Margaret Widdemer, the daughter of a clergyman, was born at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and was graduated from Drexel Institute Library School in 1909. She has written verse and prose from early childhood, but was not widely known until the appearance of her poem _Factories_. In 1915 this was published in a book with other pieces, and a revised, enlarged edition was printed in 1917, called by the name of the now-famous song, and containing in addition nearly a hundred lyrics. Although her soul is aflame at the omnipresence of injustice in the world, her work covers a wide range of thought and feeling. Her heart is swollen with pity for the sufferings of women; but she is no sentimentalist. There is an intellectual independence, a clear-headed womanly self-reliance about her way of thinking and writing that is both refreshing and stimulating. In hope and in despair she speaks for the many thousands of women, who first found their voice in Ibsen's _Doll's House_; her poem, _The Modern Woman to Her Lover_ has a cleanly honesty without any strained pose. And although _Factories_ is doubtless her masterpiece in its eloquent _Inasmuch as ye did it not_, she can portray a more quiet and more lonely tragedy as well. Her poem called _The Two Dyings_ might have been named _The Heart Knoweth its own Bitterness_. I can remember once, ere I was dead, The sorrow and the prayer and bitter cry When they who loved me stood around the bed, Watching till I should die: They need not so have grieved their souls for me, Grouped statue-like to count my failing breath-- Only one thought strove faintly, bitterly With the kind drug of Death: How once upon a time, unwept, unknown, Unhelped by pitying sigh or murmured prayer, My youth died in slow agony alone With none to watch or care. Never in any period of the world's history was the table of life so richly spread as in the years 1900-1914; women were just beginning to realize that places ought to be reserved for them as well as for men, when the war came, and there was no place for any one except a place to fight the Black Plague of Kaiserism; now when the war is over, suppose the women insist? What then? Before the French Revolution, only a few were invited to sit down and eat, while the majority were permitted to kneel and watch from a distance. A Frenchman once remarked, "The great appear to us great because we are kneeling--let us rise." They rose, and out of the turmoil came an enormous enlargement of the dining-hall.