162. Meridel Le Sueur — The Girl with Rosemary Hennessy

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co host Amy Helmes, and today we're going to be discussing a Prohibition era gangster novel. And frankly, Amy, what have we been waiting for?

AMY: No kidding. It's about time, right? But it was very worth the wait. In fact, author Meridel Le Sueur had to wait a really long time for this novel, The Girl, to even get published. It was originally written in 1939, but wasn't published until 1978, nearly 40 years after the fact.

KIM: And why? Because, listeners, in 1939, publishers didn't think a woman could write a gangster novel, and boy were they wrong. On the plus side, though, Le Sueur was able to use that extra time to revise The Girl, making it much more explicitly about the lives of marginalized women in urban America during the Depression, including frank portrayals of the female characters sex lives.

AMY: Yes, this isn't just a novel about stool pigeons, speakeasies, bootleggers, and Bonnie and Clyde style getaways. It's also a Proletarian novel, and it's filled with radical messages. But above all else, I consider this book to be a poignant tribute to women, more than a "gangster novel," quote unquote. The book is sparely written, but it is so raw and real, almost disconcertingly beautiful.

KIM: Yeah. This book is pure poetry, baby. And as the literary critic Blanche Gelfant wrote in The New York Times, Le Sueur's consummate achievement as an artist is her transformation of colloquial speech into musical prose.

AMY: And with us to discuss the novel is Dr. Rosemary Hennessey, whose most recent nonfiction book features Le Sueur.

KIM: Amy, are you ready to raid the stacks and get started?

AMY: You bet I am, and I can drive the getaway car. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Rosemary Hennessey, is a professor of English at Rice University, where she previously served as director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She has written extensively on materialist feminism, which highlights capitalism and patriarchy as a central aspect in understanding women's oppression. Her latest book, published in August of this year, is called In the Company of Radical Women Writers. In it, she rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers, including today's Lost Lady. Welcome to the show, Rosemary. We're so happy to have you here.

ROSEMARY HENESSY: Well, thank you, Amy and Kim. I'm really pleased to be here and so happy that you're talking about Meridel Le Sueur and her novel, The Girl.

KIM: So Rosemary, your book is about seven young women who turned to Communism during the Great Depression. Can you talk about what prompted you to write it?

ROSEMARY: Sure. As someone who has worked in feminist studies for decades, I really wanted to know who were the feminists of the 1930s. This was a decade of the Great Depression, as well as a period of major organizing by socialists and communists. I wanted to learn more about that time, because it seemed to me that it was a gap in the history of US feminism. And it turns out I did learn a lot. I also had in mind my mysterious grandmother. In 1926, when she was only 19 years old and my father was 18 months old, she ran away. She took her mother in law's suitcase and the Sunday school cash and left her baby with her parents. So it was about maybe nine months later that her then young husband received a postcard from a P. O. box in Chicago, and she was asking for him to take her back. He never answered the letter.

KIM: Wow.

AMY: So when did you find out that story? Did you always know that family lore?

ROSEMARY: I think so. You know, it wasn't a secret. It wasn't hidden. And we knew that my father had been raised by his grandmother. So, yeah, it was just part of the family story. And I have a lot of sisters, and we all have been, at various times, very intent on finding who was this woman. And I've often wondered, and especially writing this book, you know, I started to see in Meridel Le Sueur's novel the woman who could have been my grandmother. Who left, you know, a small town, it was Philadelphia, but it was still a small neighborhood, as a young person and went to the big city. Did she do some of the things that "the girl" had to do? Like... resorting to sex work, or having to figure out how to manage her own reproductive choices? Did she even, maybe, and I love this fantasy, I still harbor it, did she maybe join the Communist Party? Or did she end up in bread lines in the 1930s?

KIM: Yeah, I'm almost about to cry thinking about your grandmother. So, Meridel Le Sueur was born in 1900 in Iowa. She lived in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas before moving with her family to the Twin Cities. Both her parents were socialists, and her mother was an outspoken feminist. What else should we know, Rosemary, about her upbringing in terms of how it affected who she would become as a writer?

