Enka and Women’s Culture: Sorters, Jolly Farmerettes and Female Couples

A cautionary note at the outset:

This post has been long in the making, partly because of the usual quotidian necessities and interruptions. But also because I am acutely aware of the inherent perils in any attempt to delve into the evidence of, possible and/or apparently underlying original rationales for, and inescapable missteps one might make in trying to view women’s lives and culture from the vantage point of by now nearly a century of developments: Patriarchal arrogance, Mansplaining, and Just Not Getting It. Against some of this, there is no adequate defense. All a Male-Type-Person can do in the way of caution is to be aware, be careful, and make modest claims. Oh–and both to do one’s best and to be aware that that probably is not quite good enough.

Jobs and “Opportunities for Pleasure” in the Land of the Sky

Asheville Board of Trade, ca. 1915. Iconic Mt. Pisgah in the background — as the crow flies, about 10 miles SSW of the Enka plant.

Mashburn, Hominy Valley: The Golden Years, p. 279. Click to enlarge.

A Help Wanted brochure American Enka mailed out in 1929 urged that, besides good jobs, workers would have “climate, health, scenic beauties and opportunities for pleasure, unsurpassed not only in any other section of the South, but the whole country as well.”

They might have used a much older and more broadly known and resonant phrase for local scenic beauty: “Land of the Sky.” It appeared in a poem as early as 1825, but apparently dropped from awareness until William Cullen Bryant’s Picturesque America; or, the Land We Live In in 1872.((See “The Death Song of Logan” (dated Plainfield NY, 1825) in Park, Jerusalem, and Other Poems Juvenile and Miscellaneous (NY 1857), p. 119; and William Cullen Bryant, Picturesque America; or, the Land We Live In Vol. 1 (1872), I:134. For the 1872 date, I am indebted to my colleague Kevin O’Donnell.))

It became most consequentially attached to Asheville and western North Carolina in a novel by Christian Reid [pseud., Frances Fisher Tiernan], “The Land of the Sky”; or, Adventures in Mountain Byways (New York, 1875).

Asheville city directory, 1887, p. 64

The phrase seems not to have appeared in Asheville newspapers until 1878 (Asheville Citizen, March 7, p.2), at the time Christian Reid’s novel appeared, but it was employed thousands of times thereafter by other writers, local tourism promoters, publications, and businesses.

By 1887, a new magazine had adopted the title, and by 1929, when Enka hired its first workers, it had appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times more than 9,000 times.

Three of my previous posts explain how the phrase became Asheville’s (and WNC’s) ubiquitous motto, and what its main resonances and uses were: Asheville as “The Land of the Sky”: A Novel, and a Phrase That Stuck; “The Land of the Sky”: A Brief Guide to the Novel and Its Moment; and “The Land of the Sky”: How a Phrase Went So Far, So Fast, and Lasted So Long.

Enka and the Land of the Sky

The group of Dutch site-seekers who were looking for the optimum location for their first American rayon plant thus walked into the long-running  Land of the Sky promotional wave, by then guided by Asheville’s Chamber of Commerce and its Industrial Board and Board of Trade.((Several of my previous posts charted some important aspects of the Dutchmen’s search, the priorities and plans that emerged from it, and the significance of the Dutch-owned plant’s coming to Asheville: A New Vision for Old Hominy Valley: The Coming of the Enka Plant, “The Best and Most Prosperous City”: American Enka and the Imagined Transformation of Asheville, and The American Enka Corporation Was a Dutch Company: Did It Matter, and If So, How? Part I.  Asheville’s Sunday Citizen published a special “Rayon Section” on September 23, 1928, announcing the imminent arrival of the plant. Construction began almost immediately thereafter.))

From its first issue in April 1930, American Enka’s employee magazine began to print a long-running series of scenic photographs and articles on WNC natural attractions to keep the Land of the Sky’s resonances and promise fresh and appealing to its workers. Submitted by worker-photographers (like Holland-born Instrument Maker Gerrit Spaanbroek, who became a regular contributor), most of the photos were small and were not always credited.

Enka Voice, April 1930, p. 4. Original printed size. 2 1/2 x 4 in. Built as auxiliary water supply for the rayon process, Enka Lake and its grounds were also developed for employee recreation. Click for larger image.

In the late 1930s, Enka’s Landscape Gardener H. C. Pfalzgraf began to produce a variety of seasonal scenes, printed at or near full-page: farm-scapes and buildings, creeks and waterfalls, winding roads and distant mountains.((For other examples by Pfalzgraf (not all of which appeared in the Enka Voice), see Hans Curt Pfalzgraf Collection, Special Collections, D. H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, UNC at Asheville.))

Hans Curt Pfalzgraf, “Lengthening Shadows,” courtesy of Hans Curt Pfalzgraf Collection (P2737), Special Collections, D. H. Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville. Click for larger image.

As one might assume, the subjects and themes of these scores of photographs, taken by a number of photographers and stretching over decades, varied greatly.

These images (and hundreds of similar ones) make clear that American Enka officials considered it in their interest to identify with western North Carolina’s “Land of the Sky,” and wanted their workers to think of their access to the area as a kind of unfunded company benefit — like (as the Help Wanted ad above said), plentiful board and room possibilities close by, cheap transportation, good working conditions, and diversified occupations.((Irony of “baiting” Enka workers with this “advantage” when in fact most of them did (and had for most of their lives) already lived there.))

But how and whether workers actually thought of the Land of the Sky in that way depended in turn upon their lives both inside and outside, and before and during, their employment at American Enka in Buncombe County’s semi-rural Hominy Valley. In most cases reported in the Enka Voice, the association of “outdoor opportunities” with Enka was shaped to some degree by what outdoor events consisted of, who took part, where they took place (strong financial, status and availability differentials in this regard), and how each worker or group of workers thought about a given opportunity. And among these parameters was the matter of gender, to which we will return later in this post.

Whose Outdoor Opportunities?  Working Men’s Culture as the Default

As at many other locations across the country, much of western North Carolina’s tourism infrastructure that developed from the early 19th century onward was scaled (and priced) for the economic and social elite, and was thus focused around lavish hotels and resorts. In turn, the building out of such infrastructure attracted others of the same class position.

