by Anna Rottenborn
In an industry dominated by the stories of men, what roles do women play? This week, our class took a break from interviews, books, and scholarly articles, instead using our time together to dive into the Storm Lake Public Library’s newspaper archives. In order to give ourselves a fuller picture of the town’s history, we set a timeframe (1979-2020) of newspaper articles to consult. Then, we assigned each student three years from that timeframe, spaced out so that we would all get a sense from our individual research how Storm Lake changed over time. For example, I am responsible for covering the years 1990, 2004, and 2018, for finding around 20 important articles from each year to summarize in SourceNotes.
SourceNotes is the website we use to catalogue our findings, tagging keywords and people from each article to help us see broader trends across time. So far, we’ve accumulated 558 notes. We have dozens of keywords, the most popular of which include “IBP,” “Immigration,” “Tyson,” and “Politics.” My personal favorites are “Waste Sludge” and “Storm Lake (Lake).”
Through various newspaper articles dating back to 1979, we gain a clearer understanding of how women’s lives in Storm Lake changed with the shuttering of the Hygrade plant, and then the takeover of IBP by Tyson.
One topic that particularly interested me was that of women in Storm Lake. Thus far, all of the books we’ve read have been written by men, and a majority of the people we’ve interviewed in class have been men. It’s a problem common to this field, in which labor-oriented meatpacking histories rely on men’s experiences. While this has given us countless insights into meatpacking, rural politics, and immigration trends, it has failed to paint a picture of what life is like for women in Storm Lake. Through various newspaper articles dating back to 1979, we gain a clearer understanding of how women’s lives in Storm Lake changed with the shuttering of the Hygrade plant, and then the takeover of IBP by Tyson.
Prior to 1981, a job at the plant meant that you could comfortably support an entire family. In our first interview of the semester, Dr. Michael Whitlatch told us about the dynamic of Storm Lake when Hygrade was the primary employer: “The average worker out there could make between 35 and $40,000 a year. In 1981, that’s a lot of money,” he said. Thus, if the husband was employed at Hygrade, the wife would be able to stay home and take care of the kids. This relegated the role of most women in town to keeping their households and their community in order. They didn’t have to work outside the home, and so they were free to engage with their community primarily through volunteering and through social organizations. One important thing to note about these women: they were primarily white, as was most of the population prior to the Hygrade’s closure.
A SourceNote logged by Nathaniel Hieber demonstrates this dynamic. It summarizes the article “UPW Hears of World Hunger,” which appeared in a 1979 issue of the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune. The article covers a meeting of the United Presbyterian Women, who met at Lakeside Presbyterian Church to watch a presentation on world hunger. The presentation, led by Mary Autenrieth of the American Friends Service, broke down food scarcity in Southeast Asia, culminating in a call for action urging the women to support politicians’ efforts to fight world hunger. The UPW served as a place where women could gather under a common religious context and discuss social issues, allowing them to strengthen both their church and their community. In this way, it exemplified the role of women in Storm Lake prior to 1981.
IBP opened its Storm Lake plant in 1982. Offering low wages and poor benefits and displaying open hostility to union activity, IBP was immediately forced to look outside of Storm Lake for workers. This prompted a surge of immigration to town, as we well know; people from all over the world were brought in to work for IBP. This surge in immigration was the subject of a SourceNote entered by Gillian Davis, pulled from the opinion pages of the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune in 1982. The unnamed author argues that it is necessary to get tough on illegal immigrants, insisting that “the US [must] stem the unlawful massive influx of aliens into the country and at last gain control of its borders.” This article suggests that tensions already existed regarding increased immigration. With the influx of immigrants, the town underwent countless paradigm shifts, especially concerning women’s issues.
The immigrant women who arrived to work at IBP faced different realities than the women native to the surrounding areas. One person’s income at IBP was not enough to support an entire family, and so women were no longer able to stay home if their husbands were employed at the plant. Many went to work at IBP themselves, though they faced somewhat different working conditions than male employees. Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds reveals the rampant sexual harassment suffered by female employees of packing plants. Pachirat recalls that, of the few female workers employed at the Omaha packing plant where he worked, many of them were tasked with auxiliary jobs that placed them in a highly visible part of the plant, allowing male workers to “openly exchange comments about the relative degree of attractiveness of the [women’s] bodies, jeering, laughing, and leering when the women have to bend over to pick up feet out of a metal tub to pack them into the boxes.” The troubling phenomenon of sexual exploitation of immigrant women by their employers is bolstered by a 1991 article in the Pilot Tribune, “Illegal, but human,” cataloged by Logan Kelleher. This editorial outlines all of the injustices suffered by undocumented immigrants, including that “many young girls are being threatened by employers to have them reported to INS if they do not cooperate sexually.” This dynamic of power and abuse is one that was likely present at IBP for many of the women who worked there. At the very least, they would have been vulnerable to such power relations.