ROSEMARY: Well, one thing to know, and this really struck me as I was learning about her biography, is that her mother, whose name was Marion Wharton, was a really strong character, and I think she made a tremendous impact on her daughter's life. Their politics really diverged over their lifetimes, but, as a child, I think this woman who was so strong must have made a big impression on her daughter. As you said, she was a feminist and a socialist, and she lectured on what was called the Chautauqua Circuit then. And she lectured on birth control. She even chained herself to the fence around the White House as part of her very deliberate politics for women's right to vote. So her mother left the state of Texas where she was living with her husband and children and took the children, basically kidnapped them. And took them to Oklahoma where her mother was living, and they lived for some years there. Divorce was illegal in the state of Texas then. So she was basically like, saving not only her children, but her future. Several years later, she met a man named Arthur Le Sueur. He had been mayor of the city of Minot in North Dakota. And together, the two of them, along with Eugene Debs, who was a leading socialist then, founded in Kansas City a school that was basically a college for working class people. It was called The People's College in Fort Scott, Kansas. So Meridel's growing up years were spent in this lively network of free thinkers and socialists who were visiting that school. And that too, you know, had a profound impact on her. The other part of that experience in Oklahoma and Kansas is that she was very aware of the native people and communities that were living around them. And the other thing to know about her is that her great grandmother was Native American. So then the family moved from Fort Scott to the Twin Cities area because vigilantes basically attacked the school and burned it down. So the Le Sueurs moved and there in, St. Paul and Minneapolis, they became very active politically, especially in the Farmer Labor Party. So you get a sense of what the political atmosphere was and some of the family ties and culture. 

AMY: Yes, for sure. Very formative seeing what her mother and her husband were doing for the communities and traveling and seeing different parts of the country, really, too, and seeing that it was sort of, these situations were everywhere. So, Le Sueur joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, and she stayed a member until her death in 1996. And during the Great Depression, which is the time period in which The Girl, this novel, is set, she was in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area, as you said, living side by side with the types of women that she would go on to write about so vividly in this book. So tell us a little bit more about this time in her life in the Twin Cities, Rosemary.

ROSEMARY: Well, it's important to remember that in the 1920s she gave birth to her two daughters, Deborah and Rachel, Deborah was born in 1926 and Rachel in 1928. She had divorced their father earlier on. And so essentially during the 30s, she was a single mother raising her kids. Her writing career took off. Also in the late 1920s, she published her first story in 1927 in The Dial, which was a prestigious Modernist journal. She tried to live off of her writing and published mostly in those years in left leaning magazines like, The New Masses, The Progressive, Partisan Review. She also worked odd jobs: in a factory, on the line as a waitress, even as a washroom attendant. She was also, in those years, part of an organization called the Workers Alliance in the Twin Cities. This was an organization mostly supported by the Communist Party, and as the novel describes, it was really in the forefront of offering support for unemployed people, especially during the time before federal relief was available for them. I think that one of the ways that this novel speaks to people in post COVID times is because it really gives voice to people who are struggling, who are working class people, sometimes unemployed, struggling to support their families, as she was. And a lot of her writing, she's really tuned in to what women do and know. So here's an excerpt from her 1937 essay entitled, "Women Know a Lot of Things." They don't read about the news. They pick it up at its source, in the human body. In the making of the body. And the feeding and nurturing of it. Day in, day out. In that body, under your hands, every day. There resides the economy of that world. It tells you the price of oranges. and cod liver oil, of spring lamb, of butter, eggs, and milk. You don't have to read the stock reports in Mr. Hearst's newspaper. You have the news at its terrible source.

AMY: That reminds me of, um, a line from The Girl, actually, where she writes, What happens to women? What awful things do they know? I remember highlighting that while I was reading that, and it's kind of echoing what you just read there.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to read a very quick passage that stuck with me from " Women on the Breadlines." Um, it's, quoted in the introduction to the West End Press edition from 2006 of The Girl. It's one of the great mysteries of the city where women go when they are out of work and hungry. There are not many women in the bread line. There are no flop houses for women as there are for men, where a bed can be had for a quarter or less. You don't see women lying around on the floor at the mission in the free flops. What happens to them? Where do they go?

AMY: So interesting, and I don't think I ever really thought about that. You can really see how all of this work that she's doing builds to result in this manuscript, The Girl. This book winds up answering a lot of these questions about where were the women, you know, where did they go? What happened to them? While the men were suffering, the women were actually suffering worse. And that's what this book is about. So let's go ahead and leap into our discussion of The Girl. Why don't you, Rosemary, give us a little basic spoiler free overview of the plot.

