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The Girl
This celebrated novel by one of the leading radical woman writers of the twentieth century is reissued in a format designed for the general reader. Written in 1939, first published in 1978 (by West End Press), The Girl explores the fate of a farm girl who moves to the "dark city" of St. Paul, Minnesota, where she struggles to survive the death of her lover, killed in a bank robbery, and to give birth to her daughter, her hope for a new generation.
"Meridel Le Sueur's work stands, urgent and unique, at that bloody crossroads where politics and culture meet."--Paul Lauter, Trinity College
"Meridel Le Sueur's work stands, urgent and unique, at that bloody crossroads where politics and culture meet."--Paul Lauter, Trinity College
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
12 people are currently reading
762 people want to read
About the author
Meridel Le Sueur
41 books40 followers“The people are a story that never ends,
A river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns;
Lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet,
Emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is a long incessant
Coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons,
Babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable.
The people always know that some of the grain will be good,
Some of the crop will be saved, some will return and
Bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year
Some survive to outfox the frost.”
Meridel LeSueur, North Star Country (1945)
Meridel LeSueur’s poetry, her short stories, and novels are a beloved part of the cultural and political fabric of our times. She was one of the great women literary and communal voices of the twentieth century, which her long life spanned. In describing her own roots Meridel wrote, “I was born at the beginning of the swiftest and bloodiest century at Murray, Iowa in a white square puritan house in the corn belt, of two physically beautiful people who had come west through the Indian and the Lincoln country, creating the new race of the Americas by enormous and rugged and gay matings with the Dutch, the Indian, the Irish; being preachers, abolitionists, agrarians, radical lawyers on the Lincoln, Illinois, circuit. Dissenters and democrats and radicals through five generations.”
Meridel was born on February 22, 1900, and she died in Hudson, Wisconsin on November 14, 1996. As a child she lived in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Minnesota. She believed in giving voice to people’s struggles. She said she learned early to write down what they were saying, hiding behind water troughs in the streets, under tables at home—listening. Listening to the tales of the lives of the people, her writings were grounded in these grassroots, salt-of-the-earth stories and experiences of working people, of the poor, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed. She strove to make history a living, moving entity in our lives. She once said that words should heat you, they should make you rise up out of your chair and move!
She led a colorful and vibrant life. As a young woman, she studied physical culture and drama in Chicago and New York City, and she plied her talent in the silent movies in California as a stunt woman. As a young activist she lived for a time in Emma Goldman’s commune in New York City. She wrote from and was part of the great social and political movements of her time. Her writing encompasses proletarian novels, widely anthologized short stories, partisan reportage, children’s books, personal journals, and powerful feminist poetry.
Her early works, in addition to profound working class consciousness, are also focused on the struggles of women, and particularly poor women, those sterilized without their consent in so-called mental hospitals, those on the breadlines, those whose lives and oppression more traditional leftwing ideologues did not comprehend.
Her children’s books found heroes and sheroes in US history and are especially noteworthy for their non-racist depiction of Native American peoples and cultures. Meridel believed her writing could be a bridge making connections across many different cultures. The diverse communities that identify with and celebrate her work are a moving testament to the depth and power of her writing.
Meridel saw Halley’s Comet twice, once when she was 10 years old and again when she was 85. We are certain that the impact of her work will be felt the next time Halley’s comes around….and the next… and the next….seven generations and more from today! Meridel’s life and writings testify to the profoundly democratic idea that positive social change always bubbles up—and sometimes erupts—from below. With Marx she would agree that to be radical means to go to the root of things—and at the root of things are the people themselves. She would enthusiastica
A river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns;
Lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet,
Emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is a long incessant
Coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons,
Babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable.
The people always know that some of the grain will be good,
Some of the crop will be saved, some will return and
Bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year
Some survive to outfox the frost.”
Meridel LeSueur, North Star Country (1945)
Meridel LeSueur’s poetry, her short stories, and novels are a beloved part of the cultural and political fabric of our times. She was one of the great women literary and communal voices of the twentieth century, which her long life spanned. In describing her own roots Meridel wrote, “I was born at the beginning of the swiftest and bloodiest century at Murray, Iowa in a white square puritan house in the corn belt, of two physically beautiful people who had come west through the Indian and the Lincoln country, creating the new race of the Americas by enormous and rugged and gay matings with the Dutch, the Indian, the Irish; being preachers, abolitionists, agrarians, radical lawyers on the Lincoln, Illinois, circuit. Dissenters and democrats and radicals through five generations.”
Meridel was born on February 22, 1900, and she died in Hudson, Wisconsin on November 14, 1996. As a child she lived in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Minnesota. She believed in giving voice to people’s struggles. She said she learned early to write down what they were saying, hiding behind water troughs in the streets, under tables at home—listening. Listening to the tales of the lives of the people, her writings were grounded in these grassroots, salt-of-the-earth stories and experiences of working people, of the poor, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed. She strove to make history a living, moving entity in our lives. She once said that words should heat you, they should make you rise up out of your chair and move!
She led a colorful and vibrant life. As a young woman, she studied physical culture and drama in Chicago and New York City, and she plied her talent in the silent movies in California as a stunt woman. As a young activist she lived for a time in Emma Goldman’s commune in New York City. She wrote from and was part of the great social and political movements of her time. Her writing encompasses proletarian novels, widely anthologized short stories, partisan reportage, children’s books, personal journals, and powerful feminist poetry.
Her early works, in addition to profound working class consciousness, are also focused on the struggles of women, and particularly poor women, those sterilized without their consent in so-called mental hospitals, those on the breadlines, those whose lives and oppression more traditional leftwing ideologues did not comprehend.
Her children’s books found heroes and sheroes in US history and are especially noteworthy for their non-racist depiction of Native American peoples and cultures. Meridel believed her writing could be a bridge making connections across many different cultures. The diverse communities that identify with and celebrate her work are a moving testament to the depth and power of her writing.
