Literary Paper - The Girl

Carol Roe

March 29, 2006

Making the Tough Choices

As I read Meridel Le Seuer’s novel, The Girl, I thought about how her characters had arrived at the scene where I was being introduced to them. It would be easy to misjudge the decisions that brought these women to this place in their lives, without considering the circumstances under which the decisions were made. In this novel, the author uses the story of the changing lives of one group of women during the Great Depression to illustrate the changing roles of American women during a turbulent economic and political period of our nation’s history.

In 1920, America was emerging from World War I.  Two new amendments to the US Constitution became effective that year. After years of effort, temperance forces were able to achieve a national ban on the sale of intoxicating liquors through the ratification of the 18^th Amendment. The 19^th Amendment gave women the right to vote, after more than 70 years of work by women’s suffrage advocates. When the presidential election was held in 1920, many cities saw women voters far outnumbering the men, allowing women to have a voice in the American political system. During the war, many women had taken factory jobs, replacing the men who had entered the armed services. When the war ended, those jobs were returned to the former soldiers. The economic good times associated with World War I played out during the 1920s, and an economic depression spread across the United States. After the stock market crash of 1929, many men had to leave their families to seek employment and many others simply abandoned them. Women and children were forced into the roles of family breadwinners, and many rural women were forced into the cities to look for work. For many women, it seemed a hopeless situation.

Prohibition’s ban on the sale of intoxicating liquor proved very hard to enforce, and was ignored by many normally law-abiding citizens. The criminal element seized the lucrative black market opportunity before them. A very organized system of supply developed. As the public saloons closed, private “speakeasies” opened. In addition to the “bootlegging” of intoxicating beverages, these secretive establishments were also generally associated with gambling and prostitution. With the huge profits they made, the criminals paid policemen, judges and other public officials to protect their business interests from both their competitors and from legal prosecution. This period, called the Roaring Twenties, became known as an era of lawlessness.

 The story of The Girl opens in one of these speakeasies, The German Village. We meet all the main characters there. Belle, her husband Hoinck, and his brother Ack manage the illegal bar. The Girl and her young friend Clara work there as waitresses. Amelia is a customer who comes in to share time with the other women. Butch and his brother, Bill, are out of work and spend time drinking there and flirting with the girls. Ganz is a gangster who furnishes the illegal booze and pays protection for the bar. 

The Girl is young and naïve, apparently forced to the city to find work. She is described as “a virgin from the country scared of her shadow” (2). Clara supplements her meager earnings by working as a prostitute. She had been forced to learn the ways of the world at an early age, and she advises The Girl on “how to wander on the street and not be picked up by plainclothesmen and police matrons” (1). She protects The Girl from the customers with “too-free paws” at the German Village. She dreams of the fine life she will have one day and tells The Girl “there’s a rainbow for everyone” (2). The Girl describes Belle as a woman who “must have been a beauty once” and “still was on Saturday nights” (2). Belle is worldly and knows how to entertain her customers. Amelia is the most consistently solid character in the book. She is a widow whose husband was killed during a labor dispute. She’s an organizer and activist with the Worker’s Alliance. The Girl seems drawn to her for advice. Butch and Bill like to relive their glory days as a baseball players and Butch brags to The Girl:  “Sure we’re winners sister” (16). The Girl is entranced by Butch, and is eventually impregnated by him. Ganz is a sinister character who frightens The Girl.

I’m sure The Girl did not come to the city with the dream of selling bootleg in an illegal bar, but she says “I was lucky to get a job in those bad times” (1). Clara is guilt ridden about working as a prostitute, but consoles herself with the thought that she will use the money to “better” herself. Referring to sexuality, she tells The Girl “…it’s the only thing you got that’s valuable” (55). The Girl describes how Belle told her about men and about aborting all thirteen of her pregnancies:  “this is a rotten stinking world and for women it is worse…I wouldn’t bring up no kids in it” (10). But when The Girl becomes pregnant, Belle tells her “Don’t have it taken out” (112). This statement indicates to me that Belle regrets the choices she had to make. Amelia, the mother of six children, tells The Girl how her pregnancies always made her happy. It seems that in another time she might have been a quiet homemaker, instead of the social activist that she has been forced to become.

After the death of her father, we see The Girl come to terms with her childhood and bid her family goodbye. We see her surrender herself to her first sexual experience with Butch, wrestle with the truth of the resulting pregnancy, and exert her first show of defiance when she refuses to have the baby aborted as Butch has told her to do. But, perhaps the decision most representative of the era in which the book was set is The Girl’s participation in the bank robbery. It seems like a ludicrous choice for an innocent country girl to make, but during the Great Depression the banks were perceived as being a tool of the wealthy businessmen who robbed the working people of their savings and foreclosed on family farms. Bank robberies were seen as justifiable and bank robbers became folk heroes. After Clara’s death, Amelia expressed this sentiment as she raged at the system that she held responsible for killing Clara:

Was she a criminal? Was she a danger? Clara never got any wealth. She died a pauper. She never stole anyone’s land or took it to high interest on the mortgage. She never got rich on the labor of others. She never fattened off a war. She never made ammunition or guns. She never hurt no one. Who killed Clara?  Who will kill us?  (146)

In the beginning of the novel, The Girl, who had grown up frightened of her father, is also intimidated by the men at the German Village. But as she gains experience and confidence, the men fade out of the story. In a time when there was no unemployment insurance, no public housing, and no Medicaid, The Girl and the other women relied on one another for survival. As Clara lies dying, Amelia plasters the city with leaflets demanding “Milk and Iron Pills for Clara” (145). She is a representative of the women’s movement of the time demanding accountability from their government and relief for families who were suffering so much. At the same time, The Girl gives birth to baby Clara, who comes kicking and screaming into the world also making her demands…a representative of the new generation of women, who will not be intimidated or silenced. 

The decisions made by the women in the novel were dictated by the social and economic realities of the time. But these women are representative of the thousands of women whose solidarity, strength and actions during the Great Depression brought about political, economic and social change that improved the lives of families during that historic period and pushed forward a movement that continues today. 

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