ROSEMARY: The central character is this unnamed narrator, "the girl". And we meet her soon after she's arrived In St. Paul, and she's working as a waitress in a place called the German Tavern. The bootlegged liquor in the tavern is run by an underworld network whose leader pays for police protection. So "the girl" has a crush on one of the gang members, a guy named Butch, and he draws her into... many things, uh, promises of a future together, but also, driving the getaway car for the bank robbery that the gang is planning. So the plot follows "the girl" through her disenchantment, basically, with the men's competitive fantasies, her eventual pregnancy, and her awakening to an alternative way of life. There's a woman named Amelia who represents that alternative. She's an organizer and a member of the Workers Alliance.

KIM: So a lot of the action takes place in this German Village Tavern. Incidentally, listeners, that was a real establishment back in the 1930s. Amy, it reminded me of a place Dirty Helen Cromwell might've owned. We did a previous episode on Cromwell. She was a real life, madam bootlegger and speakeasy owner from Milwaukee. She had quite a life. Um, and we'll link to that episode in our show notes, 

AMY: Absolutely. I was totally getting Dirty Helen vibes the whole time I was reading this. And I'm gonna go ahead and read the opening passage of The Girl, because I think it really pulls you into this world right away. Saturday was the big day at the German village where I was lucky to get a job in those bad times. And Clara and I were the only waitresses and had to be going up and down from the bar to the bootleg rooms upstairs. My mama had told me that the cities were Sodom and Gomorrah, and terrible things could be happening to you, which made me scared most of the time.

I was lucky to get the job after all the walking and hunting Clara and I had been doing. I was lucky to have Clara showing me how to wander on the street and not be picked up by plain clothesmen and police matrons. They will pick you up, Clara told me, and give you tests and sterilize you, or send you to the women's prison.

I liked to be with Clara and hear about it, and now with Belle, who, with Hoink, her husband, and Ack, his brother, ran the German village. It wasn't German, but lots of even stylish people came there after hours for the bootleg Belle and Hoink made. Clara told me all about what was going on up there, and it scared me.

The men who came in the back alley door and went past the bar and upstairs scared me. Clara told me about Gans, who brought in bootleg from Dakota and paid protection for the place. I shivered when he passed me. And Clara would take my place when Belle told me to take them beer, because she said she could field them better when they tried to make a home run or a strike with their two free paws.

Sometimes I didn't even know the words Clara spoke. I had a lot to learn, Clara said. 

So we see her naivete, her innocence.

KIM: Yeah. I mean, she just feels so real to me from the very opening passage that you just read. I mean, I was transported instantly reading this book. I didn't know anything about it when I started reading it, but I loved it. If the German Village is the hub of what's happening in the novel, I feel like women are the heart of it. There's a lot of suffering on their part. There's abuse. Um, but there almost seems to be a spiritual aspect to it in the way that Le Sueur is describing it. I'm thinking, for instance, of "the girl"'s mother, when she's talking about her love for her husband and children, it has a sacrificial feel to it. She says, it's a fierce feeling you have for your husband and children. Like you could feed them your body and chop yourself into little pieces. 

ROSEMARY: This is such a striking image, of women so intensely nurturing and caring for others that they feel they're feeding them their bodies, chopping yourself up into little pieces. For me, that image captures something very familiar, a very familiar embodied experience that's kind of at the heart of the contradiction of care work. The fierce love that drives it and the toll that self sacrifice exacts. Le Sueur is so good at conveying this tension in women's reproductive labor between that fierce love and its costs. So in the novel, I think we see lots of examples of this. And "the girl"'s mother is one. She's literally been eroded by a thankless and violent marriage and one pregnancy after another, and yet, as "the girl" acknowledges, chased like by a pack of wolves. She kept us alive. And at the same time, women do sustain one another. When "the girl" leaves home for the city, she develops this friendship with Clara, who becomes a mainstay and a support. She also gets support from Belle, who, now, I don't know about Dirty Helen, but when you describe her, Belle sounds a lot like her.

AMY: Oh yeah.

ROSEMARY: She runs the tavern. And then there are other women who come through, including Amelia, and surprisingly for me, Butch's mother.

AMY: Who, Butch's mother keeps being depicted as a woman who's not even in her right mind, like she's lost it. But yes, you still have an affinity for her, and, also she says some of the wisest lines sometimes in the whole novel, even though she's off in the corner, kind of being the crazy lady. Something will come out of her mouth. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. The oracle. 

ROSEMARY: And the effect, I think, is that you get a range of generations, from the ingenue girl to this perhaps demented, quite elderly woman.

