“A lovely, deeply moving memoir…This is must reading, especially for the young who have so long been short-changed in the knowledge of labor history.”—Studs Terkel, author of Working
Cheri Register often tells people her University of Chicago Ph.D. really stands for Packinghouse Daughter. The daughter of a Wilson & Co. worker, Register vividly recalls the 1959 meatpackers’ strike that devastated and divided her hometown. Her story also portrays the inner conflict felt by a generation of blue-collar children propelled into the middle class by post-World War II prosperity.

What work has value? Packinghouse Daughter urges us to look at this question at a time when minimum-wage service jobs are replacing the union-scale industrial work that kept her family and community afloat. Cheri Register succeeds as both a memoirist and labor historian, creating a rich narrative that is both thought-provoking and accessible.