Sorrows of Cupid, The.
O’Hare, Kate Richards. The Sorrows of Cupid. Revised and Enlarged. St. Louis: The National Rip-Saw Pub. Co., 1912.
8vo.; dark green cloth; spine rubbed; extremities gently bumped.
Third edition, second with this title, revised and enlarged. In 1904 O’Hare published her first book, a socialist novel called What Happened to Dan. In 1908 she revised it, retitling it The Sorrows of Cupid. When all copies of that edition were exhausted, she revisited the test. She writes in her foreword: “I trust I have been able to give to it the added ripeness of ten years of work and experience, still retaining in it the hope and optimism of my youth.” The National Rip-Saw was a socialist weekly edited by O’Hare and her husband, and in 1917-18 they renamed it the Social Revolution.
The social activism of Kate Richards O’Hare (1877-1948) had its roots in the experiences of her youth. At 17 she became a machinist’s apprentice in her father’s shop and joined the International Order of Machinists, which rarely admitted women. Already a temperance worker and a member of the Florence Crittenton mission for “fallen women” in Kansas City, she was spurred to a more active role in the Socialist movement on the Great Plains by speeches by “Mother” Mary Harris Jones and publications put out by Julius Wayland. When she married in 1902 she and her husband devoted their honeymoon to a lecture tour; Kate delivered such speeches as “Law and the White Slaver” and “Common Sense and the Liquor Question.” In 1910 she ran for Congress in Kansas on the party ticket; she was, off and on, on the national executive committee; and was a delegate to the meeting of the Second International in London, 1913, all while raising four children.
The Great War brought O’Hare new contexts in which to promote socialism, delivering her “Socialism and the World War” lecture over 140 times. In 1920, after over a year in jail on specious espionage charges, O’Hare was released—and later, pardoned—with a new cause to fight for: the release of political prisoners. From prison she had published Kate O’Hare’s Prison Letters (1919), and In Prison (1920, reissued in 1923 by Knopf). In 1922 she and her husband helped organize the Children’s Crusade in Washington for the release of conscientious objectors. In 1924 she surveyed prisons nationwide, gathering statistics on contract labor for the Garment Manufacturers’ Association and the United Garment Workers, which led to significant Congressionally instituted reforms in 1929. After a failed socialist educational experiment in Louisiana 1923-24—the Commonwealth College for workers’ education begun by the O’Hares and other members of the Llano Co-operative Colony—the couple divorced and O’Hare remarried. She pursued prison reform in an official capacity as assistant director of the California Department of Penology, and helped introduce substantial state-wide reforms. “Her contribution was acknowledged by a later governor, Earl Warren, who invited her to attend the sessions of the State Crime Commission, an opportunity the aged reformer regularly availed herself of.” (NAW I, p. 419)
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