Marcy, Mary Edna

MARCY, MARY EDNA (1877–1922). A major publicist, pamphleteer, and editorialist for Debsian Socialism’s left wing, working-class militant Mary E. Marcy was a central figure at Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company in the 1910s. A key member of the editorial board of Kerr’s International Socialist Review (ISR) after December 1908, Marcy played a significant role in shaping the Left line against war and militarism prior to U.S. entry into World War I. She joined the Socialist Party in 1903 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1918.

Marcy’s muckraking “Letters of a Pork Packer’s Stenographer” ran serially in the ISR in 1904 and won her instant notoriety within Left circles. She and her husband, Leslie H. Marcy, soon became regular contributors to the Kerr monthly. A student of John Dewey at the University of Chicago, she maintained a political and pedagogical conviction that Marxian theory had to be presented in a clear, simple fashion if the movement was to make serious headway with American workers. One of her many writings, her now classic economics primer, Shop Talks on Economics, first appeared in the ISR in 1911 and subsequently went through numerous editions and translations and reached a circulation of over two million by 1922.

Marcy also wrote children’s books and materialist tracts on housework and on sexual relations. Women as Sex Vendors; or, Why Women Are Conservative (1918) examined women’s subordinate status in relation to sex and morality. She followed this theme in a short dramatic work, A Free Union: A One-Act Drama of “Free Love” (1921).

An irrepressible oppositional voice to World War I, Marcy became a target of governmental surveillance and harassment following U.S. entry. Demoralized and exhausted by personal and political losses effected by the war and the onslaught against the Left, she took her own life in 1922.

Carney, Jack. Mary Marcy. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1923.

Giffin, Frederick C. The Tongue of Angels: The Mary Marcy Reader. Sellinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1988.

Ruff, Allen. ‘We Called Each Other Comrade’ - Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers. Oakland: PM Press, 2011, [Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996].

Marxist Internet Archive- Mary Marcy: https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/marcy/index.htm