"The Woman Who Toils" - Bessie and Marie van Vorst - Everybody's

Image of Marie van Vorst posing undercover for the exposing series, "The Woman That Toils."

Description

The sisters-in-law van Vorst made the circuit as ostensible factory girls from the pickle factories of Pittsburgh to the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachuetts and on to the cotton mills of North Carolina. Originally published in a series in Everybody's Magazine in 1902, it became a book, published by Doubleday, the following year. Their starting point was an unapologetic sense of superiority over the wage earners they spent months impersonating, living and working among. Reviewers were quick to point to this approach as both a plus and a minus. As for revelations, they reported on the surprising number of young women whose only reason for working in the factories was near folly -- to earn pocket money for clothes and leisure -- and how that had depressed wages and opportunity for women who needed the jobs to support themselves or their families.

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Effects and Outcomes

Of the toiling women ruses, the work of the sisters-in-law van Vorsts was among the most successful. A book that followed their series in Everybody's Magazine became a bestseller of 1903 in the "Miscellaneous" category, holding its own for half a year against such formidable competitors as Helen Keller's "The Story of My Life" and Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery." The book contained their reports on additional exploits.

Media History

The reporting was intended for these media types: Magazine, Book

II-"The Woman That Toils" - Marie van Vorst's- Everybody's Magazine

"Experiences of a Literary Woman as a Working Girl"

1902-10-01

" ... I laid aside all that pertained to the class in which I was educated and became for a time an American working woman. To live as she lived, work as she worked, see as she saw, and to be party to her ambitions, her pleasures, her privations as far as was, under the circumstances, possible. As I worked by her side, hour after hour, day after day, I hoped to become a mirror in which she should be reflected, to be afterward her mouth-piece to those who know so vastly little of the annals of continuous, unremitting, everlasting toil."

I-"The Woman That Toils" - Bessie van Vorst - Everybody's Magazine

"Experiences of a Literary Woman as a Working Girl"

1902-09-01

"... This land which we are accustomed to call democratic, is in reality composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose despots are the employers, the multi-millionaire patrons, and whose serfs are the laboring men and women. The rulers are invested with an authority and a power not unlike those possessed by the early barons, the feudal lords, the Lorenzo de Medicis, the Cheops; but with this difference, that whereas Pharaoh by his unique will controlled a thousand slaves, Carnegie uses, for his own country what it is, industrially and economically. ..."

III-"The Woman That Toils" - Bessie van Vorst - Everybody's Magazine

"Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls"

1902-11-01

"... it is evident that, in order to render practical aid to this class, we must live among them, discover and adopt their point of view, put ourselves in their surroundings, assume their burdens, unite with them in their daily efforts. In this way alone, and not by forcing upon them a preconceived ideal, can we do them real good, can we help them to find a moral, spiritual, aesthetic standard suited to their condition of life. Such an undertaking is impossible for most people. Sure of its utility, inspired by its practical importance, I determined to make the sacrifice it entailed, and to learn by experience and observation what these could teach. ... "

IV-"The Woman That Toils" - Marie van Vorst - Everybody's Magazine

"Being the Experiences of a Literary Woman as a Working Girl"

1902-12-01

"In the early morning the giant mill grows active. Hear it roar, shattering the stillness for half a mile! It is full now of flesh and blood, of human life and brain and fibre; it is content! Triumphantly during the long day it devours its tithe of body and soul . ... "

V-"The Woman That Toils" - Bessie van Vorst's - Everybody's Magazine

"Experiences of a Literary Woman as a Working Girl"

1903-01-01

"On arriving in Chicago I addressed myself to the ladies of Hull House, asking for a tenement family who would take a factory girl to board. ... Before the hour was up, I had found a clean room in one street, and board in another. This was inconvenient, but safe, and comparatively healthy ..."