KIM: Mm hmm.

AMY: The community of women, it kept reminding me of the novel and the movie Women Talking. I don't know if you guys have either read the book or seen that movie, but just, women of all generations kind of coming together to talk about their collective trauma, and supporting one another.

KIM: She doesn't leave the men out either. They're not necessarily flattering portrayals, but they aren't flat. She really develops the characters really well. Um, a few of the men seem capable of love on some level, but they're pretty much thwarted at every turn too. They're on the edge. And it almost feels like they're a pack of wolves looking for a reason to attack because they're on the defensive all the time. And I'm thinking of one particular scene that I found really chilling. The Christmas tree lighting scene where they're kind of all gathering. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, it is a chilling scene, I mean, not only because it's cold, but because it's so dark and so menacing.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

ROSEMARY: It's important, I think, for us to remember this is the nadir of the Depression years. The men who are gathered there in the public square are there to get some food, maybe donuts and coffee, it seems, which never appear. And the word Christmas is repeated several times and it took me a little while to realize that it's printed as X mas. And in fact, a lot is canceled out here, besides the holiday cheer. It's a scene, I think, that's really preparing the bank robbery. The crowd of men are depicted as weak. The gangsters among them, as you said, are like hungry wolves. So the effect is a scene that's a spectacle of alienation, of, paralysis, really, and of something basic that's broken. So at one point "the girl" asks, why don't they do something? And then goes on to describe the crowd as crouched over our hollow stomachs, nursing our hungers like cancer. And never looking at one another or never seeing a way. So for me, what's so brilliant here is that Le Sueur is knitting together sexual politics into this scene when she has Butch basically give her, "the girl", to the lead gangster, and then he pushes her and she falls as if she's reduced to an object of exchange between two men. So on the one hand, we may think of this scene that's a kind of justification for the robbery, because people are desperately hungry and the state has completely failed to provide for them. But on the other hand, Le Sueur is helping the reader to see that the gangsters are really beaten down by a narrow idea of what's required of a man. They're part of a system, too, that is using people up and pitting them against one another. Never, as "the girl" remarks, never looking at the other or never seeing a way.

AMY: It's interesting. I'm thinking of "the girl"'s best friend, Clara, and she's described as always having an idealistic vision of her future. You know, she's always planning what her kitchen is going to look like someday, or, you know, what fabulous life she might have. And of course, you know, that that's never going to happen. But yeah, it's the first time I'm really thinking that Butch is like that, too, in a way. He always says, I'm a winner. I'm a winner. And when it's clear that he's so pathetic, he's such a loser, but he keeps trying to talk about like, I'm a winner and things are going to get better when we can have our gas station and we'll run a business and it's all going to work out. They're just clinging to a shred of hope. Yeah. Men and women. 

ROSEMARY: And, what's pathetic is not just Butch as a character, although he is, but that narrow script that men have to compete, to win, to get ahead. and then there's what's available to fill in even what that means.

KIM: Right. So let's talk a little bit more about gangsters, because apparently Le Sueur was actually somewhat familiar with the underworld of the Twin Cities. Is that right, Rosemary? What can you tell us about her knowledge of that?

ROSEMARY: Yeah, St. Paul in the 1920s and early 30s was really widely known as a place for gangsters and some famous ones actually passed through or stayed there: Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone. So bank robbers and bootleggers really from all over the Midwest came there to run their operations or to hide from the FBI. And the plot of the story is really drawing on very much real life events that were happening in that city.

AMY: So, yeah, I feel like we've been discussing all this social messaging and forgetting the fact that this is a gangster novel and it does build up to this big climax, the bank robbery, and as we said, "the girl" is tapped to drive the getaway car. Now, side note, my daughter listens to nonstop Taylor Swift all day long. There's a Taylor Swift song called “Getaway Car,” and every time I hear her sing it, I think about this book now. Um, but yeah, the bank robbery scene, it is so gripping. I love the way Le Sueur writes it. You can hear the ticking clock, you can see the moments, the waiting in the car on the sidewalk, the like, footsteps of, you know, the people on the sidewalk. It's just, I was gripped by it. 

KIM: Yeah. After I read this book, I watched the Robert Altman film for the first time, Kansas City, and it's a gangster film. I love Robert Altman, but this is not my favorite of his movies having seen it now, because I actually wish that he had used the plot from The Girl because she does such a great job. It is cinematic. 

