Mary Heaton Vorse

Mary Heaton Vorse O'Brien (1874–1966) was an American journalist, labor activist, and novelist. Vorse was outspoken and active in peace and social justice causes, such as women's suffrage, civil rights, pacifism (specifically including opposition to World War I), socialism, child labor, infant mortality, labor disputes, and affordable housing.

Mary Heaton was born October 11, 1874, in New York City to Ellen Marvin Heaton and Hiram Heaton. She was raised in prosperity in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a 24-room house with half-siblings from her mother's previous marriage. The money in the family came from her mother's side. In 1852 Vorse's mother married Captain Charles Bernard Marvin, a wealthy shipping magnate and liquor merchant more than 20 years her senior when she was a young woman of 18. Ellen Marvin was widowed at age 37 with five children. In 1873, she married Mary's father, who with his family operated the Stockbridge Inn.

The family traveled widely, spending over a year in Europe, where Mary attended kindergarten in Hanover and the first year of grade school in Dresden, learning the German language in the process. Later, the family had an apartment in Paris, where Mary learned French, followed later by a winter in Austria.

In her 1935 memoir, Mary Heaton Vorse dated her interest in the problems of politics and economics to the years of her youth, when her mother read to her aloud from a book by ethnographer George Kenan,

...
Wikipedia