''The Girl'' (1939; 1978) is a novel by

Meridel Le Sueur Meridel Le Sueur (February 22, 1900, Murray, Iowa – November 14, 1996, Hudson, Wisconsin) was an American writer associated with the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born as Meridel Wharton, she assumed the name of her mot ...

set during

Prohibition Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic ...

and chronicling the development of a young woman from a naive small-town girl into a participant in a bank robbery.

Plot

It tells the story of a nameless girl from rural Minnesota who works in a bar in St. Paul. Clara, a fellow waitress working as a prostitute on the side, takes the girl under her wing as she learns the rudimentaries of love and sex, but also of rape, prostitution, abortion, and domestic violence. Along with the bar-owner Belle and the labor organizer Amelia, Clara and the girl watch their unemployed men self-destruct one by one under the grinding conditions of the Depression. Impregnated by her lover Butch, the girl secretly defies his demand that she get an abortion, hoping that the money from a bank robbery will enable them to get married. However, Butch and three other men are shot and killed during the crime, and the girl, dependent on state assistance during her pregnancy, is forced into a relief maternity home where sterilization after delivery is routine. Amelia rescues the girl before she has her baby, but fails to save Clara from state-mandated electric shock treatments that shatter her health and her sanity. The novel ends with the climactic conjunction of three dramatic events: a mass demonstration demanding "Milk and Iron Pills for Clara," Clara's death scene, and the birth of the girl's baby. The novel closes as an intergenerational community of women vow to "let our voice be heard in the whole city" (130)
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Publication History

Originally completed in 1939, the book was blacklisted during the

McCarthy Era McCarthyism is the practice of making false or unfounded accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism and socialism, and especially when done in a public and attention-grabbing manner. The term origina ...

for its alleged

Communist Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...

ideas. In the 1970s, Le Sueur modified the story, making Girl's baby a girl instead of a boy, and the book was eventually published in 1978. The Meridel LeSueur Family Circle took control of the publishing rights in 2019 and published the third edition in 2022 with a new foreword by Margaret Randall and a new essay by Becka Tilsen, one of Meridel's great granddaughters.

References

1939 American novels 1978 American novels Novels about prohibition in the United States Proletarian literature Novels set in Minnesota {{1970s-hist-novel-stub