AMY: It's totally cinematic. It's great. And the thing that struck me the most is that it's actually "the girl" who has the most composure while this crime is playing out.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: She's the one that keeps her wits together when it all goes south.

KIM: That's a great point. 

AMY: I kept thinking of the movie Badlands, with Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, because after the bank robbery, they go on the run, and, um, you know, her innocence, combined with his kind of recklessness, reminded me of that story. I think Badlands is set more in the 1960s, but if you're a fan of that movie, I think you would really like this novel also,

ROSEMARY: Doesn't it make you wonder why this was never made into a movie?

AMY: I feel like Angelina Jolie needs to get on this one. This feels like her kind of directorial project.

KIM: Yeah.

ROSEMARY: Maybe you can reach out to her.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Maybe she's listening? 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: We always hope.

AMY: I thought it was interesting in this book that there's no use of quotation marks or punctuation to set aside the dialogue, right? it works, it's not difficult to read. It's, you know, you would think that would make it more confusing, and it really doesn't. so seamless.

It 

KIM: almost makes you closer to "the girl" by reading it that way. I don't know, on some sort of

AMY: Like, inside her 

KIM: Yeah. Unconscious level. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

AMY: I think so, too. 

ROSEMARY: She really had an ear for ordinary people's talk. and she listened. She got them, you know, not from her imagination, but she got these ways of speaking from listening to people. 

AMY: So the novel has been labeled a Proletarian novel, and there's the socialist subplot with the labor organizer, Amelia, that we mentioned. I was thinking, I know that this, it ultimately wasn't published until the 70s. And I kept thinking, gosh, if this had come out in the late 30s, early 40s, what a recruitment tool this would have been for the Communist Party, right? By the time you're done reading it, you're like, where do I sign? Because we got to fix things, you know? That sounds crazy to say, but she really... lays her point out so well. 

ROSEMARY: And Amelia really carries the book's political message. I think in the manuscript she didn't have quite the sort of foregrounded carrier of the political message role that she does in this final version. But she is there now from the very beginning. Serving as a midwife as a cat is giving birth to kittens and the guys are betting on how many kittens are going to be born. But she's really more than a midwife to kittens or to a baby. I think of her as the Meridel figure, actually. 

KIM: Interesting. 

ROSEMARY: She is there as a teacher, as a supporter to "the girl", and also to the other women, and she's a counterweight, really, to Butch, and the gangsters, and mapping out another way that we can be a whole other set of values.

AMY: Yeah. Um, okay, so you mentioned the birth of the kittens. the first scenes in the bar. It's a fun moment. So we start with the birth and then we also end with the birth. Very symbolic, because women's reproductive power winds up being a through line of this novel. And you see childbearing as both a weight that holds women down, but it's also kind of their superpower. So Rosemary, you write in your book about the ways that Le Sueur likes to tie women's reproductive bodies to the land, right? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, you know, I think there definitely was, I'll call it a generation of feminist critics who saw that connection between women and the land as not a very productive one because it kind of equates women with Nature as if that's all they can be. and in that way robs women of a certain kind of agency in the world. I don't read Le Sueur that way at all. In fact, I see her as putting what I think of as a radical ecology. She's really expanding how we can understand the reproduction of life as involving, yes, the need for humans to give birth, reproduce, but also for the natural world to reproduce. That humans and the land, they're quite interdependent and entangled. I'd like to refer to one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite stories of hers. It's a widely anthologized story called Annunciation. This was published in 1935, and I think it captures what she's referring to as remembering. I think of it as re, you know, like re-membering, putting back together. So in this story, a woman is reflecting on her experience of pregnancy through her relationship to the pear tree that's outside of her window. She remembers a time in the early weeks of her pregnancy when she had morning sickness and she, quote, “must give it up with the people all looking. And her boyfriend was angry, and he walked away so that these people wouldn't think that he was with her. So then she goes on to savor the memory of a night when the two of them rode on a riverboat to get out of the cold, and she hears the scurrying of tiny animals on the shore, and their little breathing seemed to be all around. I think of them, she says, wild, carrying their young now, crouched in the dark underbrush with the fruit scented land wind in their delicate nostrils, and they are looking out at the moon and the fast clouds. Silent, alive, they sit in the dark shadow of the greedy world. There's something wild about us, too. We too are at the mercy of many hunters.

KIM: Whoa, that is beautiful. 

