An Anarchist Woman

Hapgood built this 1909 book around a real working woman he calls Marie, a factory hand and domestic servant raised in a Chicago slum who thought her way out of poverty and into the anarchist movement. Drawing on her letters, her talk, and her confessions, he traces what he named the temperament of revolt: how hardship, labor, and disillusion can push an ordinary person toward radical politics and free love. The result sits between reportage and biography, warm toward Marie yet honest about her contradictions and her drift toward self-destruction. It holds up as a rare firsthand look at the human texture of American anarchism rather than its theory, and as an early, serious effort to treat a poor woman’s inner life as a subject worth close attention.