Meridel saw Halley’s Comet twice, once when she was 10 years old and again when she was 85. We are certain that the impact of her work will be felt the next time Halley’s comes around….and the next… and the next….seven generations and more from today! Meridel’s life and writings testify to the profoundly democratic idea that positive social change always bubbles up—and sometimes erupts—from below. With Marx she would agree that to be radical means to go to the root of things—and at the root of things are the people themselves. She would enthusiastica
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
February 28, 2012
My great-grandmother's book is an interesting insight and an emotional ride into a world long gone, yet still close.
May 24, 2017
This was a hard one to rate, and I think I rounded up a little. Any book that takes place in Minnesota is instantly endearing to me, I can't help it--we look out for our own and everything. I'm also a big fan of Le Sueur's essays and short fiction (her writing on women on the breadlines, feminization of poverty, and women in socialism is really awesome). This was a good book with a good plot--it wasn't especially literary but I think it was trying to be.
There were some really gorgeous scenes, especially between The Girl and Butch before his death in a car after a bank hold-up gone bad (banks certainly aren't seen in a positive light in this one). The Girl's relationships with Clara, Belle, Amelia, and her mother are all refreshing to read in this type of fiction...her life is changed by a man but ultimately, it revolves around other women (also a commentary on socialism and collectivization,). I think any fan of 20's crime/prohibition/gangster fiction would get something out of The Girl.
The politics are pretty heavy-handed, which I'm sure is why this book never really took off. Le Sueur is a known communist and a labeled proletarian writer and it shows through her fiction (notably Amelia, who is a pretty decent cardboard cutout of the perfect communist woman). It prevents the novel from transcending anything except a heavy political statement, which is too bad. I know that it has been picked up by feminism, and that is a genuinely valid criticism--but it's mainly a political book, in my opinion.
There were some really gorgeous scenes, especially between The Girl and Butch before his death in a car after a bank hold-up gone bad (banks certainly aren't seen in a positive light in this one). The Girl's relationships with Clara, Belle, Amelia, and her mother are all refreshing to read in this type of fiction...her life is changed by a man but ultimately, it revolves around other women (also a commentary on socialism and collectivization,). I think any fan of 20's crime/prohibition/gangster fiction would get something out of The Girl.
The politics are pretty heavy-handed, which I'm sure is why this book never really took off. Le Sueur is a known communist and a labeled proletarian writer and it shows through her fiction (notably Amelia, who is a pretty decent cardboard cutout of the perfect communist woman). It prevents the novel from transcending anything except a heavy political statement, which is too bad. I know that it has been picked up by feminism, and that is a genuinely valid criticism--but it's mainly a political book, in my opinion.
July 30, 2011
It’s always been my experience that women know less about women writers than men do. Women may despise men, but sometimes they despise each other more in reality, and it takes a rare woman writer to get beyond such angularities to be able to write with sensitivity both about men and women. Meridel le Sueur is such a writer and her work in some strange way takes me back to the work of Anais Nin, my favorite woman writer ever since I read “A Spy in the House of Love” and “Henry & June”, not to mention her “Journals”. But why does Meridel le Sueur remind me of Nin? Because both were “activists” of a different order from the women who masquerade these days as “activists’. You could say that their distinguishing mark was “sensitivity” and not so much “ideology”. Ideologists are rarely sensitive. They become encrusted and fossilised. Then again, writers are usually in poetry in motion, dynamic beings, whereas “activists” are generally “stuck and scratchy records”.
But to get back to the book, aptly and simply titled THE GIRL, it’s central aspect is that it is written in a colloquial vein and it is one of the most poignant books I have ever read. If you want to feel like or identify with or enter the soul of a girl or, better still, a woman, any woman (and, of course, I do not consider the ideologues or activist, feminist women as authentic “women”, it seems to me that most of those who belong to that ilk have undergone female circumcision at some point in their life!), the Universal Woman, Eve, Pandora, the Magdalene, Sita (perhaps the oppressed, subservient, helpless Sita more than the princess), Mirabai, Mother Mary, Pandita Ramabai, Kasturba Gandhi, Lady Mountbatten, etc, this book is THE PORTAL.
Set in the years of the Depression, in the speakeasies and among prostitutes who had no other choice but to take up sex work, the story of The Girl unravels itself. The innocent is forced to work among bootleggers, down and out of job men looking for a fix or a fuck to drown their helplessness, strike busters, wise women who have been through hell and a variety of men and untoward circumstances and who form both the underbelly and the renaissant underground of society, the fecund solidity of Source, and she comes into her own. She makes love for the first time, then accompanies Clara her prosstitute friend who believes that good times are coming while she takes in four or five men a day to make five bucks, and finally gets drawn into a plot to rob a bank. That’s where poverty leads – to robbery. Thence, to death, insanity, perennial hunger, disease, torment at the hands of “charity” and “welfare” givers, unceasing pain punctuated by human love and nature’s overflow, the organising of the workers into a brotherhood/sisterhood, and the wondering if the exploitation of human beings by human beings will ever come to and end. Tragedy has its own dignity.
Poignant. Gut-wracking. Heart-wrenching. The chapter on Clara’s dying, after the authorities take her away for electro-convulsive treatment, made me weep with a book after a long time. Clara, who always in the midst of her suffering, believed that every dark cloud had a silver lining. In her case, the only silver lining was dying with her mouth open in the O of Horror.
That is what this book is about. Written fluid, the reader melts. Memorable sentences and dialogues burn every page with a fierce flame. The pace is perfect. The stories are all culled from real life and woven into an arpillera that can not be burnt out from memory. “Memory is all we got, I cried, we got to remember. We got to remember everything.” Memories of the evil that haunts humankind to its suffering and destruction. Let them be inscribed thus, in its mixutre of despair and hope.