Stereograph, Portico of Warm Springs Hotel, ca. 1873. Warm Springs lay about 40 miles NW of Asheville on the French Broad River. Rufus Morgan Photographic Collection, 1869-1880 (P0057), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, UNC Chapel Hill Library. Click for larger image.

Not surprisingly, most non-elites were priced out of that market, and the first state park for public use (Mt. Mitchell) was not created until 1915. Another half-dozen followed during the Depression years, including magnificent Hanging Rock State Park in Stokes County (1936-42), after private developers’ plans for a high-end mountain resort fell through. The (also public) Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smoky Mountains National Park were authorized in 1933 and ’34, but construction of the Parkway was not completed around Asheville until nearly 20 years later.

Thus if you were Black or white and working class, chances were that what you knew of the organized tourist industry, you learned by working for meager wages in either private homes or hotels–as cooks, laundresses, janitors, waiters and bellmen, hostlers, or carriage drivers.((For an extended discussion of the industry, see Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (1999). Also Zoe Rhine’s excellent 5-part blog series Occupations of Black Women in Asheville, 1890, in Buncombe County Special Collections’ Heard Tell Blog, Pack Memorial Library, February 2022ff.))

Thus during American Enka’s first 15 years or so, organized or developed, publicly available recreational sites in the Land of the Sky were in fact rather few. Fortunately, the National Forest system (Pisgah, Nantahala), owned large acreages in western mountain counties that were usable without cost by ordinary citizens.

Looking Glass Falls, Pisgah National Forest. TripAdvisor. Click to enlarge.

The same was true for a large number of lakes at hydroelectric dams spread throughout western North Carolina. They were technically corporate-owned, but fishing permits (if required at all) could be had for a small daily fee. Additionally, a long-standing and widespread ethic of “the commons” among private landowners allowed ordinary citizens access for hunting, fishing, camping and other non-destructive uses.((For a thorough discussion of this phenomenon from the 18th century onward, see Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (2012).))

The Male Paradigm for Vacation and Outdoor Activities

Primarily (but not entirely) the outdoor activities and recreation of men had long been built around such activities and spaces.((This cultural pattern has been instiutionalized in various ways (e.g., National Hunting and Fishing Day, state wildlife federations, clubs of hunters and other sportsmen).)) And that did not disappear (indeed, it may have even been augmented to some degree) when they took industrial jobs. Or so it was at American Enka.((I do not mean to imply that women were not involved in such activities, but only that the main paradigms and patterns were modeled upon men’s activities.))

Hourly-paid and skilled male workers at Enka seemed to prefer either close-by or out-of-the-way spots for group fishing or hunting, instead of the few more developed (and expensive) vacation destinations.

Avery’s Creek Hunting and Fishing Club, Enka Voice, January 1950, p. 5. Printed size 2-1/2 x 4. Click for larger size.

Such activities continued for many years. In November 1936, a group organized a big deer hunt in Pisgah National Forest.((Enka Voice, December 1936, p. 17)) More than a decade later, Assistant Shift Foreman Charles Birley of the Chemical Department joined “a big group of hunters . . . [on] a  trip to Hyde County in Eastern North Carolina to hunt deer and bear.((Enka Voice, December 1949, p. 19; no photo located))

An especially dramatic example from 1950 was a boar-hunting trip by 17 members (not all shown in the photo) of the Avery’s Creek Hunting and Fishing Club, accompanied by 25 hunting dogs, to “the Lake Santeetlah section” (in a very undeveloped area about 90 miles west of the Enka plant). One of the “mainstays” of the group, said the caption, was Enka employee Roy White of “C” Shift Pot Spinning.

Indeed, scattered throughout the employee magazine were hunting and fishing news items, jibes at the comical lack of luck or skill on the part of individuals, and the usual variety of “fish story” exaggerations.

In a brief comment in August 1947, the Enka Voice declared broadly that “It is a happy little boy who loves fishing, and that boy stays happy all the rest of his life because he is a fisherman.”((p. 17))

Enka and the Culture of Women

Meanwhile, one might ask, what did women workers love, and what made them “happy all the rest of their lives”? They joined in on some “men things,” certainly, as other photographs showed, but the question was considerably broader and more complicated than that.

Core parts of it for many were, as scores of photographs and notices in the Enka Voice (as well as throughout the then-ambient popular culture) emphasized, wearing cute clothes, going to parties, graduating from high school, assembling hope chests, organizing  a “Matrimonial Club,” getting engaged and married, having children, mothering a family, arranging at-home parties, and sending children to summer camps (all referred to in the Enka Voice).

But at the same time, some representations of women show how — from within their always subordinate and regimented positions — women workers formed relationships and built some cultural connections and systems among themselves. The object of the balance of this post to take note of some of those, while exploring the boundary between dominant gendered norms and some that lay outside them.

From the beginning, American Enka’s Dutch owners and managers planned to hire a high percentage of women workers, and they did (about 60%). But the company was slow in settling upon how to situate women socially and culturally within the plant, how to represent them to the public, and how to keep them under male supervision.

The first issue of the Enka Voice (April 1930) had no photographs of workers — men or women. The May issue carried (along with several misogynist jokes) a stylishly-dressed secretary to a male manager. There were none in June, but the July issue presented three “Enka Girls” — one quite young, another perhaps in her twenties, and a rather matronly third.((Enka hired some women at 16 or 17 years old.)) The following January  there was large  group of (unnamed) uniformed women waiting for books outside the library,  and three “secretaries in important divisions” (two Misses and one Mrs.).

Taken together, these images (and many later ones) suggest that American Enka was not sure what image(s) of its women workers it wanted to project. Businesslike (e.g., Miss Edna Whitman) was marginal, since relatively few women worked in support roles for managers. Stylish appealed, since the company was striving for attention in the women’s clothing market, but that didn’t mesh with Coning or Twisting Room settings, where most women worked. Ordinary and in uniform (the 3 girls, and women at the library) seem likely, since those images conveyed that any female worker — however attractive — was a replaceable part of the production machine.((Black women workers were virtually never pictured. The one example I found was of several cafeteria workers in the September 1942 Enka Voice, p. 20.))

