Her father was a successful hotelier, but the family's fortune, which was considerable, was her mother's legacy as the widow of Captain Charles Bernard Marvin, a shipping magnate and liquor merchant.

Barbara Ehrenreich dates the beginning of Vorse's activist writing to the horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire which she witnessed the year before just blocks from her home in Greenwich Village.

The Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies", with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and "Big" Bill Hayward as their principal agents, had shown that a largely female and immigrant workforce could organize.

Then a fifteen-year-old mill hand, Fred Beal recalled that, against all expectations, it was the least regarded of the immigrant groups that sustained the strike over two bitterly cold winter months: "the Italians, Poles, Syrians and Franco-Belgians".

When mass arrests followed the tactic (initiated by a young Frank Tannenbaum) of invading churches with demands food and shelter,[12] it was at Vorse's apartment on East 11th Street, that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Hayward, Carlo Tresca and others organized a defense committee.

[13] In Greenwich Village, to which she had moved after Bert's death, she became a charter member of the Heterodoxy, a community of feminists who had largely met as suffrage workers, among them Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Crystal Eastman, Inez Milholland, Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Sara Josephine Baker, and Ida Rauth.

In 1913, while on a magazine assignment in Europe to write a series of articles on the development of the Montessori method of education, she was party's delegate to the conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest.

[16] Unlike Carrie Chapman Catt and others in the party (whose suffrage referendum in 1917 was to result in New York becoming the first eastern state to grant women the ballot), she applauded the direct action tactics associated in Britain with the Pankhursts.

To a friend she wrote, "I cannot imagine anything that would affect better the moral health of any country than something which would blast the greatest number of that indecent, immoral institution – the perfect lady – out of doors and set them smashing and rioting".

[19] She also began, regularly, to produce articles on child labor, infant mortality, labor disputes and working-class housing for several newspapers including New York Post and New York World In November 1919, the Thiel Detective Agency, an anti-union group for hire, informed the Department of Justice that Vorse, along with several anarchists, Wobblies, communists, and AFL leaders, had met in Chicago to advance plans under the leadership of John Reed to overthrow the U.S. government.

Interest in Vorse peaked as a result of her relationship with the radical political cartoonist and Communist Party functionary Robert Minor and their engagement on behalf of the death-row anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

Minor helped produce the first Sacco and Vanzetti defense pamphlet, and Vorse, who saw their case as testimony to "the unalterable determination of the employers to smash the workers", was first to bring it to the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union.

[21] A trip to the Soviet Union in 1919 convinced Minor that Lenin and Trotsky had established "a complete monopoly of news, fact and opinion" in order to silence the "more radical revolutionaries ... behind the dark cloak of secrecy."

"[22] In 1922 her affair with Minor ended when, four months pregnant with his child, she suffered a miscarriage, and he deserted her for the socialist illustrator Lydia Gibson, "a younger, more politically compliant woman".

The moment you get any large group living in virtual slavery (and for ideological reasons) the world should say, "Why bathe humanity in blood if we still have to keep enslaved a considerable number of people so that the new civilization can march?"

On December 2, the front page of the Washington Post featured a letter to President Herbert Hoover she had signed with Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Robert Morse Lovett, and Edmund Wilson pleading with the government not to respond with violence to the unemployed marching on the city.

While in early New Deal Washington, she associated for a time with members of the Ware group, a covert network of Communists later fated to receive wide attention for their connection to the Alger Hiss case.

[32] In 1915, on her property in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Vorse helped stage the first performance of a repertoire that included Ida Rauh, Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, and Eugene O'Neill.

With Albert Vorse's encouragement, at the age of 29 she found herself reeling off short magazine fiction "like a regular phonograph"—typically stories of rugged and energetic heroines who managed to win the affection of a coveted male over a more constrained and conventionally feminine rival.

Vorse's 1915 novel I’ve Come To Stay: A Love Comedy of Bohemia employs "blue serge lining"—a reference to the fabric that protected the inside of tailored coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world—as a metaphor in the struggle of her heroine to break free of a stultifying bourgeois upbringing.

Camilla embraces the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village complete with anarchist friends and a Polish violinist lover and rejects the suit of her neighbor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, for fear that he will once again wrap her up in blue serge.

In 1907 Vorse was one of a dozen authors—among them Henry James and William Dean Howells—who each contributed a chapter to The Whole Family, a multi-generational saga first serialized in Jordan's magazine and then published by Harper's as a book in 1908.

The project was originally conceived by Howells as a showpiece of his brand of literary realism[39] but his vision for the book was disrupted by the agency the women writers insisted on giving the female characters.

[40] In 1917, along with thirteen other authors ready to donate the royalties to the suffragist cause, including Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Henry Kitchell Webster and William Allen White, Vorse collaborated again with Jordan in The Sturdy Oak.

They vary from compilations recording her coverage of actual events, such as Men and Steel (1920), The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926-1927 (1927), and Labor's New Millions (1938), to novels: Second Cabin (1928) based on her homeward voyage from inflation-ravaged postwar Germany and post-revolutionary Russia.

His counterpart in the novel, Fer Deane, under constant threat of assassination leaves much of the work to Irma Rankin and the chief protagonist Mamie Lewes, characters recognizable as Beal's assistants Vera Buch Weisbord and Ella May Wiggins.

She resists Deane's demand that he be given direction of a strike in which it is the women who "man" the dangerous picket lines, and tires of a middle-class Communist-Party activist from the north who befriends her partly, it seems, for the pleasure of hearing himself lecture.

In the novel (completed before Beal and his co-defendants skipped bail and escaped to the Soviet Union) the death of Lewes leads to the decisive martyrdom of an otherwise indecisive Deane: he joins in the final act of resistance and, with five other men, is killed.

In 1966, her children Heaton Vorse, Mary Ellen Boyden, and Joel O'Brien, deposited their mother's papers with the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, in Detroit.

"[51] John Dos Passos, a longtime friend of Vorse's who owned a Provincetown house not far from hers, is said to have drawn on "her quality of willed self-creation" when he invented Mary French, an ill-fated labor organizer in The Big Money, the third volume of his U.S.A.