ROSEMARY: So for me, this is the sensibility that so epitomizes Meridel Le Sueur and remains really at the heart of her politics.

AMY: I think it's also interesting in terms of women's reproductive bodies, which she brings up in the novel, the value to the economy for the work we are providing. Like talk about a labor movement! Literally, we're keeping this whole thing going with our bodies. That was fascinating, and I think just the cyclical nature of the seasons, then you're also thinking in this book about like the, the seasons of women, the generations of women. I kept going back to thinking about my grandmothers, my great grandmother, who I don't even know, their mothers, you know, like thinking about the generations of women that came before us. There's a very strong sense of the interconnectedness.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: The generations. 

KIM: So, Le Sueur, maybe not that surprisingly after some of the stuff we're saying, but she was blacklisted, unfortunately, in the 1950s. What happened and how did this impact her legacy, Rosemary? Mm hmm.

ROSEMARY: The 1950s were really tough for her. She was a member of the Communist Party, and she never denounced that fact. Her grandson, David Tilson, told me that she kept open for years, the Communist Party bookstore in St. Paul, so even through these difficult times. Her parents died in the mid 50s, and so did her partner, Bob Brown, the artist. So that was tough. She lived then in the boarding house that her parents had kept, and she taught creative writing courses through a correspondence program, and through all of that, she was hounded by the FBI to such an extent that her boarders, like, left. And her students quit. She was summoned by the House Un American Activities Committee, and they couldn't find her. She lost jobs, and it was then that she went to work at the Minnesota Asylum for the Insane. So, yes, she was also blacklisted and unable to get published except in Communist magazines and presses. So basically, the U. S. government wanted to relegate her to oblivion. They almost succeeded in doing that. 

AMY: So we mentioned in the introduction that The Girl didn't get published until 40 years after it was written. Why? What's the story there? And, when it was eventually published, what were some of the changes made in the intervening decades, or were there any?

ROSEMARY: Well, men in the Communist Party definitely voiced their criticism of her writing. It really speaks to what you had been mentioning before, the ways that women's lives, women's reproductive capacity, women's labor, matters to Le Sueur. All of that was just completely unrecognizable to male critics, because she just didn't conform to their priorities. Men in the party also saw her erotic sensibility as bourgeois, you know, as not working class. When she tried to publish her novel, it was rejected for being too lyrical. It was rejected for not being written in the style of Ernest Hemingway, and because publishers didn't think that a woman could write a crime novel.

AMY: Think about this. If we're to tell you right now, this is a crime novel that is written in the most beautiful lyrical style, isn't that a draw?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. 

AMY: What's wrong with that? That's amazing.

ROSEMARY: And so we would say, now, this is a woman who was clearly ahead of her time.

AMY: Yeah.

ROSEMARY: And because of that, what she was doing was unrecognizable. So then she put aside her manuscript and it stayed out of sight until the early 70s. What happened, basically, was that historical conditions had made it recognizable as groundbreaking. John Crawford, who founded the left wing publishing house West End Press in 1970, he learned about the manuscript and approached her and suggested that she dust it off and revise it. And she did. As I said, she modified Amelia's role, and she changed the ending. Uh, the baby originally was a boy, and this time around it became a girl. And she wrote to Crawford that she also had deepened the sexual perception of "the girl" and women. So by 1978, when the novel was published, we know that the women's liberation movement by then was in full flower. And, um, and she was able to represent "the girl"'s sexual experiences and women's discussions of sex more openly, more frankly, than she would have been able to do in 1939.

AMY: What a moment in the book that is. 

KIM: Mm

AMY: When "the girl" has her first sexual encounter and when it's over she goes immediately to the women. It's such a communal moment of all the women being there for her, sort of recounting their own experiences. I mean, it was very powerful.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, and she talks about, the phrase that stuck with me was, how awful wonderful it was.

KIM: Yes. 

ROSEMARY: And how it was really scary, and it hurt. And... The things that many of us may have wanted to say and maybe got to or maybe didn't. So I think it absolutely still resonates now, that scene. Also, this is a novel that talks about sex work. And that's part of "the girl"'s education too.

KIM: Right. Right.

ROSEMARY: Abortion is gonna feature in the novel, and we really get a picture that women's control over their reproductive capacity is also at the center of this book.

KIM: So with these changes that Le Sueur made to the manuscript, the story arc gets stronger. "the girl" goes from being this quiet pushover to becoming an empowered woman. And I felt like the ending was unexpectedly hopeful and I loved that about it.