With a small snapshot of a beautiful but unnamed woman in the July issue, the Enka Voice added a bit of mystery to the array of possibilities.  She was, readers were informed, the “Enka-Type”: a young adult, glamorous, sophisticated, alluring, maybe even provocative. Perhaps she was the ideal type, but the lack of comment or explanation left many questions:

Enka Voice, July 1930, p. 5. Printed size 1 3/8 x 1 3/4 in.

Who was this woman? Where did this image come from? Was it borrowed (or serendipitously encountered)?

Did she work at Enka?  (Likely not, for such long and abundant hair would not have been safe around textile machinery.)

What was the point of printing it in a magazine mailed monthly to every Enka family?

Had she heard that Enka was using models for its stylish rayon clothing, and come for (or submitted) a headshot?

Who provided the caption, and what did it mean? Was it a play on “-type” words (daguerreotype, archetype)? “Enka-Type” seems too elegant for a Buncombe County textile worker, but maybe not for a society-page young lady (although the photo’s resolution is too fine for a newspaper halftone).

Did the caption-provider (likely a man, one suspects) know her? Did he feel attracted to or excited by her?

Is the white collarless blouse or the pinned-on head covering a sociocultural clue? The latter barely qualifies as a “hat,” it seems; more likely a required head-covering for a religious service.((I am out of my depth here, but an online search for “women’s religious head coverings” produces thousands of variously-styled examples from numerous traditions. Among the results, a Jewish kippah (lace or not) seems perhaps the most likely. I also searched “ladies hats 1920s,” which produced nothing similar.))

Hence perhaps the most serviceable explanation for the “Enka-Type” image turns out to be (whatever was intended) that it was a Rorschach, interpretable by many viewers in their own ways.((In any case, seeing this image set me on a search to see if I could find out who she was. I will return to the results of my search at the conclusion of this post.))

Moreover, the cultural climate was in flux in many ways at once. Prohibition, in place since 1920, was under public attack on the shaky tail-end of its run. Auto manufacturers were offering long-hooded “straight eights,” and “talking pictures” were splashing loosened mores across big screens. The Women’s Section of the July 20, 1930 Asheville Sunday Citizen (p. C7) carried tantalizing ads for Clara Bow’s Love Among the Millionaires, The Big House (featuring “a little waitress in a restaurant, catering to railroad men . . . [and] lots of love-making”) and other films of a similar sort (One Mad Kiss; Born Reckless; Let’s Go Native). And local radio (WWNC) personality Dr. M. Sayle Taylor was filling auditoriums with his promise of “an astoundingly frank and scientific solution of the mysteries of love and sex-life”:

Years later, the facts about the self-promoting  Dr. Taylor were revealed to be seriously in conflict with the Sunday Citizen ad and the potential usefulness of his message for single female textile workers.((Taylor’s February 2, 1942 obituary in the New York Times recorded that as the son of a Baptist preacher he had developed his crowd-drawing “Voice of Experience” as a precocious young preacher himself, had been married 3 times (and sued by #2 for alienation of affections occasioned by his pursuit of #3), lectured on psychology and juvenile delinquency on the Chautauqua circuit, served in the early 1920s as William Jennings Bryan’s platform opponent concerning fundamentalism, published hundreds of pamphlets and books on “the inferiority complex, pessimism, marriage, divorce, acidosis, insomnia, the eternal triangle and the pampered child,” and developed a huge radio audience on three major networks, drawing up to 30,000 letters a week from “the disconsolate, the betrayed, the disillusioned, the weary, [and] those who gave up all hope of ever having another happy moment.”))

But in any case, Dr. Taylor or no, Enka’s central management strategy was to hire many (preferably single) women workers, pay them modestly, maintain their loyalty, keep them under male supervision, and (as we shall see in a subsequent post), prevent them from joining a union.

Unfortunately, within the large context of Enka’s dealings with its many hundreds of women workers (and despite their efforts to make it appear otherwise), a half-dozen overlapping strands of policy and practice with regard to women persisted:

• as much as possible, hire single women — unencumbered by husbands, impending pregnancy, household duties, or child care;((The 1930 city directory, published shortly after the company began to hire workers, listed more than 200 Enka employees, a large percentage of them single (Miss) women.))
• perpetuate the job categories and markers that working women had long had to endure in other contexts: low wages, non-skilled/non-managerial jobs, and gender-linked subordination
• publish misogynous jokes in the Enka Voice that minimized, marginalized, and denigrated women in general((See section 8 of previous post: Spinning, Twisting, Reeling, Marketing and Basketball: Women Workers at American Enka.))
• reflect and normalize the dominant, patriarchal culture within company culture, policy, and practice (e.g., for women, focus on engagements, marriages, recipes and hobbies, births and child-raising)
• position women within a gendered external/”private” sphere: church, home, family, homemaking — echoing the old derogatory 3- to 6-word German K-word series Kirche, Kammer, Kinder, Keller, Küchen, Kleider: church, room, children, cellar, cooking, clothing (think “barefoot and pregnant”)
• link all possible female referrences and clothing to rayon:  the “women’s page”, elite women’s fashions (back covers from November 1936), women’s athletics((“The Rayonettes”; see section 9 of previous post cited above.))

It also seems in retrospect that underlying the many images of women in the magazine during the coming decades was a fairly ubiquitous (and familiar) male fascination with women.((At least for the 20 years of the magazine I have seen, the editor was always a man.)) And to some degree, that fascination shaped the representation of them.

What can be said, then, about how women were represented? In the first issue of the Enka Voice (April 1930, p. 4), its editors promised that it would be fair and equitable:

A medium for the exchange of ideas; to print the news and happenings at Enka;

and for the promotion of good fellowship and true sportsmanship among residents of this community

thus making Enka more desirable as a place in which to live, to work, and to progress.

Beyond those rosy projections, the “news and happenings” were about what one would have expected: notes on the history, making and marketing of rayon; employees, athletics (“true sportsmanship”), the plant safety program (which functioned partly to shift blame for accidents from the company to employees), hints for gardeners,  and related topics.

But another hint on the facing page was not so benign with regard to women: a few lines of working girl doggerel under the title “Singing While Reeling” (i.e., in the Reeling Department, where large numbers of women worked):

Girls dancing in the cafeteria

Showing a mild form of hysteria . . .

But if they’re having a good time

what affair [is it of] mine?

But the laissez faire attitude implied by the image of this stanza was not in fact characteristic of Enka’s attitude toward its women workers.