It takes a woman to write about women, men, society, loyalty, love, brutality, the inevitability of hope when one is on the underside of Fate or Destiny as the case might be. It takes a woman to fertilise writing with her own fecund juices of insight, her ripening eggs of penetrating prescience.
Meridel Le Sueur’s ode to the heroic women of the Depression is a book very few would have come across. It ends with a powerful assertion of the feminine roots of life, the feminine impetus to life, the feminine shaping the future despite every obstacle, man-made or society-forged.
Here is the last line of the book, when the protaganist has given birth to her own child – a girl.
“O girl, I said down to her, giving her my full breast of milk.”
But to get back to the book, aptly and simply titled THE GIRL, it’s central aspect is that it is written in a colloquial vein and it is one of the most poignant books I have ever read. If you want to feel like or identify with or enter the soul of a girl or, better still, a woman, any woman (and, of course, I do not consider the ideologues or activist, feminist women as authentic “women”, it seems to me that most of those who belong to that ilk have undergone female circumcision at some point in their life!), the Universal Woman, Eve, Pandora, the Magdalene, Sita (perhaps the oppressed, subservient, helpless Sita more than the princess), Mirabai, Mother Mary, Pandita Ramabai, Kasturba Gandhi, Lady Mountbatten, etc, this book is THE PORTAL.
Set in the years of the Depression, in the speakeasies and among prostitutes who had no other choice but to take up sex work, the story of The Girl unravels itself. The innocent is forced to work among bootleggers, down and out of job men looking for a fix or a fuck to drown their helplessness, strike busters, wise women who have been through hell and a variety of men and untoward circumstances and who form both the underbelly and the renaissant underground of society, the fecund solidity of Source, and she comes into her own. She makes love for the first time, then accompanies Clara her prosstitute friend who believes that good times are coming while she takes in four or five men a day to make five bucks, and finally gets drawn into a plot to rob a bank. That’s where poverty leads – to robbery. Thence, to death, insanity, perennial hunger, disease, torment at the hands of “charity” and “welfare” givers, unceasing pain punctuated by human love and nature’s overflow, the organising of the workers into a brotherhood/sisterhood, and the wondering if the exploitation of human beings by human beings will ever come to and end. Tragedy has its own dignity.
Poignant. Gut-wracking. Heart-wrenching. The chapter on Clara’s dying, after the authorities take her away for electro-convulsive treatment, made me weep with a book after a long time. Clara, who always in the midst of her suffering, believed that every dark cloud had a silver lining. In her case, the only silver lining was dying with her mouth open in the O of Horror.
That is what this book is about. Written fluid, the reader melts. Memorable sentences and dialogues burn every page with a fierce flame. The pace is perfect. The stories are all culled from real life and woven into an arpillera that can not be burnt out from memory. “Memory is all we got, I cried, we got to remember. We got to remember everything.” Memories of the evil that haunts humankind to its suffering and destruction. Let them be inscribed thus, in its mixutre of despair and hope.
It takes a woman to write about women, men, society, loyalty, love, brutality, the inevitability of hope when one is on the underside of Fate or Destiny as the case might be. It takes a woman to fertilise writing with her own fecund juices of insight, her ripening eggs of penetrating prescience.
Meridel Le Sueur’s ode to the heroic women of the Depression is a book very few would have come across. It ends with a powerful assertion of the feminine roots of life, the feminine impetus to life, the feminine shaping the future despite every obstacle, man-made or society-forged.
Here is the last line of the book, when the protaganist has given birth to her own child – a girl.
“O girl, I said down to her, giving her my full breast of milk.”
June 1, 2023
The Girl, as Le Sueur tells it in her brief afterword, is woven together from the stories of women she met in a Workers Alliance writing group she ran during the Depression. So while one might critique Le Sueur for never quite cohering the story into a solid structure, it’s better to look at the book as a patchwork quilt depicting the lives of a community living on the margins of an American city wracked by economic depression.
The St Paul of The Girl is a city where the National Guard roams the streets picking off strikers, where bootleggers make handshake deals with cops to keep their taverns open another week, where poor women have to hide their romantic lives from the state to avoid being sterilized or even lobotomized for immoral behavior. It’s a city where the vernacular of the underclass is colored by the overwhelming sense of being someone else’s dinner: when she encounters her crush, the protagonist feels “like a bird on a barbecue spike”; her mother describes feeling so devoted to her family that she “could feed them [her] body, and chop [herself] up into little pieces”; reflecting on the increasing difficulty of sex work as she ages, Clara bemoans that she “can’t speak to ‘em like [she] used to when they thought they was getting chicken.”
It’s a city populated by those Le Sueur’s CPUSA comrades might have dismissed as lumpen–prostitutes, squatters, drunks, bank robbers. As many Marxists have argued, they do, in their desperation, become vulnerable to the seduction of authoritarian Hitlers big and small. But they also nourish one another. In their love for each other and their need to remember the friends and lovers who their society would rather forget, they find the power to resist those who wish to feed on them.
This book has a ton to say, and I’ll certainly be thinking about it for a long time to come. A great choice for my first fiction read since 2021.
The St Paul of The Girl is a city where the National Guard roams the streets picking off strikers, where bootleggers make handshake deals with cops to keep their taverns open another week, where poor women have to hide their romantic lives from the state to avoid being sterilized or even lobotomized for immoral behavior. It’s a city where the vernacular of the underclass is colored by the overwhelming sense of being someone else’s dinner: when she encounters her crush, the protagonist feels “like a bird on a barbecue spike”; her mother describes feeling so devoted to her family that she “could feed them [her] body, and chop [herself] up into little pieces”; reflecting on the increasing difficulty of sex work as she ages, Clara bemoans that she “can’t speak to ‘em like [she] used to when they thought they was getting chicken.”
