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"When I was first thinking of starting my own theatre company for women back in late 1998, one of the things I struggled
with was finding a catchy, recognizable, and thought-provoking company name,
a name that could capture both the essence of Chicago and the struggle of women
throughout history. Around Thankgiving 1998, I re-read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
for the first time since high school (partially because Lookingglass Theatre Company
had recently staged a well-received adaptation of the novel, and partially because since moving to Chicago I had a
better understanding of the old-time Chicago writers). One of the parts of the
novel I had forgotten all about (and had also been largely left out of the Lookingglass
adaptation) was the story of immigrant women working in the old Chicago stockyards----largely
in menial work, like painting meat cans, bone-cutting, and rotten meat-picking.
"This led me to do a bit of research. After some time spent on the
Internet and the local library, I cobbled together a series of facts that led
to one and only one conclusion---the majority of workers at the turn-of-the-century Chicago Stockyards were
not big burly hog butchers, they were women and children. Thousands upon thousands of women
and children who did the menial, cottage-industry piecework essential to the
meat-packing industry. Like so many components of women's history, this is a fact
that is largely lost to the modern consciousness.
"In early 1999, I incorporated the new, woman-centered theatre company Stockyards Theatre Project both as an homage
to those forgotten working women in the old Union Stockyards and as a symbol
of what Chicago once was, and could be, if women were given a strong voice in
the performing arts in this city."
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