Indeed, unmentioned anywhere was the sharp gender divide (and its attendant inequities) among Enka workers: about 60% women (most in production jobs, with a sprinkling of office and lab workers) and 40% men (some in production, but many in better-paying skilled trades and managerial jobs).((Related aspects of the shabby story of Enka’s relatively few Black workers was the subject of several prior posts, but is not the topic under discussion here: The American Enka Corporation Was a Dutch Company: Did It Matter, and If So, How? Part I; American Enka Corporation Was a Dutch Company: Did It Matter, and If So, How?: Part II and The Enka Voice in White and (Rarely) Black.))

Enka Women Outdoors

What emerged within Enka’s panoply of restraints, barriers, normalized patterns and policies was that women employees began to form some of their own socially attached groups and activities — both within and outside the plant. From available photographs, it appears that most such groups gathered outside plant buildings, both on their own initiative and at the urging of management.

Enka Voice, May 1930, p. 2. Click to enlarge.

The “outdoor” spaces could be (and often were) liminal, transition spaces, both literally and figuratively between indoors (in the plant building behind) and outdoors (on plant property), and also (probably) at lunchtime — both at and not at work. In a less obvious way, the left photo shows an apparently ad hoc group, and the right one organized.((Several pages later, the women (from the Sample Room and the Reeling, Sorting and Twisting departments) were named.))

But the consequent blurring of boundaries and contexts did not cause worker/management opposition or agency to cease to exist. In practice, each modulated the other.((See previous post Spinning, Twisting, Reeling, Marketing and Basketball: Women Workers at American Enka, for discussion of Enka’s “Rayonettes” basketball team, which reflected a full non-liminal merging of women, the company and its signature product.))

The Reeling Redheads appeared in  the September 1939 Enka Voice (p. 12). Obviously hair color was the qualifying criterion for inclusion. The photographer grouped them for the photo in a liminal indoors/outdoors space (company buildings out of the frame). They formed a both official and social group (another liminality). The Reeling Red Heads were presented/marketed, it seems fair to observe, as company asset, to serve company aims.((A similar photograph, Blondes in Reeling, appeared in October 1932, p. 6.))

Enka Voice, September 1932, p. 12

Other employees and families would have recognized the arm bands (red and green) as marking the “Red Band” and “Green Band” workers, who held some managerial authority within this social group of co-workers (a third liminality). They reported to the male departmental “Master.”

In a labor law case against Enka a decade after the photo was taken, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) held that the company attempted to use the green/red-banded workers within the Reeling Department to spy on their female co-workers regarding union-organizing activity.((In the Matter of American Enka Corporation and Textile Workers Union No. 22129, American Federation of Labor Case No. 00-C-0011600.–Decided October 2, 1940, pp. 10 and 1065-1066.))

Somewhat less liminal with regard to the agency of the women themselves vs. the agency of management was a photo taken at an unidentified location:

Enka Voice, June 1931, p. 21. Printed size 2 1/2 x 4 inches. Click to enlarge.

The short-sleeve dresses mark it as a summer event. Whether all the “girls” were from a single department is also unknown, since no names are given. Judging from her distinctive hair style, the person shown 7th from L in the back row seems to be the leftmost of the three “KODAKED” ones in the July 1930 photo above. Presumably an Enka Voice photographer was present to take the photo, indicating that despite the lack of work uniforms and photo location, the inside/outside the plant liminality is still marked.

From late 1932, an example gave both location and names, some connected to Enka departments, and several not. Names suggest that the group consisted of both workers and non-worker family members (Jones and MeHaffey):

Enka Voice, November 1941, p. 10.

No uniforms are evident in the photograph, but both departmental identification (“enjoyed by Spool Winding Dept.”) and location are given, but no individual names. The woman in the polka-dotted dress (front row L) appears older than the others, and may have been a manager.((I have been unable to find Camp Laurel. A Camp Laurel Ridge shows on current maps, and may have existed at the time, but it lies 125+ miles (nearly 3 hours) ENE of the plant, so it seems unlikely as a location.))

In June 1935, seven “Enka Girls” from the Twisting and Cone Packing departments appear to have broken the liminality when they took a two-week driving trip northeast through the Shenandoah Valley with stops in DC and New York city, and then up the Hudson River, west to Niagara Falls, into Canada (just to Toronto, or further north?) and back home through Detroit. There was no photo, but details in the article made clear that this was to be an all-female expedition. And except for the departmental identifications, there was no evidence that the company had any role in it.

Surprising Encounters: Enka Women as Couples

As I perused and pondered these many representations of women, I began to notice (actually in the earliest issues of The Enka Voice)  an unexpected series of female couples.((The photographer was not named for any of these, but all but one of them seem to have been taken offsite as snapshots.)) The more of them I saw, the more I wondered about how they came to be there, and what overt (or subliminal) messages may have lain within or behind them.

So I went back to the first issue, and assembled as many as I could find.((I disavow any intention to judge these women in any way, or to imply that what(ever) the message(s) the photos may have intended or implied was “proper” or not. They were free to do whatever they, as adult women, were of a mind to do. I personally  admire them exercising whatever freedom and autonomy they had for the benefit of themselves and their friends. My hope in assembling and thinking about these examples is to understand how hey managed to do so much of that in the face of the gender-linked assumptions and barriers of the period.))

What might (I think defensibly) be called a representative sample of them, I present below, together with some conjectural (I am not actually sure of any of this) rationales (not to say explanations) of any of them, separately or together. At the least, their presence in the magazine helps to fill out the focus I named at the beginning, about the company’s representation of women to its publics.

SORTERS FAIR: two attractive, appealing women from the Sorting Department photographed on their way to the company’s Labor Day picnic, their coupled status (if such it is) emphasized by similar dress and embrace

TELEPHONE OPERATORS: Despite their affectionate embrace, Louise Holcombe and Sadie Morgan may or may not have been a couple in any sense except that they had the same job.

AT ENKA LAKE: Eva Swafford and Helen Morgan (no departmental affiliation given) embracing in swimming “costumes” (per then-current usage) at the company’s Enka Lake employees’ club

CHUMS: Maxine Byrd and Grace Penley of the Spinnerette Department, in matching dresses, with heads together, arms around necks, and beguiling and sultry smiles may have been more of a couple than “Chums” implied.

