Feminine Free Lance

A FOOTNOTE TO FOLLY--Mary Heaton Vorse--Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Few wives and mothers of her day have seen so much of the world as Mary Heaton Vorse. Few men or women have a better right than she to consider her reminiscences of an active life a footnote to the history of her time. A Footnote to History was to have been the title of her book, but after thinking about history and what it had failed to teach her generation, Author Vorse changed the name to A Footnote to Folly.

If she had been that kind, Mary Heaton might have grown up to be a New England bluestocking. Reared in the academic society of Amherst, Mass., where Henry James went visiting his young cousins and Emily Dickinson was one of the town characters, she found the life pleasantly stimulating, graduated naturally into studying art in Paris. Marriage to Albert White Vorse, a writer with a hobby of arctic exploration, further broadened her horizon. In a winter spent in Italy she saw her first big strike (Venetian gondoliers). It impressed her but hardly got under her skin. Back in the U. S., she and her husband set up a co-operative housekeeping venture in Manhattan with some other young intellectuals called themselves A Club. "Everybody"--from Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser--used to drop in for a chat.

From this still idyllic existence Mrs. Vorse was brutally awakened by the death of her husband. Forced now to support herself and her children, she turned to writing stories, articles, magazine assignments. With the Lawrence textile strike (1912) her story really begins. Her sympathetic investigation of conditions among the strikers got her dander up, gave her a full-time purpose in life. "I could do one thing. I could write. I could try to make other people see what I had seen, feel what I had felt. I wanted to make others as angry as I was. I wanted to see wages go up and the babies' death rate go down."

At Lawrence she met Hearstman Joe O'Brien, found he felt the same way she did, married him later the same year. But she admits few such personal facts into her narrative; from then on her story is of an impersonal crusade, carried on over ten years and three continents, to help children. "Indeed, my book is the record of a woman who in early life got angry because many children lived miserably and died needlessly."

Her crusade took many forms, plunged aside against many a threatening windmill, but never faltered. She founded a Montessori school at Provincetown, where she spent her summers when she could. She went to Europe to report the 1915 International Congress of Women in Amsterdam. She ventured through War-time Germany just after the sinking of the Lusitania. She toured the French devastated areas to find out how the civilians were making out. She got home to find her husband dying of cancer.

Back to Europe went Mary Heaton Vorse, just after the Armistice, on the last convoyed ship to leave Manhattan. England's Black Country, faced with "the great calamity of peace"; Paris of the Peace Conference; Italy, with new ruins to add to its old; the meeting of the Second International at Berne; devastated Serbia, machine-gun fire in starving Vienna, Budapest under Bela Kun's Communist regime--all these she saw and reported. The one meeting she refused was an interview with Queen Marie of Rumania. Once more in the U. S., her active indignation sent her into the great steel strike of 1919, then into organizing shirtmakers for the militant Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Finally she went to Russia, rode on a propaganda train with Kalinin, talked to Lenin, listened to Trotsky. Going home that time, second class, was an anticlimax: "Hungry gluttonous people fell upon the good food wolfishly. The ship swiftly split up into the goods and the bads. The bads had a good time and the goods talked about them."

Looking back on it all, Mary Heaton Vorse concludes that the ''creative impulse" she thought she felt in 1912 has not been strong enough for the forces of reaction. Though she does not explicitly admit it, she implies that not even warm-hearted indignation was enough to save the children.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.