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Cheri Register, Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2000. 288 pp. $24.05 cloth; $13.00 paper.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2004
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Reading Cheri Register's Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir was like a homecoming for me. I too am a Ph.D. daughter of the working-class, perpetually caught between loyalties and values forged in a union family and a middle-class adult life in which more individualistic pursuits both compel and confuse me. Like Register, I find objectivity on questions of union struggles difficult, if not impossible. But Register's intentions, and the resulting literary and historical delight of a memoir, are far more interesting than objectivity. As she observes in the opening essay of her autobiography, “I find that I still experience the world as a working-class kid away from home. I walk the line between a feisty fidelity to the people of my childhood and a refined repugnance for the work they had to do” (8). The old labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” echoes throughout her searching, poignant, and compelling reflections on working-class values, labor, and history from the perspective of a postwar working-class daughter.
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- © 2003 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society