JOLLY FARMERETTES: Faye Howell and Eva Swafford are reserved for further comment below.

REELING DEPT.: Mary Morgan and Ruth Lovingood cast themselves as school days-like “Valentines” with a “Mary & Ruth” handmade logo, and identical hats and dresses.

REELING: “Avery” Morgan and Ruth Lovingood in similar, more formal attire. Mary in previous photo and Avery here are apparently the same person, with identical hair style. Both couples work in the Reeling Department.((Ruth Lovingood is likely one of the Lovingood Sisters family musical group shown in other photographs. Rob Neufeld, “Portraits of the Past: Lovingood Sisters,” Asheville Citizen-Times, November 3, 2016.))

CONE PACKERS: Fay Powers and Edith Miller are the only couple shown in uniform (except for the high heel shoes?) on company property.

HAPPY PAIR: Kathryn Barnette (daughter of employee) and Cone Winding employee Mae Ledbetter are both in “dressy” dresses of similar style (draped at top, with full skirts), white socks and high heels, each with an arm around the other.

CONE WINDING and HOW ABOUT A LITTLE MUSIC: Two photos of Clara Case and Ida Hughey (both in similar clothing) suggest an ongoing relationship, possibly leading to later musical performance.

Amongst these, several repeated markers of “couple-ness” are evident:

• identical or similar clothing
• close body contact and embraces
• some of the captions: “Sorters Fair,” “Chums,” “A Happy Pair”
• outdoor, non-company settings as markers of relationships beyond/outside of work

The most challenging of these entries to read is that of Reeling Department co-workers Fay Howell and Eva Swafford:

Enka Voice, March 1932. Click to enlarge.

I  leave the following questions not to tease, but in honest admission that I do not know the answers to them.

• In what sense(s) are Howell and Swafford a couple (if they are)?((Swafford had appeared with a different woman in the “couples” AT ENKA LAKE photo a year earlier.))
• What does the -ettes suffix connote? Diminuitiveness? Playfulness? Role-playing (the hats, one with an unreadable legend)?((To readers of the period, the term “Farmerettes” may have resonated (in fact been defined by) the 1932 comic short The Farmerette (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY65A_nvfcc), whose content is not discernibly related to the Howell-Swafford female couple.))
• Is the woman in front, in (new-looking?) bib-front overalls and farmer-ish shoes, the only farmer(-ette)?
• And what does the striped long skirt (or wide-legged pants?) on the woman behind connote?

Editorial Clues

A few of the couples photographs (click to enlarge) were accompanied by editorial comment that included (and/or suggested) dimensions of  the relationship not discernible from the photograph itself, but potentially confirming/emphasizing the closeness of the couple:

Enka Voice, March 1932, p. 21

NEW YORK OFFICE is the earliest of these.((I cannot explain the lapse between 1932 for the first two and 1937-38 for the other two.))

Together with its comparatively long editorial commentary, it blends backstage knowledge with coyly (perhaps transgressive) suggestiveness.

The two dates in The Editor’s comment (1928 and 1931) indicate that — since Enka’s North Carolina plant did not open until mid-1929 — Emily Adams (in the boldly striped beach pajamas) was one of its first employees, and that she took the job as a high school freshman, working during the day and going to school at night. She proved to be a stellar student of math and history, honored by both her classmates and her teachers.

New York Daily News, January 10, 1932, p. 20

Adams’s phyical closeness with “the other woman”, each with an arm around the other, and both in striped “beach pajamas” of the same cut, mark them as perhaps more than office mates and “friends.”

A search in newspapers.com for beach pajamas (unrestricted as to location, class, etc.) in 1932 returns nearly 11,000 mentions. “Beach pajamas,” averred a January 1 article in the Miami Daily News, “started out as a pure fantasy, but have a very determined place today. . . . [Their] chief quality is the look of youth [they bestow] upon the wearer.”

Boston Globe, January 12, 1932, p. 9

Likewise, a search for “portable [windup] phonograph” brings more than 1600 items. So Emily Adams and “the other girl” were definitely in touch with the popular culture of the early 1930s.The phonograph hints at (possibly romantic couples’?) beach music.

And who are the “all” The Editor refers to as looking forward (whomever’s lost address notwithstanding) to  a revisit when summer “come[s] again” to Far Rockaway?

But the tightly packed narrative can be parsed a bit more. Far Rockaway beach is on Rockaway Peninsula of New York’s Queens  borough, about 15 miles SE of Hempstead. In its heydey (1880 to 1900 or so), stimulated by the Long Island Rail Road, it was crowded with mansions, grand hotels, bathers on the beach; carousels, vaudeville houses, rides, saloons, and dance halls. It has been photographed and written about by many, from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane.((See Alfred H. Bellot, History of the Rockaways (1917).)) Thus Far Rockaway was not just any beach, but a beach where one would wish to be seen.

Enka Voice, July 1932, p. 12

REELING AND SORTING: All that is revealed about co-workers Pearl Wright and Ruth Grant is that they chose a historic area for their vacation and photo.

In the early 1930s, the trip from Enka to Yorktown NY, most likely by train, could be made in about one day. So the women’s vacation would probably have lasted about a week or so, even without likely stops at other historical sites in Washington DC and Philadelphia.

Most immediately, the pose of the two women (remarkably similar faces and expressions, almost identical hair styles except for parts on opposite sides, and both of one woman’s hands resting around the neck of the other) suggests romantic attachment and pleasure.

The balance of the caption focuses–erroneously, it turns out–upon the site’s historical (hence relationship-legitimizing?) interest. The National Register of Historic Places for northern Westchester County as of 2022 lists 99 sites, no one of which had anything to do with the 1781 Cornwallis surrender, which occurred at Yorktown, Virginia.

Enka Voice, December 1937, p. 12

ON VACATION Here pictured dressed similarly in (pillbox?) hats, high-waisted bib-front jump suits and short-sleeved shirts, Terry Leatherwood and Lillian Webb chose to relieve the tedium of “Mr. Luper’s” Spool Cleaning unit by a vacation in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

But beyond their two-week “grand time” and vague plan to go back “some day,” readers were left to wonder about their relationship.

