author
Mrs. John Van Vorst
1873–1928
An American journalist and author who wrote with unusual immediacy about women’s working lives, she is best remembered for turning firsthand investigation into vivid social reporting. Her best-known book, written with Marie Van Vorst, brought readers inside factories and helped make labor conditions impossible to ignore.
1 Audiobook
The Woman Who Toils Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls
by Mrs. John Van Vorst, Marie Van Vorst
About the author
Born Bessie McGinnis in New York on September 2, 1873, she published under the name Mrs. John Van Vorst and is also known as Bessie Van Vorst. She was an American author and journalist whose work often joined storytelling with social observation.
She is best known for The Woman Who Toils (1903), written with Marie Van Vorst after the two women worked undercover in factories to study the lives and conditions of women laborers. The book grew out of a magazine series and became a notable example of early investigative writing about industrial labor.
Later reference sources also note that she spent part of her life in France, and her career included both fiction and nonfiction before her death in Paris on May 19, 1928.