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Elizabeth Visser
Ken Hansen
History 1700
22 March 2016
23-15 Le Sueur, Meridel, Women on the Breadlines (1932)
This Place is Making Me CRAZY!!!!
I see it; the room where the women wait. The hard tile floor, the chairs built strictly to
accomplish their purpose with no thought of comfort. It’s stuffy. The late summer day in
Minnesota is humid and the room has poor ventilation. Le Sueur says nothing of the conditions
of the room, but her powerful descriptions of its members creates a full picture of this most
despairing place. Le Sueur, through her writing, is insisting that the public knows that this place
and these women exist. That despite the growth and improvements happening in the economy,
the woman on the breadlines are still there, still hurting, still struggling.
Le Sueur describes a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and even actions of the women
gathered at the city employment bureau. As she sits as a fellow job seeker her keen awareness of
those around her is evident. She has personally come in her own search for employment. After
being there for many, many days, she begins to notice things about the women around her, and
longs to give them a voice. She sees into the women in that moment, but additionally, she
recognizes how it is that many of them have arrived at this place. The farm girls who have been
displaced, the wives searching for work while their husbands are without employment, the
elderly woman who devoted her life to rearing her children and has now found her own self
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without. As in any situation we find ourselves in life, there is always a back story, and Le Sueur
recognizes this splendidly. Le Sueur knows something of these women and their past, as she
herself grew up among the radical farmer and labor groups that informed her youth, like the
Populists, the Farmers Alliance and the “Wobblies,” the Industrial Workers of the World.
(Saxon, 1996)
She watches several events unfold as she waits for her own turn at a job. “A girl we have
seen every day all summer went crazy yesterday at the YW. She went into hysterics, stamping
her feet and screaming.” (Le Sueur) This young woman had been coming to the bureau for
months and finally could not take it anymore. The buzz around the women in the following days
was that this young woman had been seen; “back of a café downtown, outside the kitchen door,
kicking, showing her legs so that the cook came out and gave her some food and some men
gathered in the alley and threw small coin on the ground for a look at her legs.” (Le Sueur) The
pangs of hunger and the fear of the coming winter seem to have led these women to extremes
that they would not normally have even considered. Without creating a sense of judgment, Le
Sueur simply states the choices made by some of the women. Some of the hard choices these
woman felt forced into were; the choice to not marry, hesitant to bring an innocent life into their
own current chaos, the choice made by some to sell their bodies through prostitution, the choice
to swallow the hard pill of pride and apply for possible charitable support. These choices all
came with their individual consequences. Missing out on true love and companionship of a
family, risking their personal safety by trusting men in the most intimate way, and potentially
being looked down on society even more than they felt they already were.
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This gave me cause to wonder what measures I would go to. As a mother faced with
feeding the ones your heart loves most deeply, no measure would seem too great after months,
even years of this torture. Personally I know a little something of these women’s struggles. As a
single mother of two beautiful boys, I have made the choice to turn to financial assistance, in the
form of food stamps from the state, as I work to finish my education and put myself in a place to
support myself and my sons on my own. While I am extremely grateful for the help, each time I
use my card for our groceries I do feel within myself a sense of shame and longing for the day
when I am no longer using this assistance.
Most interestingly, Le Sueur captures the abilities and weaknesses of the human and its
spirit. Within myself I wonder, how it is, that one woman goes crazy, while another remains
“unbelievably jaunty?” (Le Sueur) In a moment in history when political leaders were touting
the end of the depression, her critics would rather she had seen only the good that was happening
for our country, Le Sueur stood as a voice for those still facing intense private battles.
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Works Cited
Le Sueur, Meridel. "Women on the Breadlines." New Masses (1932).
Saxon, W. (1996, November 24). UPenn Writing. Retrieved July 26, 2010, from UPenn:
http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/meridel-obit.html