It’s a city populated by those Le Sueur’s CPUSA comrades might have dismissed as lumpen–prostitutes, squatters, drunks, bank robbers. As many Marxists have argued, they do, in their desperation, become vulnerable to the seduction of authoritarian Hitlers big and small. But they also nourish one another. In their love for each other and their need to remember the friends and lovers who their society would rather forget, they find the power to resist those who wish to feed on them.
This book has a ton to say, and I’ll certainly be thinking about it for a long time to come. A great choice for my first fiction read since 2021.
September 23, 2022
For any woman who has been used and abused by a man, this is a terribly triggering book.
In the afterword, the author tells that this book was really written by the great and heroic women of the depression.
"As part of our desperate struggle to be alive and human we pulled our memories, experiences and in the midst of disaster told each other our stories or wrote them down. We had a writer's group of women in the workers alliance and we met every night to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of saga, poetry, cry-outs."
Clara is The Girl's friend. Clara is a sex worker. Belle and The Girl work at the German Village, where they sell bootleg.
"I listened about men from Belle while I wandered with Clara. Clara's been twice to the house of correction and she says you learn a lot about how not to get screwed there. Belle says this is a rotten stinking world and for women it is worse, and with your insides rotting out of you and Men at You day and night and the welfare workers following you and people having to live off each other like rats. It's covered with slime, she says. I wouldn't bring up no kids in it. She says she had 13 abortions. Clara is very cheerful, cutting out pictures from the magazine showing elegant houses and drapes and furniture and stuff for the baby room and maid's room, all the best stuff, but at night she cries thinking she is going to hell because of what she does with men, but Belle says we are in hell right now and there isn't a God who would make men and women wanting what they want and then stick them in hell after they've done it."
Men and their rotten ways of making up rules and games, changing them all the time without ever telling women what the rules are or what their change means to them:
"we came to a field and Butch stopped and for some reason I jumped out and ran across the road and looked back and called him, I don't know why I did it, and he jumped out of the car and ran after me and grabbed my arm from behind. I was scared. I didn't know why I did it.
He was trying to kiss me and he had hold of my arms tight, screwing them around. I got away and ran some more. We were in a pasture with short grasses. He came up and I said, Don't, Butch.
Why did you get out and run?
I don't know, I said, I didn't mean to.
You egged me on, he said, you got me going, now it's your fault. You got to take the consequences.
I was surprised.
You got to take your medicine, he said, you egged me on. You did it on purpose. You got me all riled up now. You can't say I wasn't treating you like a sister and then you jumped out of the car and runs like a harlot.
I didn't, I said, I didn't mean anything.
She didn't mean anything! He said to the sky. God almighty, here I've been hot as a hound for a week and trying to act nice to you because you are such a nice girl and then all of a sudden you egg me on."
The Girl's father dies, so she goes to her parents house for his funeral. Now we learn what a god-awful sad situation the family's life is, what the father's miserable mental illness has caused to the family.
"Joe [The Girl's big brother] said, he let me go and began to cry like a whipped dog. It was awful. It scared us worse than his yelling.
I'll go away, he kept shouting, I'll go away. Get me a pillow slip I'll put my earthly belongings in, I'll go away, that's what I'll do. I worked like a slave all my life. I worked, I grubbed, I did everything a father could do. I worked day and night for my children he said, I built houses for my children. I walked this country looking for work, looking asking here there everywhere for work...
We all looked at each other.
Gee, it was awful, Joe said.
He did too, Mama said. You children don't know what it is to have 11 mouths to feed day in and day out.
Well, whose fault is it? Joe said. did we ask to be born?" 👈
Butch finally wears The Girl down to have sex with him, the motherfucker:
"I didn't want to ever go out of that filthy Dollar hotel room. I didn't want to open the door and go out into the dank Hall with the stinking toilet running at the end. And I didn't want to be away from the warm breast of Butch. And it seemed like he just wanted to put on his clothes and get back down on the street. We really didn't have to be out of that room till 11:00 in the a.m. I wanted to hide, to stay there forever. Never to stand upright in the cold air. Strange in the city to lie prone as if in a meadow along a line of sky, and feel each other near just as flesh as warmth as some kind of reaching into each other, on the other side of accidents and tearing apart and beating and collision and running into each other and blaming.
I didn't feel good. I cried. Butch got mad and slapped me. My old lady used to cry all the time, he said, getting you to do what she wanted. Didn't you like it? Wasn't I good to you? My old lady is crazy too. She cries for something she can't even remember didn't happen. All women are nuts, beyond me."
Once more Clara shares her sad wisdom about men with The Girl:
"Clara lay down beside me and put her arms around me and wanted me to tell her about it but she wanted to tell about herself. She said she started it when she was 12 with a bunch of boys in an old shed. She said nobody had paid any attention to her before and she became very popular. They liked her and wanted her to say which of them she liked the best. They like it so much, she said, why shouldn't you give it to them and get presents and attention? I never cared anything for it and neither did my mama. But it's the only thing you got that's valuable. Then she began to tell me funny things that didn't go together. Never let a man think he's getting the best of you or that he is boss. They can become very mean and change overnight. She says it's all right if you don't feel anything. If you feel something you shouldn't charge them. Once she said she paid the guy, a black guy, he was so good to her and made her feel so good she paid him. Yes he took it, she said...."
Clara let's Ganz have sex with her, because Butch asked her to, because it would give them money so he could "open his own gas station."
Ganz beats her terribly, and let's another man have sex with her, then only gives her $10 of the $25 he promised her.
Ganz, Butch and another man planned to rob a bank, but Ganz get killed and Butch gets shot up in his side. The Girl was to drive the getaway car, so she drives away with Butch bleeding in the car with her. She keeps driving and driving, and finally stops at of service station to get some gas. Here is the terrible hypocrisy that Butch finds out about his dream:
"he took our can from the back seat. It was a service station built like a cottage, there were paper geraniums at the window.
