The Girl

The Girl is the representative work of the American left-wing woman writer Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996). Completed in 1939, the novel was banned during the McCarthy era for its alleged communist character and was not published until 1978, when the author's revised version appeared from West End Press; the renewed attention of the second-wave feminist movement in the 1970s also brought Le Sueur back into readers' view. The story is set in St. Paul, Minnesota, during Prohibition and the Great Depression. The narrator is a nameless girl from the countryside who flees poverty and a brutal home and works as a waitress in a restaurant that doubles as a speakeasy, where she meets Clara, a clandestine prostitute, Belle, the bar's owner, and Amelia, an organizer who distributes leaflets for the "Workers' Alliance." The girl falls in love with Butch, a chronically unemployed and violent-tempered man, and becomes pregnant by him; to raise money to open a gas station and start a family, she is drawn into a doomed bank robbery in which Butch and the others are shot dead. The girl then depends on relief during her pregnancy and is sent to a relief maternity home where sterilization after childbirth is routine; Amelia rescues her just before she gives birth, while Clara loses her health and her mind under forced electroshock treatment. The novel replaces the isolated "I" with a collective voice, presenting mutual aid among women as the only way out of poverty and violence, and its language draws heavily on the vernacular of the lower classes in the Depression era, with unquoted dialogue, poetic and rough-hewn. The book is short but presents class, gender, and institutional violence with extreme directness.