AMY: Those last two chapters or so of this book left me speechless. I will never forget reading the end of this novel and how, how powerful it is. It's interesting, Rosemary, I didn't know that she changed the sex of the baby from a boy to a girl, because to me, that's 

the ending. It's the daughter, it's the, 

KIM: It's so perfect. 

AMY: The next generation of women. And this whole idea of she's called "the girl" the whole time. She doesn't have a name in the novel. She's just "the girl". Her mom calls her girl, you're not quite sure if it's a term of endearment or maybe kind of just dismissive in some ways, the way her mom says it. So, it comes up again at the end of the novel, and it's such a sisterhood moment. 

KIM: Right, right. Definitely taking it to the next generation.

ROSEMARY: Absolutely. I love the ending too. And in addition to all of what you've said, I really love that here, Le Sueur is weaving together those private spaces of women together, and the public space of what's happening outside the warehouse. Uh, and the two then kind of converge in the sense that collective action in the streets and in this warehouse home where the women are all huddled together to support each other in, like, the most dire circumstances, that that organizing that they do together then turns into a public demand for the resources that Clara didn't have and others of them don't have. So that's, for me, what really makes this powerful. That women are able to come together and do something that is so not scripted for us as women, which is demand, in public, what we need. 

AMY: So Le Sueur lived until age 96, which is incredible. Uh, she had such an interesting life. Rosemary, is there anything about her later years that you'd want to share? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, sure, sure. During the 70s and the 80s, she was very much embraced by the feminist movement. It really enabled the recovery of a lot of her work, I mentioned that earlier. She also made a very beautiful film entitled My People Are My Home in 1976 and that's available actually on YouTube. One thing that is important to know about her later years is that she just kept writing into her 90s, even on her deathbed. And the writing that she did then was continually reinventing forms. When she was 91, she published a novel, it's called the Dread Road, and it's written in three columns. And one column is an excerpt from an Edgar Allen Poe short story, “A Message in a Bottle.” Another column is excerpts from Le Sueur's copious journals. And a third, which is the core narrative, is based on a trip that she had actually taken. It's narrated by an old woman, and this old woman gets on a bus in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in the bus station, she meets a young Mexican woman who is carrying in her backpack a dead baby. So the journey passes through a nuclear test site, the town of Ludlow, Colorado, where there had been a massacre in 1914. And so there's this history of slow violence that hangs over the story. This is a book that really speaks to who we are in the 21st century, now trying to comprehend the ways that slow violence has materialized, especially in the climate disaster that we're living through, also in nuclear threats, and we're certainly reminded of them by this recent movie Oppenheimer. And we're trying to imagine what it means to restore a relationship to one another and to the land. So Meridel Le Sueur is writing about all of that. It's packed into the columns of this crazy novel.

AMY: So when you say columns, do you mean typeset columns? 

ROSEMARY: Yes. 

AMY: Wow.

ROSEMARY: So it's very unsettling. Like how the heck do I even read this? 

AMY: Yeah.

ROSEMARY: Right? I mean, she was pretty brilliant. And I think in many ways, a really great American writer.

KIM: I mean, she is an incredible woman, not just because of what she wrote, but that she was actually living it. She put herself out there in these situations, not just to be able to write about it but because she believed in it and she was really living out her beliefs. I mean, it just seems incredible. 

AMY: I was thinking a little bit reading this book about The Grapes of Wrath, too, and how this is such a good alternative in terms of getting a woman's perspective on that era.

KIM: Yeah. I always said my grandmother on my dad's side of the family was, we always say it was very Grapes of Wrath, in their life and experiences during the Depression. But now I'm thinking of my grandmother in a whole other way. No, she was more The Girl, and I wish she was still alive so she could read this and we could talk about it together.

ROSEMARY: You should definitely read some of her journalism, Kim, yeah, because you will maybe see your grandmother there, too.

KIM: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Rosemary, we can't thank you enough for coming on the show to talk about Le Sueur, and we love this discussion so much.

ROSEMARY: Well, I'm so happy you're doing this. Yeah, so, so grateful to you, because your listeners will now know something about Meridel Le Sueur. This has been a real honor and a real, fun conversation.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and leave us a review if you enjoyed the show, and visit our Facebook Forum to chat with us and other listeners. Until next time, keep exploring the lost gems of women's literature. 

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.