This is a swell place you got here, Butch said.
The young man looked at us, and went inside.
How much money you got Butch?
I got a fiver Ganz gave me for gas, he said.
Good, I said, cuz that's one thing Ganz did that was okay.
The young man came out and Butch said again that it was a fine place he had. He looked at us. Oh yes, he said wiping the windshield. Butch and I leaned together so he wouldn't see.
I put everything me and my wife had into this place, he said, and now the Standard Oil is going to take it away from me.
How can they do that, Butch said, didn't you get a lease on it?
Oh sure, he said, that's a racket, they make you feel like you got your place, like you're going to be the boss, a big shot. They take all your dough and they got it fixed so you can't make good. You could work 28 hours out of 24, you could starve your wife and kids and throw them in with it. They got you milked from both ends. It's a racket. They hold the cards, you can't win. And when you give up, when they suck you dry, they get another sucker."
Amelia, The Girl's friend, the Socialist, is commiserating with The Girl about this horrible capitalism:
"We walked along the streets. She was a strong walker. She would walk from one end of the city to the other with her leaflets. On Sunday she would walk all day knocking on doors, talking to women. She would walk right in and help them with the baby and show them how to make a meat pie out of leavings, and then she would talk to them and tell them not to believe what was in the papers. She said, they'll get you sooner or later. They wear you out, they work you to death, they wear you out on the belt, in the mill, the factory. They get your blood and bones one way or another. What are we? Just goods to be bought and sold? Yes, she answered herself cursing, that's what they think, buy and sell you and then use your body after you're dead! It's too bad, it's too bad they can't kill our babies and eat them like suckling pigs. What tender meat that would be! Stuffed babies with mushrooms. Why not? "
Indeed, why not?
Clara becomes very sick, probably from sexually transmitted disease, from the men sticking their diseased penises in her, the only way she could make any money to eat. Social workers take her away and give her electric shock therapy. They burn her brains out. And leave just a shell.
"It was a still hot bright afternoon when they brought Clara back from Hastings Mental Hospital where she had the electric shock treatment and I never seen anything like she looked. It wasn't that she was white, she was always very white, but it was that look in her eyes and her stillness. She was very very still as if she had gone out of herself, as if the shock like an explosion had sent the doves of her spirit flying away never to come back.
They were kind of walking her and the social worker who had refused her milk came in behind her and helped her to lie down.
She is going to be just fine, she said to all of us, you'll see. These treatments take away anxiety.
Did you bring the special food she was supposed to get? Amelia asked going over to stroke Clara's head where it seemed like you could see bruises.
These things take time, the social worker said.
But death don't wait, Amelia said."
This is such a painfully sad book, but hugely important, by a writer who was a socialist leader. May you rest in peace Ms Le Sueur.
In the afterword, the author tells that this book was really written by the great and heroic women of the depression.
"As part of our desperate struggle to be alive and human we pulled our memories, experiences and in the midst of disaster told each other our stories or wrote them down. We had a writer's group of women in the workers alliance and we met every night to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of saga, poetry, cry-outs."
Clara is The Girl's friend. Clara is a sex worker. Belle and The Girl work at the German Village, where they sell bootleg.
"I listened about men from Belle while I wandered with Clara. Clara's been twice to the house of correction and she says you learn a lot about how not to get screwed there. Belle says this is a rotten stinking world and for women it is worse, and with your insides rotting out of you and Men at You day and night and the welfare workers following you and people having to live off each other like rats. It's covered with slime, she says. I wouldn't bring up no kids in it. She says she had 13 abortions. Clara is very cheerful, cutting out pictures from the magazine showing elegant houses and drapes and furniture and stuff for the baby room and maid's room, all the best stuff, but at night she cries thinking she is going to hell because of what she does with men, but Belle says we are in hell right now and there isn't a God who would make men and women wanting what they want and then stick them in hell after they've done it."
Men and their rotten ways of making up rules and games, changing them all the time without ever telling women what the rules are or what their change means to them:
"we came to a field and Butch stopped and for some reason I jumped out and ran across the road and looked back and called him, I don't know why I did it, and he jumped out of the car and ran after me and grabbed my arm from behind. I was scared. I didn't know why I did it.
He was trying to kiss me and he had hold of my arms tight, screwing them around. I got away and ran some more. We were in a pasture with short grasses. He came up and I said, Don't, Butch.
Why did you get out and run?
I don't know, I said, I didn't mean to.
You egged me on, he said, you got me going, now it's your fault. You got to take the consequences.
I was surprised.
You got to take your medicine, he said, you egged me on. You did it on purpose. You got me all riled up now. You can't say I wasn't treating you like a sister and then you jumped out of the car and runs like a harlot.
I didn't, I said, I didn't mean anything.
She didn't mean anything! He said to the sky. God almighty, here I've been hot as a hound for a week and trying to act nice to you because you are such a nice girl and then all of a sudden you egg me on."
The Girl's father dies, so she goes to her parents house for his funeral. Now we learn what a god-awful sad situation the family's life is, what the father's miserable mental illness has caused to the family.
"Joe [The Girl's big brother] said, he let me go and began to cry like a whipped dog. It was awful. It scared us worse than his yelling.
I'll go away, he kept shouting, I'll go away. Get me a pillow slip I'll put my earthly belongings in, I'll go away, that's what I'll do. I worked like a slave all my life. I worked, I grubbed, I did everything a father could do. I worked day and night for my children he said, I built houses for my children. I walked this country looking for work, looking asking here there everywhere for work...
We all looked at each other.
Gee, it was awful, Joe said.
He did too, Mama said. You children don't know what it is to have 11 mouths to feed day in and day out.