VISITOR FROM GEORGIA

Enka Voice, May 1938

This is in some respects one of the most intriguing of the photos under discussion here, first because only one member of the couple is in the photograph. But at the same time, the caption appears to suggest that the relationship between Loreen Joyner (then working in Athens GA) and Bernice Miller of Enka’s B Shift Twisting Department was already  established, and likely to be ongoing, with the former visiting Asheville “quite often.” Joyner enjoyed reading The Enka Voice and seeing the mountains, but also (as seems suggested) the company of her “special friend.”

Judging from Joyner’s office and flower-bedecked desk, and her somewhat formal dress and necklace, her position as secretary at the University of Georgia may have placed her socially somewhat above textile worker Miller. My inquiry to the alumni office also revealed that she was at the time a student in agriculture, that she graduated in 1933, and married sometime thereafter.((Regulations do not permit the University to divulge former students’ hometowns, dates of marriage, or other personal information. The University had admitted its first 12 women students in 1918 (all in the Home Economics Program). The first women’s dormitory followed in 1920, and the first woman graduated from the Law School in 1925. Opponents to coeducation had argued that “allowing women to study serious subjects alongside men would bring a loss of morality and the end of wholesome womanly qualities.” An editorial in the Lawrenceville GA News Herald argued that teaching women alongside men at the university would bring “the destruction of that modesty and real refinement, which makes them so attractive to men.” See The Long Struggle to Admit Women at UGA.))

Thoughts Upon Interpretation and Extrapolation

My own first thought about attempting to interpret these photographs in Enka’s official company magazine is that at a certain level, no interpretation is called for. These women were (and had every right to be) free to do as they pleased, for whatever reasons, in whatever contexts.

But given that so many  young, single women were employed at Enka, and that they worked so closely together and almost always under male supervision, not everyone might have considered their (seemingly) unfettered choices or activities to have been either appropriate or legal.((In fact, same-sex sexual activity (which a same-sex relationship would have been widely assumed to involve at the time) was illegal in every state until 1962. From my earlier reading (e.g., Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, p. 65), I recall that as early as 1642, Massachusetts’s Essex County Court accused one Elizabeth Johnson of “unseemly practices . . .  with another maid.”)) And even more likely, not everyone might have thought it proper to publicize the choices they made or the activities they engaged in. Hence these women may have had to strategize more carefully then than would be necessary now in order to act in such (apparently) free and unrestricted ways.

In any case, there is abundant evidence of the development  of a women’s culture both within and beyond work units in the Enka plant. Some of the women undoubtedly had been school mates and belonged to churches together before they began to work at Enka. They rode to work together in their cars or on buses. During working hours they talked together, ate lunch and walked together. They joined in social activities during non-working hours.

And as for the female couples, the Enka Voice‘s fairly spotty coverage of women employees makes exploring their actual lives and relationships during (or after) their employment at Enka difficult, even if one would settle for answers to a few questions :

What kind of relationship was it?

How long did a particular same-sex relationship last, and in what form?

How many of them ended, at what determinable juncture, and for what reason(s)?

How many of the women later married men (as was their only legal option at the time), or remained single?

Attempting to answer such questions led to difficulties and uncertainties deriving from the nature and distribution of publicly available data on women. Last names typically changed at marriage, and marriage registers typically included only name, residence, age and race for both parties, date of marriage and witnesses. When included within search keywords, some given names (e.g., Ruth, Emily, Louise, Edith, Helen), even if further limited by state, county, or even township, produced unmanageably large responses. And few women factory workers came from families wealthy or prominent enough to generate detailed newspaper engagement or wedding announcements that typically included social and cultural indicators. Most were only a column-inch or so — enough to describe a quick trip down the mountain to Greenville or Spartanburg for a “family and close friends” ceremony in some minister’s living room.

Only one of the attempts I made (with considerable investment of time and extensive cross-checking) proved productive, and even it did not bring the answers I hoped for:

Enka Voice, December 1931, p. 13

Mrs. Joseph Ramsey; Asheville Citizen-Times, July 14, 1940, C5

Searching for the Maxine Byrd who appeared in the CHUMS photo of December 1931, I first found her in a July 1940 marriage photograph in the Asheville Citizen-Times.((For assistance with this search and related ones, I am grateful to my wife, historian Anne Mitchell Whisnant, who has highly developed skills in this area.)) Its brief caption revealed that her sister Gladys had announced Maxine’s marriage (a month earlier in Greenville SC) to Joseph Ramsey of Asheville, and that Maxine and Gladys were the daughters of Mrs. W. H. Byrd of Gate City, VA and Asheville.

Asheville Citizen-Times, June 19, 1939

Cross-checking in the 1940 city directory, I found that the sisters were living at 22 Blake Street (Apt. 2), a duplex in the somewhat upscale Montford Avenue area. Maxine was listed as a “rayonwkr at Am Enka Corp” and Gladys as a waiter at the downtown George Vanderbilt Hotel. The photo, by Culberson Studio, for many years the leading portrait studio in Asheville, was itself an upscale icon for a textile worker.

How long Maxine’s marriage to Joseph Ramsey lasted is not clear, but the 1941 directory showed that he was working as a clerk and living in the Blake Street apartment with his new wife (“Maxine B”), and that her sister Gladys (listed separately) was also living there (marked “h” as “householder” rather than renter).

By the time the 1942 directory appeared, Gladys had gotten a better job at the more upscale Battery Park Hotel, and moved to 11 Highland Avenue, where (oddly?) Joseph [F.] Ramsey (by then a “storehsemn” for the Southern Railroad) and his wife Maxine (no middle initial) were also living. By the next year, Ramsey had left his railroad job (or maybe not; he was listed both ways), the couple had moved to West Asheville, and Gladys was not listed.

The 1944 directory listed none of them, but Maxine turned up (maybe) in the 1950 directory as “Mrs. Maxine Ramsy”[sic], a renter at 51 Central Avenue. A Buncombe County marriage register entry of May 11, 1951 showed that Mrs. Maxie [sic] Byrd Ramsey had married Lawrence George Boothby, of coastal Saco ME, in nearby Swannanoa. Both were 42 years old (which would have made Maxine 22 years old when she appeared in the CHUMS photo, and about 31 when she married Joseph Ramsey).

Buncombe County Register of Marriages, p. 72

Click to enlarge.

