Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley was first published in the U.S.A. in 1929, but my copy is a Virago reprint from 1984. It’s very autobiographical, which is heartbreaking really.

The main character is Marie Rogers (Agnes Smedley) and her family is mired in desperate poverty in rural Missouri where her father has been working at various jobs, but as he goes home via the bars he’s just a hindrance to his poor wife who struggles to feed and clothe the family and is undernourished herself. Marie is determined not to end up like her mother, with a feckless husband and multiple children. The choices for females seem to be marriage or prostitution, but Agnes wants an education. She manages to get to college for a time and in the future she gets some work teaching and in journalism.

Strangely for a woman who says she’ll never get married as she wants to keep her independence, she ends up getting married TWICE, each time on the spur of the moment, the first time within twenty minutes of being propsed to! The second time within a week or so. Disasters of course.

Marie got a job working for the birth control activist Margaret Sanger who valued her work and hoped she would stay on, but Marie was attracted to the Indians who were in America and trying to gain independence from Britain. She worked for them during World War 1 and it seems that they were being bank-rolled by the Kaiser who was insanely jealous of the British Empire. But the Americans put Marie in jail for two years for her efforts. After that she took up a Chinese cause and became a war correspondent.

I can’t help thinking that it’s a shame that she felt the need to travel far afield with her talents rarther than staying at home and helping with the feminist and birth control movements. It seems like someone like her is needed nowadays in the US!

This was a fascinating but grim read. This was one of my 20 Books of Summer 2022.