Marie Louise Van Vorst

• Marie Van Vorst
• Born: November 23, 1867
• Died: December 16, 1936

Novelist and writer on the plight of women and child factory workers, was born in New York City to Hooper Cumming Van Vorst, a descendant of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley, and his second wife, Josephine (Treat) Van Vorst. Hooper Van Vorst, born in Schenectady, New York, spent most of his adult life in New York City, where he practiced law, served as a justice on the state supreme court, and was instrumental in causing the downfall of the city’s corrupt and tyrannical Democratic organization, the Tweed Ring. His two sons and daughter were educated at home by tutors.

Marie Van Vorst became associated with reform almost by chance. A bookish child, she hoped to become a poet, and in her early twenties she published poetry and fiction in magazines. She did not try her hand at a novel until her early thirties, after she had moved to Paris and had begun collaborating with another expatriate, Bessie (McGinnis) Van Vorst, the widow of her brother John. Their novel, Bagsby’s Daughter (1901), was well received. Seeking a subject for a solo effort, Marie Van Vorst decided on a wealthy young man’s struggle to help the poor in the face of opposition from his family and friends.

How Van Vorst chose to focus on social problems is unclear. The wretched conditions of life for New York’s immigrant poor were facts she grew up with, and she was acquainted with political reform efforts through her father. Perhaps she was encouraged to treat reform activities by the success of the muckrakers and of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s 1901 novel The Portion of Labor. Whatever the impetus, the result, Philip Longstreth (1902), proved a popular novel, and it identified her with reform.

Next she set out, with Bessie Van Vorst, to describe the desolate lives of women factory workers. To collect material for the book, the two women returned to the United States and worked briefly under assumed names at several factories. Marie Van Vorst, taking the pseudonym Bell Ballard, found work in a Columbia, South Carolina, cotton mill and in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts. “I laid aside for a time everything pertaining to the class in which I was born and bred,” she wrote, “and became an American working-woman. I intended, in as far as was possible, to live as she lived, work as she worked.” Van Vorst abhorred socialism, but supported the formation of labor unions to enable the working woman to “keep her health and self-respect,” both of which were threatened by the conditions prevalent in sweatshops, mills, and factories nationwide.

Helped by a short preface written by President Theodore Roosevelt, the exposé won a wide readership when it was published as The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (1903). Marie Van Vorst’s final chapter, “The Child in the Southern Mills,” triggered a movement in the South to abolish child labor. Bessie Van Vorst went on to publish The Cry of the Children (1908), a collection of magazine articles on child labor in textile mills. Marie Van Vorst touched on the theme in Amanda of the Mill (1905), a novel about southern factory conditions that she researched in the Blue Ridge Mountains and wrote in France. Amanda found a welcome audience, as did many of the thirty-eight romantic novels she forced herself to write afterward. Some of the more successful of these later novels were The Sin of George Warrener (1906), First Love (1910), and Broken Bell (1912). She wrote nonfiction books as well, a few of them collections of her pieces on art and travel for Harper’s Monthly and other magazines.

American neutrality during the opening years of World War I gave her material for a forceful piece of prowar propaganda, War Letters of an American Woman (1916). The war’s opening had caught her in Paris. She fled from there to London with a secretary, three servants, and her mother. Unable to join the British Red Cross, she returned to France as a volunteer nurse with the American Ambulance, a field hospital in Neuilly. In 1915 she toured the United States, lecturing on the need for American support of France. Her War Letters, a chronological selection of her correspondence with friends, relatives, and newspaper editors, hammers that point home. Not surprisingly, the tone of some of the letters is jingoistic. To the New York Sun, she wrote in November 1915 a demand that all German-Americans either denounce the Kaiser’s methods (“American women of the highest class have been stripped and insulted”) or depart the United States. “America does not seem to realize,” she concluded, “that this Cause is a cause common to humanity, to Christianity, and to manhood.”

In October 1916, in Paris, Van Vorst married an Italian nobleman, Count Gaetano Cagiati. They lived in Rome, where they raised an adopted son, Frederick John. As a wife and mother, Marie Van Vorst insisted on her independence. “The modern trend toward freedom is a great thing,” she said in 1923. “I heartily believe that a woman can have a career and a home and have both successfully.”

In 1918 the Supreme Allied Command sent her to the United States as head of a commission that managed war relief for Italy. She continued to write a novel a year until 1922, when she found she had a talent for painting. That discovery, and the sale of several paintings, seemed to release her from a burden. “Writing was never easy for me,” she told an interviewer in 1923. “I hated it. And I have never written the things I wanted to write. I wrote coldly for money, without interest in what I was doing. No, I do not admire anything I have ever written.”

Yet, despite her claim that she wrote “without interest,” she was a passionate woman, as The Woman Who Toils and War Letters prove. A reformer more by accident than by nature, she is remembered as a champion of working women—not for her advocacy, but for her direct and sympathetic descriptions of the joyless world of exploited female factory workers.

At the age of sixty-nine, Van Vorst died of pneumonia while visiting Florence, Italy, where she was buried.

The Woman Who Toils Van Vorst’s travel articles in Harper’s Monthly (1906-09), and War Letters of an American Woman (1916) contain useful information on her activities and thoughts. Also of value are articles in the Bookman, May 1902, the Critic, January 1902, and The New York Times, May 27, 1923, and December 18, 1936. See also Notable American Women (1971) and Who Was Who in America, vol. 1 (1943).