"Don't Agonize, ORGANIZE!" The Girl by Meridel LeSueur

The Girl by Meridel LeSueur
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

27 April, 2023, published as "Don't Agonize, Organize!" Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.

         Born in 1900, Le Sueur was hunted and haunted by sexual predators and the Red Scare police and agents of the 30s and 1950s, but bolstered by a forthright courage, her bond with like-minded others and a powerful determination that kept her going through 1996. 

        The never-named “girl’s” first person narrative and compelling spoken word multilogue is radically unpretentious and boldly descriptive in the urgency of youth, the heaviness of the Great Depression and the fluidity of the present moment. Taken directly from intimately heard speech, rendered without quotation marks; half a dozen different stories from a Women’s Alliance writer’s group in 1939 are blended together and narrowed down to the rushing epic year through one young woman: her Minnesota family’s farm and city of St. Paul, her viscerally immediate world.        

Portions of The Girl were published in various places between 1935 – 1945, then gathered together and re-edited in 1978 to “a work of fiction” which Prof. Neala Schleuning said “does not tell us about the thirties—she invites us to join in that experience…opens the panorama…for us to see the rhythms of that culture, those people…different from the flowering prairies of the Midwestern farms and villages…a stark world…of urban poverty and the beginnings of our modern bureaucratic world.” (p. 201) (photo: residents of a tenement USA early 1930s)

        A woman in “Robber Baron” America who told vivid truths about her life and the politico-social world around her; about others as well as mass movements. “Big picture” linking intimate story. To expose those who employed violence, money, murder and the media who cruelly controlled and manipulated women, the elderly, immigrants, workers, minorities, people of color, the disabled and disadvantaged. Sound familiar? Sadly, YES.

“This is one of the stories they didn’t want you to read,” her website says, and it’s true. 

        LeSueur had been a writer all her life; but had two children, an extended family, wide community involvement and leaned more toward journalism, lyricism, collectivism, labor and feminist activism than intellectual self-analysis and justification. When I knew her in The Women Poets of the Twin Cities in the 1970s to the 90s, she despised the effete sophistication of T. S. Eliot and reveled in the ferocious eroticism and embodied spirituality of the Second Wave of Feminism boiling to the surface of the literary world. (photo: Audre Lorde, Meridel LeSueur and Adrienne Rich in 1980)

        Her great-granddaughter says she, “wheelchair-bound, was passionately cherished and celebrated for writing visionary, raw, sensual poetry and prose about poverty, and organizing, and corn, and hunger, and Indigenous sovereignty, and state violence, and wheat fields.” LeSueur led us forward in the ascendance of female leaders, adventurers, labor, political, artistic and cultural organizers and soothsayers who emerged by necessity, choice and bravery during that time and then again in The Second Wave of Feminism of the 1960s and 70s.

        She had an automatic sense of being a uniquely caring and gifted woman among ALL women, ALL humanity, and using her life experiences, self-confidence and gifts for all living beings of her times into the past and future, especially the voiceless. Artistic and cultural organizers and soothsayers emerged by necessity and bravery, stepping forward when circumstances, fellow-sufferers and inner “hungers” demanded action, not excuses. (Photo: Minneapolis Star Tribune November, 1985)       

Women, multicultural, conscious and feminist attendees, speakers, scientists and performers at the recent Bioneers conference here seemed to be a large majority; dynamic, multi-talented and of all ages. The upcoming Bay Area Book Festival looked that way, too.  

        Wake up, Listen to Each Other, Get Together, Go!


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