And when (or why) had Boothby come to Asheville? The 1950 York County ME census lists Lawrence G. Boothby, age 41, not employed, apparently never married, and living with his parents, ages 74 and  70.((Enumeration date appears to be April 29.)) A name and broad date search in the Asheville Citizen turned up no notice of him except an arrest and fine for speeding on May 6 and 10, 1952. Seeing his Asheville address (42 Albemarle Road) in the notice, I cross-checked in the 1951 Asheville city directory (no archive appears to have the 1952 volume), where I found that Maxine Ramsey (then a saleswoman at Sears) was also living (as the householder) in Apt. 5, suggesting that Boothby may have moved in with her after their marriage.((Despite multiple searches, I was unable to find any other information on Boothby.))

Hence with regard to the durability of Maxine’s relationship with Grace Penley, one can only say that it presumably ended when she married Joseph Ramsey in 1940.((A 1931-1951 newspaper check on Grace Penley produced only a single reference to her as Miss Grace Penley, chairperson for a New Year’s Eve chicken dinner at Asbury Methodist Church in Candler NC. (Asheville Citizen-Times, Dec. 31, 1942, p. 5). Candler was close to the Enka plant.))

A few searches related to the other women couples were not nearly so productive. Looking for the Myrtle Snyder who appeared in the SORTERS FAIR photo of November 1930, for example, I found that a Myrtle Snyder, age 26, of Buncombe County, married Allen C. Williams of the Candler community (near the Enka plant) in October 1933. But whether that Myrtle Snyder was the one shown in the photo, I have no idea, partly because both Myrtle and Snyder were common names in that section of western North Carolina.

Moreover, couples photos of the types included here disappeared after World War II, which had many powerful impacts upon American Enka: work force composition during and after, production lines (bomber tires rather than fashion clothing), markets (toward governmental rather than private commerce), and the personal and social lives of employees and their families.((Whether the absence of photos occurred because the relationships disappeared is unknown.)) Marriages (and babies) multiplied afterwards. Frequency, length, and composition of the departmental pages that had appeared in each issue before the war were replaced by attention to a new plant being built at Lowland, Tennessee.

Some Historical Perspective

Fortunately, recent scholarship has illuminated the domain of women’s relationships with other women in many historical periods and cultural settings. My own meager understanding of that domain has been expanded by Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (1981; 1998), which documents the personal, social, cultural, legal, and political history of “romantic friendship and love” between women.((I am grateful to my daughter Rebecca S. Whisnant PhD, scholar of feminist ethics, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dayton, for bringing this book to my attention.)) For her chronicle and meticulous analysis, Faderman drew upon  autobiographical, biographical, literary, epistolary, clerical, legal, artistic, journalistic and scholarly sources reaching from the early 16th through the 20th centuries.

From Faderman’s work (which draws considerably upon related work by others) it is clear that

• Same-sex relationships between women have been present in some form(s) and to some degree at least since the Renaissance, and (it seems reasonable to conclude) for many centuries before that.
• Such relationships have been in continual flux over time, accompanied variously by celebration, tolerance, and repression/outrage/punishment.
• Public attitudes in the US were fairly tolerant before the 1920s, when, Faderman says, “popular  stories often treated the subject without  self-consciousness or awareness that such relationships were unhealthy or immoral.”
• These relationships were sometimes sexualized, sometimes not.

However interesting these patterns have been over the few hundred years Faderman investigated, their intricacies are too daunting to engage here. More to our purpose are her observations concerning female same-sex relationships in the U. S. in the 1920s and 1930s. And even within that narrow frame, one must tread carefully.

“Love between women, openly treated,” Faderman concluded, “was dead as a popular literary theme in America by the 1920s.”((This and the following quotations come from Faderman, pp. 308-313.)) It was still to be found in art magazines, and possibly in popular magazines if “sufficiently disguised”– sometimes by “locating romantic friendship in some far-off kingdom in the distant past.” By 1921, she continues, “it was necessary to place romantic friendship at a distance, where it could be attributable to the peculiarities of time and location  . . . to make it safe.”

Faderman’s broad conclusions about the 20th century are apposite here:

Our century has a passion for categorizing love, as previous centuries did not, which stems from the supposedly liberalized twentieth-century view of sex that, ironically, has created its own rigidity. In our century the sex drive was identified, perhaps for the first time in history, as being the foremost instinct — in women as well as men –inescapable and all but uncontrollable, and invariably permanently intertwined with real love. . . . Throughout most of the twentieth century . . . the enriching romantic friendship that was common in earlier eras is thought to be impossible, since love necessarily means sex and sex between women means lesbian and lesbian means sick.

There is plenty of anecdotal proof that love between women cannot exist without self-consciousness in our era, and that regardless of its noble qualities it is given a label which, until lesbian-feminists reclaimed the word in recent years, meant sickness. . . .

Consequently, a whole area of joyful, nurturing experience which women of other centuries enjoyed freely has  . . . been closed in our liberated times. To demand it has meant to put oneself beyond the pale and to accept the label which has carried dreadful meanings with it.

What remains to be commented upon here (necessarily briefly) is that the life situations of women of past eras who tested out modes of behavior “surpassing the love of men” offered them privacy, freedom to travel and communicate, double lives in the theater and other modes of artistic involvement and self-presentation, even multiple identities. And all of that lay beyond the means of most women. “What they did,” Faderman observes, “could not set an example for the average woman. . . . [If] enough women weavers or cotton dyers [had] decided to eschew restrictive female dress and marriage, they could have [had] a substantial effect on the social structure. [But the] law moved decisively . . . to quash such behavior.”((Faderman, p. 61))

Indeed it did. Which brings me back for a final turn with the “Enka-Type” photo. Could she have been, as her photo perhaps conveys, a rather well-off young woman, enabled by her circumstances to imagine for herself (and be imagined and empowered by them) a life outside the Reeling, Twisting or Coning rooms of a rayon plant? And thus beyond the lives of the thousands of young women employees I sold newspapers to at the plant gate at 5:30 a.m. as they climbed down from the buses from Canton, Cruso, Barnardsville, Haw Creek, Sandy Mush, Leicester and many another Buncombe County community?

