Career
Young Mary Heaton was intelligent and athletic and deeply influenced by the ideas of feminism that had begun to emerge as the 19th century wound to a close. Many upper-class women such as Mary were in the forefront of the movement for women's rights to economic independence, education, voting rights, and birth control.
In 1896, continuing earlier work in the field, Mary Heaton began to study at the Art Students' League, located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League was established 20 years earlier by strong-minded young men in rebellion from the conservative nature of the instruction at the National Academy of Design. By the time that Mary entered, the school was booming, with over 1100 pupils studying in sex-segregated day and evening classes, studying sketch art, sculpture, and painting. While Mary found participation in the artistic avant-garde exhilarating, she unfortunately was sadly lacking in talent. She wrote in her diary: "When I come into my room and see my work lying around, my sense of my own futility overwhelms me. After so much work, that is all I can do."
Under the influence of her first husband, Mary Heaton Vorse determined to herself become a professional writer. Mary began to create and sell romantic fiction to women's magazines. Her stories often featured the motif of a rugged and energetic heroine who managed to win the affection of a coveted male over a more constrained and conventionally feminine rival.
In 1904 Mary and Bert Vorse moved to Venice, where Mary was first introduced into the world of the working class and their labor struggles.
In her mid-40s, Mary entered into a common-law relationship with anarchist-turned-communist cartoonist Robert Minor beginning in 1920. She suffered a miscarriage of a child by Minor in 1922, with Minor leaving her for illustrator Lydia Gibson shortly thereafter. Vorse was despondent over her broken relationship and loss of her child and as a result of the medical treatment she received following her miscarriage, she became addicted to morphine and later alcohol. She did not shake her drug problems until early 1926, when she was finally able to return to writing again.
Read more about this topic: Mary Heaton Vorse
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)