The low wages at IBP (and eventually Tyson) necessitated multiple sources of income to support a family, and while some women helped by joining their husbands at IBP, others worked at family businesses or started their own. In his interview, Dr. Whitlatch recalled the gradual growth of immigrant-owned businesses throughout the 1980s and 1990s. One such business was highlighted in a 2004 issue of the Storm Lake Times. The article, “Lidia dreams of fashion franchise,” profiles Lidia Montiel, who was born in El Salvador and moved to California before eventually settling in Storm Lake. Montiel, who worked the morning shift at Tyson, also opened her own clothing store, where she filled custom orders for formal gowns and, in a pinch, poodle skirts. Montiel’s work demonstrates the new dynamic that women in Storm Lake embraced. No longer able to stay at home while their husbands worked at the packing plant, women started engaging with the community primarily through their work and their small businesses rather than by volunteering or focusing solely on community organizations. As more and more women joined the workforce, they became vital players in Storm Lake’s economic success, which empowered them to demand change and advocate for progress in the community. This is something that we see of women in Storm Lake today.
One of the biggest problems that emerged for Storm Lake’s rapidly shifting population was lack of support for mothers and young children. Any Way You Cut It notes that in meatpacking towns, women and children are most likely to suffer without adequate medical attention. This concern was reflected in a 1997 edition of the Pilot Tribune, in which the article “Infant mortality rate spikes upward” reported that, over the previous 2 decades, teen pregnancy rates and infant mortality rates in Iowa spiked. The increase can be attributed to the lack of specialized prenatal and maternal care available to women in smaller, rural towns, particularly women without adequate healthcare, as is often the case for employees of IBP.
In 2001, Tyson acquired IBP, and by 2002, it began processing. Despite attempting to revamp its public image with the addition of positions such as chaplains and community liaisons, Tyson continued paying its workers low wages and maintained poor benefits, leading to a similar strategy as one used by IBP. Tyson recruited new workers aggressively, and was accused of going to Mexico on multiple occasions to court potential employees. This led to regular surges of immigrants arriving in Storm Lake, and maintained similar circumstances for the women arriving as those who came earlier to work at IBP.
One issue that surfaced in the wake of the Tyson takeover was the lack of affordable and accessible childcare for Tyson’s employees. Emilia Marroquín highlighted this issue in my recent interview with her, going as far as to say that childcare is one of Storm Lake’s biggest problems. Marroquín explained, “Not everybody qualifies for childcare assistance, especially if you work at Tyson, so that’s something that I’ve been going through myself. At least $350 a week because you need to pay for child care services and not everybody cannot afford that. See, that’s something that makes people make that decision. Okay, I prefer to leave my one-year-old with my twelve-year-old because I’m going to save $150 a week.”
Childcare is expensive and, for some workers at Tyson, completely inaccessible. If parents work the night or morning shifts, they may not be able to find childcare that works with their unusual hours. A SourceNote that I logged covering a 2004 article from the Pilot Tribune, “Children found locked up, SL mother arrested,” described a 24-year-old mother arrested on three charges of child endangerment. The mother, who was working the night shift at Tyson, had locked her three children (ages 1, 3, and 5) in a bedroom alone for her eight-hour shift. Clearly, this mother had to make the devastating decision to leave her young children home alone because she couldn’t afford childcare. Many Tyson employees surely face this difficult decision, prompting community members like Marroquín to call for Tyson to invest in quality daycare for their employees’ families. According to Marroquín, “The employees are the main source for [Tyson] to succeed, so they should get together and make something. They can write a grant, they can do, they have money. I mean, they have come up with so many great things, but they can help better there. If they make [their employees] lives easier, most likely, they will stay with them.”
In Storm Lake today, women are actively engaged in improving their community, particularly through checking Tyson’s power and ensuring that there are plenty of resources for the new families still coming to town. SALUD!, an organization run entirely by women, is a forceful example. Its members have organized events like free blood-pressure and BMI screenings for Tyson employees, and they aren’t afraid to criticize Tyson’s treatment of its employees and call for them to do better. As Storm Lake continues to evolve, so will the role of women in building and maintaining a thriving community.
Anna Rottenborn is a freshman at Miami, double-majoring in math and secondary math education. She enjoys calculus, politics, and knitting. Anna plans to become a math teacher after her time in Oxford.
