theme of change, and encapsulated many different historical events which influenced labor patterns. The newspapers I analyzed in this project not only reflect the way that attitudes toward’s women’s participation in the workforce changed, but they also reflect both racial and class dynamics, industrialization, and the influence of different historical events on attitudes.

project origins and goals project activation project outcomes project continuation appendix 1: bibliography

Project Origins and Goals

This winter, I took History of the Pacific North West with Professor Steven Beda, and one of the books we read for this course was Sandy Polishuk’s book Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila. Julia Ruutila was a labor activist in Oregon, and this book ended up being my inspiration for this project. I wanted to research labor histories in Oregon but struggled to find a gap in existing research. Eventually while pursuing a different idea for this project, I read “Rejection, Reception, and Rejection Again: Women in Oregon’s World War II Shipyards” by Diane Simmons. The author was preparing to interview a family friend about her work in Portland’s Shipyards during WW2 and looked at different newspapers that had been released around that time to get an idea of the way that people felt about women working in the Shipyards. After reading this article, I thought that it would be really interesting to a larger collection of texts occurring over a period of time to show how attitudes toward’s women’s participation in the workforce, and how the types of work they participated in changed over time. I originally hoped that this project would not only answer my original question about how changing ideals are reflected in newspapers, but I hope to also answer questions about how newspapers reflect popular attitudes, speak to the general public, and potentially influence the opinions of others.

In creating this project, my original idea for the audience was academics, such as both professors and students, specifically those interested in history, women and gender studies, labor history, people involved with DH, or really just anyone with an interest in any of these topics. The majority of my sources were available through the University of Oregon, so the UO was also part of my intended audience; I hoped to show the UO how people are using the resources that they have made available and encourage them to continue providing these sources and other resources that may otherwise be difficult to access.

I think that this project is significant because of the analysis of newspapers as a source, there are tons of collections online of historical newspapers, but they are not analyzed in relation to one another. I think that this is what makes this project unique, that it examines a broad collection of sources to reveal hidden (or not so hidden) truths. I hope that other people care about this project because it’s interesting and cool, but also because it documents the integration of women into the workforce and their work over time, aspects of the women’s labor movement, and the changes in what type of work is available due to industrialization.

Project Activities

This project truly began around halfway through this term when I finally figured out what I wanted to do it about. I started reading a few different sources as background information, mostly just to help provide some more information about the papers that I would eventually start processing. As a history major, I already had an idea of different events that I would see in the papers I analyzed, but having a bit of extra information never hurts. We worked for class on different assignments all term that would build into this project, and I finally began processing papers a bit later than I should’ve but it was around the end of Week 7. I searched “women labor” on the Historic Oregon Newspapers site, downloaded papers started in 1910 as plain text files and went through the original scans of these text files and edited the parts that were inaccurate, and removed irrelevant sections. As I mined and transcribed these newspapers, I made edits to some of them so that when they were eventually Uploaded to Voyant, there wouldn’t be multiple versions of different words.

I then removed the extra spacing that created columns, and saved them into a file with the naming convention: “year.month.day_newspapertitle_articletitle”, an example: “1912.06.12_morningenterprise_womansworld.txt”. I uploaded these files into a folder on GitHub. During this process, I kept track of the source citations for the newspapers in a spreadsheet in Excel, and posted them to Github. During week 9, we made presentations about our projects. Once I finished processing data, I created a corpus in Voyant of this data but struggled to see patterns and meaning due to the large number of files, and a skew due to a majority of the files coming from 1910-1922. With the help of Professor Burkert, we decided to split up these files into five periods: pre-ww1, ww1, interwar period, ww2, and post ww2. Using these merged and periodized files, I uploaded them to Voyant and used mostly the ‘Trends’ tool and the ‘Contexts’ tool to analyze these papers.

I ran into a lot of problems throughout this project, which Professor Burkert helped me with, at the beginning I kept running into issues with finding my project topic, and that was just the beginning. Another problem I had was the organization of my files, I was having trouble using Voyant in their original organization so we had to change them into periodized files. We ran into problems merging the files from each period into one, I was able to do one with my Terminal but was unsuccessful with the others. One of my biggest problems was my struggle to use Voyant to encapsulate all of the different papers that I had seen. I looked at each and every one in detail, and it was difficult to find a way to use Voyant to truly represent each different paper without feeling like things were being left out, and I don’t feel like I was able to use Voyant to demonstrate all of the changes I hoped to discuss in my project.

Project Outcomes

The main outcome of this project was my Website which links to all of the work I did over the term like my project log, as well as my data, the presentation I created, my fair use evaluation, and my bibliography. I think the project was semi-successful. I was able to communicate some of the changes I was hoping to, but not all of them, and I wasn’t able to communicate a lot of other aspects that I wanted to, but I think the things I was able to show were successful. I think that looking at these different sources and assessing them yourself is super cool, they used images as well, and so many of these papers were really difficult to capture.

Project Continuation

I am graduating in just a few weeks and will be leaving the future of this project to the wonderful Mattie Burkert at the University of Oregon! I think that the future of this project could expand to include different keywords searched, more years included, or another state to reveal patterns about the PNW, or Washington and California, to include patterns about the West Coast, or even a state like New York and you could compare different states to see if they reflect similar patterns or not. I think that there are a lot of different directions that this project could go in in the future, all of which would be really interesting.

Appendix 1: Bibliography

This file contains my sources cited for the newspapers I collected data from, and is my main bibliography for this project.

Other sources used for background information, and those that helped inspire this project include:

- Polishuk, Sandy. *Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila.* Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

- Diane Simmons. “Rejection, Reception, and Rejection Again: Women in Oregon’s World War II Shipyards.” *Oregon Historical Quarterly,* vol. 119, no. 1, 2018, pp. 96–119. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.119.1.0096. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023.

- Mercier, Laurie. “Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity: Labor Feminism in Oregon, 1945–1970.” *Oregon Historical Quarterly,* vol. 120, no. 1, 2019, pp. 6–45. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.120.1.0006. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023. 

- Amy E. Platt. “‘Go into the Yard as a Worker, Not as a Woman’: Oregon Women During World War II, a Digital Exhibit on the Oregon History Project.” *Oregon Historical Quarterly,* vol. 116, no. 2, 2015, pp. 234–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.116.2.0234. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023. 
 
- Northwest Women's History Project. “Northwest Women's History Project Records and Interviews.” 2021, digitalcollections.ohs.org/coll-883-northwest-womens-history-project-records-and-interviews. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

- Oregon History Project. “Women in the Shipyards.” *Oregon, WWII, Women, and Work,* Oregon Historical Society, www.oregonhistoryproject.org/women-in-the-shipyards/.