Well, whose fault is it? Joe said. did we ask to be born?" 👈
Butch finally wears The Girl down to have sex with him, the motherfucker:
"I didn't want to ever go out of that filthy Dollar hotel room. I didn't want to open the door and go out into the dank Hall with the stinking toilet running at the end. And I didn't want to be away from the warm breast of Butch. And it seemed like he just wanted to put on his clothes and get back down on the street. We really didn't have to be out of that room till 11:00 in the a.m. I wanted to hide, to stay there forever. Never to stand upright in the cold air. Strange in the city to lie prone as if in a meadow along a line of sky, and feel each other near just as flesh as warmth as some kind of reaching into each other, on the other side of accidents and tearing apart and beating and collision and running into each other and blaming.
I didn't feel good. I cried. Butch got mad and slapped me. My old lady used to cry all the time, he said, getting you to do what she wanted. Didn't you like it? Wasn't I good to you? My old lady is crazy too. She cries for something she can't even remember didn't happen. All women are nuts, beyond me."
Once more Clara shares her sad wisdom about men with The Girl:
"Clara lay down beside me and put her arms around me and wanted me to tell her about it but she wanted to tell about herself. She said she started it when she was 12 with a bunch of boys in an old shed. She said nobody had paid any attention to her before and she became very popular. They liked her and wanted her to say which of them she liked the best. They like it so much, she said, why shouldn't you give it to them and get presents and attention? I never cared anything for it and neither did my mama. But it's the only thing you got that's valuable. Then she began to tell me funny things that didn't go together. Never let a man think he's getting the best of you or that he is boss. They can become very mean and change overnight. She says it's all right if you don't feel anything. If you feel something you shouldn't charge them. Once she said she paid the guy, a black guy, he was so good to her and made her feel so good she paid him. Yes he took it, she said...."
Clara let's Ganz have sex with her, because Butch asked her to, because it would give them money so he could "open his own gas station."
Ganz beats her terribly, and let's another man have sex with her, then only gives her $10 of the $25 he promised her.
Ganz, Butch and another man planned to rob a bank, but Ganz get killed and Butch gets shot up in his side. The Girl was to drive the getaway car, so she drives away with Butch bleeding in the car with her. She keeps driving and driving, and finally stops at of service station to get some gas. Here is the terrible hypocrisy that Butch finds out about his dream:
"he took our can from the back seat. It was a service station built like a cottage, there were paper geraniums at the window.
This is a swell place you got here, Butch said.
The young man looked at us, and went inside.
How much money you got Butch?
I got a fiver Ganz gave me for gas, he said.
Good, I said, cuz that's one thing Ganz did that was okay.
The young man came out and Butch said again that it was a fine place he had. He looked at us. Oh yes, he said wiping the windshield. Butch and I leaned together so he wouldn't see.
I put everything me and my wife had into this place, he said, and now the Standard Oil is going to take it away from me.
How can they do that, Butch said, didn't you get a lease on it?
Oh sure, he said, that's a racket, they make you feel like you got your place, like you're going to be the boss, a big shot. They take all your dough and they got it fixed so you can't make good. You could work 28 hours out of 24, you could starve your wife and kids and throw them in with it. They got you milked from both ends. It's a racket. They hold the cards, you can't win. And when you give up, when they suck you dry, they get another sucker."
Amelia, The Girl's friend, the Socialist, is commiserating with The Girl about this horrible capitalism:
"We walked along the streets. She was a strong walker. She would walk from one end of the city to the other with her leaflets. On Sunday she would walk all day knocking on doors, talking to women. She would walk right in and help them with the baby and show them how to make a meat pie out of leavings, and then she would talk to them and tell them not to believe what was in the papers. She said, they'll get you sooner or later. They wear you out, they work you to death, they wear you out on the belt, in the mill, the factory. They get your blood and bones one way or another. What are we? Just goods to be bought and sold? Yes, she answered herself cursing, that's what they think, buy and sell you and then use your body after you're dead! It's too bad, it's too bad they can't kill our babies and eat them like suckling pigs. What tender meat that would be! Stuffed babies with mushrooms. Why not? "
Indeed, why not?
Clara becomes very sick, probably from sexually transmitted disease, from the men sticking their diseased penises in her, the only way she could make any money to eat. Social workers take her away and give her electric shock therapy. They burn her brains out. And leave just a shell.
"It was a still hot bright afternoon when they brought Clara back from Hastings Mental Hospital where she had the electric shock treatment and I never seen anything like she looked. It wasn't that she was white, she was always very white, but it was that look in her eyes and her stillness. She was very very still as if she had gone out of herself, as if the shock like an explosion had sent the doves of her spirit flying away never to come back.
They were kind of walking her and the social worker who had refused her milk came in behind her and helped her to lie down.
She is going to be just fine, she said to all of us, you'll see. These treatments take away anxiety.
Did you bring the special food she was supposed to get? Amelia asked going over to stroke Clara's head where it seemed like you could see bruises.
These things take time, the social worker said.
But death don't wait, Amelia said."
This is such a painfully sad book, but hugely important, by a writer who was a socialist leader. May you rest in peace Ms Le Sueur.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 1, 2021
A little bit of a difficult review to write. The book was very good, especially for it’s age and some of the writing was really beautiful. I think some people would hate the conversational route taken with the narration - it did take some getting used to. Sometimes the slang would slow me down, but the attempt to recreate the language of the time was also what made it vibrant. This is a feminist novel - primarily about the strength of women in the face of male cruelty, but it also a very political statement about the cruelty of poverty in a capitalist society. I enjoyed that less because it felt like it was being added gratuitously, especially in the last couple chapters. It’s short and a quick read. I don’t regret the time spent.
April 25, 2008
What a downer!
May 22, 2017
A stark depiction of life during the Depression and what women had to do to survive. Also a redeeming story about the sisterhood of women and how they supported each other.
