Queer Places:
The Art Students League of New York, 215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019
24 Charles St, New York, NY 10014
Provincetown Cemetery
Provincetown, Barnstable County, Massachusetts, USA
Mary
Heaton Vorse O'Brien (October 11, 1874 – June 14, 1966) was
an American journalist, labor activist, social critic, and novelist. She was a
member of the Heterodoxy Club. She was outspoken and active in peace and social justice causes,
such as women's suffrage, civil rights, pacifism (such as opposition to World
War I), socialism, child labor, infant mortality, labor disputes,
and affordable housing.[1]
Vorse is sometimes remembered anecdotally as the inspiration for the fictional
character "Mary French" in John
Dos Passos' trilogy USA.[32]
Mary Heaton was born October 11, 1874, in New York City to Ellen Cordelia Blackman Vorse Marvin (1834-1910) and
Hiram Heaton, Jr. (1841-1914).[2] She
was raised in prosperity in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a 24-room house with
half-siblings from her mother's previous marriage.[3] The
money in the family came from her mother's side. In 1852, Ellen Vorse's mother
married Captain Charles Bernard Marvin, a wealthy shipping magnate and liquor merchant,
more than 20 years her senior, when she was a young woman of 18. Ellen Marvin
was widowed at age 37 with five children. In 1873, she married Mary's father,
who, with his family, operated the Stockbridge Inn.[4]
The family traveled widely, spending over a year in Europe, where Mary
attended kindergarten in Hanover and
the first year of grade school in Dresden,
learning the German
language in the process.[5] Later,
the family had an apartment in Paris,
where Mary learned French, followed later by a winter in Austria.[5]
In her 1935 memoir, she dated her interest in the problems of politics and
economics to the years of her youth, when her mother read to her aloud from a
book by ethnographer George
Kennan on the brutal Siberian penal system of Russia.[6] An
interest in classic Russian
literature followed, complemented by directed reading with her father on
topics of American
history.[7]
She found her intellect stimulated by life in the college town of Amherst and
discussions held in the family home between her father and several prominent
friends from academia, including the president of Massachusetts
Agricultural College, Henry
Hill Goodell, and anthropology professor John Tyler.[8]
She was allowed to leave the formal school system at a young age and
subsequently spent several winters in Paris studying art.[5] In
1896, Heaton began to study at the Art
Students' League, on West 57th Street in New
York City. The League was established 20 years earlier by strong-minded
young men in rebellion from the conservative nature of the instruction at the National
Academy of Design. By the time that Mary entered, the school was booming,
with over 1100 pupils studying in sex-segregated day and evening classes,
studying sketch art, sculpture,
and painting.[9]
While Mary found participation in the artistic avant-garde exhilarating,
she unfortunately was sadly lacking in talent. She wrote in her diary: "When I
come into my room and see my work lying around, my sense of my own futility
overwhelms me. After so much work, that is all I can do."[10]
She was young, intelligent, and athletic and was deeply influenced by the
ideas of feminism that
had begun to emerge as the 19th century came to a close. Many upper-class
women such as Mary were in the forefront of the movement for women's rights to
economic independence, education, voting
rights, and birth
control.[11]
Her first husband was Albert White "Bert" Vorse, a widely traveled journalist
who had worked for a year in a Boston settlement
house, run by Edward
Everett Hale.[12] They
were married on October 26, 1898[13] after
a brief courtship and had two children: a boy, Heaton (1901-1990),[14] born
in 1901 and a girl, Mary,[14] born
in 1907.[15]
The couple began to take an increased interest in social problems of the day,
spurred by the muckraking reformist
politics of the day and a personal friendship with radical journalist Lincoln
Steffens.[12] The
Vorses would frequently go sailing with Steffens and his wife on the Vorses'
boat, where they would be regaled with Steffens's "epic stories" of "gigantic
lootings and skulduggeries."[16]
Bert was soon assigned to Paris as the correspondent of the Philadelphia
Ledger.[16] It
was in France that Mary, encouraged and instructed by her husband, began to
try her own hand at professional writing.[16] She
began to create and sell romantic fiction to women's magazines. Her stories
often featured the motif of
a rugged and energetic heroine who managed to win the affection of a coveted
male over a more constrained and conventionally feminine rival.[17]
In 1904, the Vorses moved to Venice,
where Mary was first introduced into the world of the working
class and their labor
struggles.[18]
Bert died on June 14, 1910, of a cerebral
hemorrhage.[19]
In 1912, she married the journalist Joe O'Brien, a socialist from Virginia
whom she met at the 1912
Lawrence Textile Strike.[20] The
couple had one child, Joel
O'Brien (1914-1991).[22]
Vorse was active in the fight against militarism and American
entry into World War I and was a founding member of the Woman's
Peace Party in January 1915. She was chosen as the delegate of the New
York Woman Suffrage Party to an International Women's Peace Congress held in The
Hague at the end of April 1915, traveling aboard the MS Noordam through
mine-strewn waters to attend.[23]
She wrote for the New
York Post, New York
World, McCall's, Harper's
Weekly, Atlantic
Monthly, The Masses, New
Masses, New
Republic, and McClure's
Magazine as well as various news services.[24]
The catalyst for the transformation of Provincetown from declining fishing
village to ostentatious LGBTQ resort was the privations accoiated with WWI. As
an alternative to summering in Europe, one woman who was connected to the
Greenwich Village set that was the American arm of this expatriate group, Mary
Heaton Vorse, told everyone she met to spend the summer of 1915 in
Provincetown. A journalist, Vorse first came to Provincetown in 1907 seeking
space to write and raise a family. By 1912, her home was a center for left
wing writers and activists, with famed author
Sinclair Lewis and others
stopping at 466 Commercial St. whenever they needed a place to rest or work
without interruption. Seeking investment property, Vorse purchased an old
fishing pier, Lewis Wharf (571 Commercial St), and leased part of it to an art
school. Her friends came in droves and invited others. There were so many
Greenwich Village people in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 that two
popular Village restaurants, Polly's (at 484 Commercial St) and Christine's
(at 264A Bradford St) opened branches in Provincetown's East End.
Vorse participated in and reported on the Lawrence
Textile Strike, the steel
strike of 1919, the textile
workers strike of 1934, and coal strikes in Harlan
County, Kentucky.[25]
From 1919 to 1923, Vorse was in a relationship with the radical political
cartoonist and Communist
Party functionary Robert
Minor.[26]
Four years before her death in 1966, the 88-year-old Vorse entered the silver
jubilee banquet of the United
Auto Workers, accompanied by union leader Walter
Reuther. There, she received the first UAW
Social Justice Award, with former First
Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt and novelist Upton Sinclair looking on to share her honor.[27] Vorse
was feted for her work as one of the most important labor journalists of the
1920s and 1930s.
Vorse died of a heart
attack on June 14, 1966, at her home in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, on the extreme tip of Cape
Cod, where she was buried.[28] She
was 92 years old. In addition to her memoir written in 1935, Vorse
participated in an oral history project at Columbia
University in 1957, an interview that was transcribed and microfilmed by
the university.[29]
Vorse also wrote several ghost
stories, including "The Second Wife" (1912).[30][31] The
stories were later collected in the Ash-Tree
Press volume Sinister Romance : Collected ghost stories.
My published books:
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