A Backward Glance at the “Enka-Type” Photo

Enka Voice, July 1930, p. 5

Enka Voice, December 1934, p. 18

Sometime after writing my initial response to this puzzling image, I made an accidental discovery: Searching in the Enka Voice for something with regard to the same-sex female relationships, I came across a photo and death notice (December 1934) of a young woman who struck me as bearing a striking resemblance to the “Enka-Type” one. She was Mrs. Allie Cole of the Coning Department, and the death notice (written by co-worker Ida Morgan) said she had worked at Enka for 4 years, and died 3 months earlier after “an illness of three days.” Her life, said Ida Morgan, had been “a sweet example.”

The photo was of poor quality (a newsprint halftone, with poor resolution and contrast ratio), but tweaking the brightness and contrast revealed aspects of her appearance quite similar to those of the “Enka-Type” woman: her unmistakable hair (dark, abundant, with strong waves), straight nose, wide mouth and fairly full lips, and dark eyebrows. Such striking similarities might plausibly suggest that she and the Enka-Type woman were the same person.

What else might I be able to learn about sweet Allie Cole that might reinforce (or contradict) that possibility?

Taking the “Mrs.” as a directional arrow, I checked the Buncombe County marriage register and found that on Christmas Eve, 1916, a 20 year-old woman (hence born in 1896) named Allie McFee married 28 year-old F. P. Cole. That was not much, but it explained the Mrs. Allie Cole, at least.

Searching next for a death certificate for Allie (which I knew would contain, as those documents usually do, key personal information), I found that she had lived in Upper Hominy (near the Enka plant, where she worked), and was the daughter of Cordelia and Melvin McFee. The “principal cause” of death was listed as “brain abscess or tumor; not known if malignant,” and she died on September 16, 1934, ten days after “onset.” The informant for the certificate was her husband Fred Cole. A glimpse of her personality and a possible suggestion that she had suspected for several weeks that she was ill lay in the Enka Voice article: “Just a few weeks before death when talking to a friend she was heard to remark ‘It does me more good to laugh than to cry, so I’ll just laugh on.'”((November 1934, p. 14))

Her brief obituary notice in the Asheville Citizen-Times added the names of her two sons (Austin and Robert) and her burial location (Snow Hill Methodist Church of Candler). A somewhat fuller death notice that appeared later in the Enka Voice (November 1934, p. 14) spoke of her as “a wonderful, happy, laughing co-worker” and a “patient, faithful, first class worker.”

These details filled out her story, but was there any way I might find any information actually linking Allie Cole and the Enka-Type woman? It was a long shot, but I started by searching records on her husband and children.

Asheville Citizen-Times, September 2, 1993, p. 14. Click to enlarge.

Allie’s son Robert’s death certificate says he was born December 4, 1917 to Fred C. Cole and Allie McFee. He became a Nylon Maintenance Supervisor at Enka, a tobacco user for 60 years, and died of lung, liver and bone cancer in 1993.

Robert’s death notice in the Asheville Citizen-Times, it turned out, included the name and address (!) of Allie’s granddaughter–Robert’s daughter Susan Cole Campbell. If Susan were still living — not impossible even 30 years after Robert died — she might have a better photograph of Allie.((Robert would have been about 17 when Allie died in 1934. The death notice also revealed that he had worked at Enka for 39 years, was living on Orchard Street in the Enka village when he died, and was a member of Snow Hill Methodist Church in Candler, where Allie’s funeral and burial had been nearly 60 years earlier.))

An online search for Susan Campbell at 297 Hooker’s Gap Road in Candler produced a voter registration list, including her telephone number, so I called her. Her husband answered and told me Susan was out on some errands, but he would ask her to call me when she returned. And she did a short while later. Susan proved to be responsive, both about her own life (she had grown up in the Enka village, one street over from where I did) and about Allie, although Allie had died when Susan’s father was still quite young.

Susan thought she might have a photo, which she would send to me if she could find it. A few days later she sent it to me–in four sections copied from an undated family photo.

Here are 3 photos — Enka-Type, Mrs. Allie Cole from the Enka Voice, and Allie Cole (accompanied, it appears, by her husband and a son) from the family photo Susan Campbell provided. An older son who shows in another section of the photo at R would have been Austin, whose 1986 death certificate gave his birth date as 1923, which would have made him perhaps 7 years old. Allie, consequently, would have been about 34 in the family picture (taken, then, about 1930, 4 years or so before she died in 1934 at the age of 38).

And why does this date shuffling matter? First, I think, because it makes it most likely that (if Enka-type is in fact her photo) someone (Allie, maybe?) gave it to the Enka Voice in 1930, the year she went to work for Enka, and that it was published  there. Further, if it was her wedding photo (from 1916), she would have been 18 years younger than she was in the 1934 photo.

In any case, what matters most here was not whether the “Enka-Type” woman actually was Allie Cole, but what was the “Enka-Type,” and how did (or didn’t) some version of it reflect or shape the lives of Allie and other women who worked for Enka in the years after 1930?

What also matters are the actual lives of women like Allie who worked at Enka, and shaped their own lives within a world that presented them with both an oppressive, confining “type,” and also the possibility for something beyond that.

In any case, Enka wavered between some singularly ideal type of woman and a host of ordinary, uniformed, subservient women operatives. And in the process of trying to deal with those thousands of women employees, Enka tried to create a women’s culture modeled substantially upon that of men (department outings, girls’ basketball, etc.).

Enka’s women employees participated in those cultural inventions, but also countered with their own culture, both inside and outside them (and inside and outside the plant). A substantial, but not widespread (it appears) sector of what women created/invented for themselves was that of female couples.

Whether Allie Cole was or was not the Enka-Type, learning about her drove home to me the irony that, since she was Allie Cole of the Coning Department, there were thousands of her on site at Enka, but the men who ran the plant could not see her as she was: a female worker who carried within her the essence of an extraordinary female human being (not merely of a good worker who laughed a lot or had some other endearing characteristic).

Of the more than 40 posts I have written since the first one in 2014, this has been (as I expressed it in my cautionary note above) the most difficult: to imagine, to make sense of in my head, and to write. I am under no illusion that I have avoided all the potholes, to say nothing of producing a flawless post. But if any parts of it seem interesting or persuasive to you as a reader, I would be most gratified to receive and consider your comments.

REFERENCES