May 2, 2024
Such a beautiful ending. Le Sueur’s so real for this.
December 25, 2022
This book had been on my shelf since college and I remembered it was once assigned to me, though couldn't recall what it was about. Once I got to the part about abortions, I realized immediately this must have come from some feminist-leaning English teacher who I guess had a point to make?
It's a glimpse of what women went through in Depression-era Minnesota. It's as bad as you'd expect. Women were treated poorly in every way imaginable, except amongst themselves. Women took care of each other.
This isn't my kind of book. The review from the Times on the back makes it seem like art, but eh. It tried too hard to be artsy, to be feminist. I'm not against either, but to me it has less value when it's so in-your-face.
It's a glimpse of what women went through in Depression-era Minnesota. It's as bad as you'd expect. Women were treated poorly in every way imaginable, except amongst themselves. Women took care of each other.
This isn't my kind of book. The review from the Times on the back makes it seem like art, but eh. It tried too hard to be artsy, to be feminist. I'm not against either, but to me it has less value when it's so in-your-face.
August 23, 2022
Meridel le Sueur's novel, "The Girl" picks you up from the first page and carried you through a cold, bitter, and rather discouraging truth of American history. Our narrator is a young, naive girl in the Twin Cities who is desperate for work desperate to eat, and desperate over a man. She is relatable even when she's being silly. Girl--for she is not named in the book--is a brave narrator in that she does not look away when life gets hard. She continues looking at the violence and devastation that poverty heaped on Americans during the Great Depression. And she makes the reader look with her.
Beautiful story and beautifully told.
Beautiful story and beautifully told.
November 16, 2023
This was my final, and least favorite school read of the semester. I didn't dislike it at all, but reading it definitely felt more like a chore than my other school reads. That's not entirely the books fault. I had to cram to finish it before the deadline, and some very important plot points spoiled for me in class before I caught up. I was surprised to see a writing style very similar to Cormac McCarthy in this book. Le Sueur used the same absence of quotation, and an unconventional use of punctuation. It creates a unique reading pace and experience, although the plot contradicts the increased pace created by the writing style, unlike McCarthy's books.
May 12, 2024
meridel le sueur shakes my core in a way that feels unique to her and her work. (although at times her work reminds me slightly of morrison — other times of faulkner.) part manifesto, part the telling of real stories — as she puts it, the work of an artist is to take the experience of the people and mirror it back to them. i cried at the last few pages. the message itself is heavy and repeated, which could’ve felt exhausting in a longer text, but this book is the perfect length for its tale and intention. i loved the stream of consciousness writing style, the intensely real feeling of the conversations between characters, the rising heat of resentment depicted in the working class people, the honest portrayal of the real pains women face as havers of abortions, givers of birth, caretakers, sex workers, business owners, homemakers.
fuck mccarthy and the us imperialists for keeping meridel’s work as far as possible out of the public eye — this is the type of art kids should learn about in high school!
fuck mccarthy and the us imperialists for keeping meridel’s work as far as possible out of the public eye — this is the type of art kids should learn about in high school!
December 2, 2024
First read this in the 80s. The Women's Press was publishing some amazing books, expanding horizons. My copy has been sitting around somewhere since then and I'm really glad I picked it up again. A hard read made easier by the captivating writing - hard to put down every time I had to stop. Lyric, tough - and heartbreaking when you reach the end and find out/remember that she has woven together the first hand accounts of women who lived through those hard times. I feel the book allowed me to step outside my own skin and glimpse another world.
March 13, 2020
Meridel Le Sueur is known as one of Minnesota's most famous radical writers. She originally wrote this manuscript in the 1930s and revised it in the late 1970s. The book tells the story of an unnamed young woman who moved to St. Paul during the Depression. I think she is a composite character of many women and this doesn't make it an easiest story to follow at times.
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October 23, 2020Meridel Le Sueur is an advocate for the people. Her book keeps the memories alive. The stories and tragedies and occasionally a perfectly worded detail about the lives of women in middle America during the depression, and about their often-abusive men. Hard to read, sometimes, but worth it. Important as a piece of social history.
June 7, 2017
Purchased for Am Lit 2; read on my own after removal from syllabus. The criminalization of being alive. The unique struggles of women during the Depression.
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May 10, 2023it's me I'm her
August 29, 2023
feeling honored to get to read this book .
October 22, 2023
I thought it was very moving and didn’t care one fig that it was overtly political. What, only men are allowed to write political novels?
July 2, 2025
Another great read thanks to Lost Ladies of Lit!
July 18, 2023
Born in 1900, Le Sueur was hunted and haunted by sexual predators and the Red Scare police and agents of the 30s and 1950s, but bolstered by a forthright courage, her bond with like-minded others and a powerful determination that kept her going through 1996.
Taken directly from intimately heard speech, rendered without quotation marks; half a dozen different stories from a Women’s Alliance writer’s group in 1939 are blended together and narrowed down to the rushing epic year through one young woman: her Minnesota family’s farm and city of St. Paul, her viscerally immediate world. Her first person narrative and the compelling spoken-word multilogue she hears around her are radically unpretentious and boldly descriptive in the urgency of bodily existence, youth turning to womanhood, the heaviness of the Great Depression and the fluidity of the present moment.
“This is one of the stories they didn’t want you to read,” her website says, and it’s true. Her great-granddaughter says she, “wheelchair-bound, was passionately cherished and celebrated for writing visionary, raw, sensual poetry and prose about poverty, and organizing, and corn, and hunger, and Indigenous sovereignty, and state violence, and wheat fields.”
A woman in “Robber Baron” America who told vivid truths about her life and the politico-social world around her; about others as well as mass movements. “Big picture” linking intimate story. To expose those who employed violence, money, murder and the media who cruelly controlled and manipulated women, the elderly, immigrants, workers, minorities, people of color, the disabled and disadvantaged. Sound familiar? Sadly, YES.
