Mary Marcy

Mary Edna Tobias Marcy (May 8, 1877 – December 8, 1922) was an American socialist author, pamphleteer, poet, and magazine editor. She is best remembered for her muckraking series of magazine articles on the meat industry, "Letters of a Pork Packer's Stenographer," as author of a widely translated socialist propaganda pamphlet regarded as a classic of the genre, Shop Talks on Economics, and as an assistant editor of the International Socialist Review, one of the most influential American socialist magazines of the first two decades of the 20th century.

Early years

Mary Edna Tobias was born May 8, 1877, in Belleville, Illinois. Orphaned in her childhood, Mary's two younger siblings were sent away to live with relatives while she worked to support herself while attending high school. As she grew somewhat older Mary found more stable employment as a telephone switchboard operator and took her sister and brother back into her household, in which she served as the provider.

Mary purchased a textbook on stenography and taught herself shorthand in her free time.

She took an active interest in politics from an early age and found out firsthand about the consequences sometimes bestowed on those holding minority views on such matters when she was fired from her job in 1896 for wearing a button supporting populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan. "It is interesting to note," remarked socialist Jack Carney in his eulogy of Marcy, "that her employers were engaged in the business of manufacturing American flags."