YPSILANTI, MI -- A March walking tour on International Women’s Day will offer a historical look at Ypsilanti jobs and workplaces a century ago.
The Women Workers Walking Tour at 1 p.m., March 8 will reflect on the careers of women during the time period of the first International Women’s Day in 1909.
The tour will begin at the Riverside Arts Center parking lot on 76 N. Huron St. in Ypsilanti. Historian Matthew Siegfried will lead the walk down N. Huron Street for a look at sites that were once boarding houses, factories and mills.
Siegfried said postal work was one of the most popular occupations in Ypsilanti at the time. Workers were separated by gender, ethnic and racial boundaries. The only time segregation didn’t occur was in male construction work, he said.
“We’ll show where people went for baths, shopping and workplaces," Siegfried said, "places where people ate and slept. And places where people recreated...
“We’ll show people where black women worked as domestic servants in some of the wealthy houses on North Huron,”
Sexual assault was very common when women worked in factories, Siegfried said, which resulted in many protests against working conditions.
Steady work for a single employer wasn’t as common in the early 20th century as it is today, Siegfried said. Laborers had to regularly search for new sources of income. He compared it to working as an Uber or Lyft driver.
“It’s closer now to what it was like in 1900, than at anytime since 1900,” Siegfried said. “So, we’ve gone back.”
Working with the Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalition, Siegfried supports local educators by providing historical lessons, assigning projects and leading tours. He gives free public tours at least six times a year.
For the past 15 years, he has focused on black history in Washtenaw County and southeast Michigan. Siegfried has also focused on Native American landscapes and history in Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Detroit and the Downriver area.
Siegfried became interested in history and decided to study it while in school at Eastern Michigan University. During graduate school, he formed the South Adams Street Project as his thesis. It shows how the neighborhood, known as the Southside, has changed from the beginning to now.
“I think it’s fair to say that the Southside of Ypsilanti is one of the oldest intact black communities in the great lakes and that is changing,” said Siegfried. “I will be giving very different tours in 10 years. We’re going to be talking about the neighborhood that was here because gentrification is dramatically shifting populations in Ypsilanti.”
2020-02-23 13:00:00Z
https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2020/02/international-womens-day-tour-to-focus-on-careers-of-women-in-early-1900s.html
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