She had an automatic sense of being a uniquely caring and gifted woman among ALL women, ALL humanity, and using her life experiences, self-confidence and gifts for all living beings of her times into the past and future, especially the voiceless. Artistic and cultural organizers and soothsayers emerged by necessity and bravery, stepping forward when circumstances, fellow-sufferers and inner “hungers” demanded action, not excuses.
Women, multicultural, conscious and feminist attendees, speakers, scientists and performers at the recent Bioneers conference here seemed to be a large majority; dynamic, multi-talented and of all ages. The upcoming Bay Area Book Festival looks that way, too. Wake up, Listen to Each Other, Get Together, Go!
Taken directly from intimately heard speech, rendered without quotation marks; half a dozen different stories from a Women’s Alliance writer’s group in 1939 are blended together and narrowed down to the rushing epic year through one young woman: her Minnesota family’s farm and city of St. Paul, her viscerally immediate world. Her first person narrative and the compelling spoken-word multilogue she hears around her are radically unpretentious and boldly descriptive in the urgency of bodily existence, youth turning to womanhood, the heaviness of the Great Depression and the fluidity of the present moment.
“This is one of the stories they didn’t want you to read,” her website says, and it’s true. Her great-granddaughter says she, “wheelchair-bound, was passionately cherished and celebrated for writing visionary, raw, sensual poetry and prose about poverty, and organizing, and corn, and hunger, and Indigenous sovereignty, and state violence, and wheat fields.”
A woman in “Robber Baron” America who told vivid truths about her life and the politico-social world around her; about others as well as mass movements. “Big picture” linking intimate story. To expose those who employed violence, money, murder and the media who cruelly controlled and manipulated women, the elderly, immigrants, workers, minorities, people of color, the disabled and disadvantaged. Sound familiar? Sadly, YES.
She had an automatic sense of being a uniquely caring and gifted woman among ALL women, ALL humanity, and using her life experiences, self-confidence and gifts for all living beings of her times into the past and future, especially the voiceless. Artistic and cultural organizers and soothsayers emerged by necessity and bravery, stepping forward when circumstances, fellow-sufferers and inner “hungers” demanded action, not excuses.
Women, multicultural, conscious and feminist attendees, speakers, scientists and performers at the recent Bioneers conference here seemed to be a large majority; dynamic, multi-talented and of all ages. The upcoming Bay Area Book Festival looks that way, too. Wake up, Listen to Each Other, Get Together, Go!
February 27, 2008
This was 'assigned' reading for a Women's Studies 101 class, partially to help us understand the important part the memoir played in Women's History, and partially to also see how much has changed for women in the United States in the past 70-80 years.. Ms. Le Sueur's prose is powerful and packed... the narrative is quick and jagged like that of a woman confiding in you. There are stand out portions though that bear repeating:
"I felt like a great root sprang up out of my skull green, or a terrible root went in the dark with a hundred mouths looking for food."
*
"Was she a criminal? Was she a danger? Clara never got any wealth. She died a pauper. She never stole timber or wheat or made poor flour. She never stole anyone's land or took it for high interest on the mortgage. She never got rich on the labor of others. She never fattened off a war. She never made ammunition or guns. She never hurt no one. Who killed Clara? Who will kill us?"
There were so many more moments in the book that made me pause and really enjoy the prose beyond the story - this book stands as a root, as the background to great writers like Ms. Winterson or Ms. Morrison who combine personal drama with really amazing writing.
"I felt like a great root sprang up out of my skull green, or a terrible root went in the dark with a hundred mouths looking for food."
*
"Was she a criminal? Was she a danger? Clara never got any wealth. She died a pauper. She never stole timber or wheat or made poor flour. She never stole anyone's land or took it for high interest on the mortgage. She never got rich on the labor of others. She never fattened off a war. She never made ammunition or guns. She never hurt no one. Who killed Clara? Who will kill us?"
There were so many more moments in the book that made me pause and really enjoy the prose beyond the story - this book stands as a root, as the background to great writers like Ms. Winterson or Ms. Morrison who combine personal drama with really amazing writing.
April 1, 2011
I was impressed how well the focus stayed on the story in this book. Knowing that this book was considered a feminist and possibly a socialist text, I was afraid that ideology would get in the way of the narrative- like in Sinclair's "The Jungle." Perhaps that was true to a small extent, but this book did not sacrifice story to politics. The humanity of the characters and the brutality of the world in which they found themselves seemed primary, everything else secondary. I was pleased to see that the book was not specifically anti-male. I expected that, having heard it was an important feminist book. I think a lot of men shy away from such books on the worry that it will just be anti-male instead of pro-woman. However, I didn't feel that here. Admittedly most of the men in the book didn't come off so good, but I think that was just the characters and their world. Sure, there were some shitty guys in here, but the book did not seem to need to bitterly attack men in general to make its points about women. Sad as it was, I enjoyed this book very much.
May 27, 2010
A little mother-feminist heavy-handed, maybe, but a novel of people surviving the Depression is bound to have some politics to point out. LeSeur was there after all, so it's worth seeing her accounts. And i love her phrasing.
August 30, 2013
My favorite quote is "The breasts of our women are deep with the awful and wonderful life that strikes and swarms and breaks from us". Didn't care so much for this book, maybe in class discussion on it will change that.
June 20, 2008
Excellent book by my namesake.
May 21, 2009
Characters and dialogue live in this book! Loved the characters of Butch and Belle (flawed, crass, believable).
November 11, 2009
reads like a long conversation, beautifully told. if you like Prohibition stories, Minnesota, and bank robbery, this is for you.
December 12, 2009
every woman should read this. dialect of the moment ... woman power. woman strength. i love this book. i love the power this book gives me.
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