Marie Rogers grew up the second of many children in a poor mining family in the 1890s. Abused by her husband, Elly, Marie's mom, in turn abuses her physically. Their family is not a happy one. When John Rogers, the patriarch, discovers that Aunt Helen has been working as a prostitute instead of a laundress as she claimed, he kicks her out into the street. Marie dreams about leaving her family and finding work of some kind, but she is trapped in the lower class from birth. She even turns down a handsome marriage proposal at sixteen because she cannot afford the marriage.
As soon as she's able, Marie moves to New Mexico to teach school kids. She starts a pen-pal romance with a middle-class man named Robert Hampton, but she must abandon everything to help her dying mother. After Elly's death, Marie works as a travelling saleswoman, but she sends most of her income back home to her starving siblings. At one point she's mistaken for a prostitute and raped by two men in a bar. As soon as she's well enough to leave town, she does. A man named Big Buck nurses her back to help, but she refuses his marriage proposal (this being her third proposed marriage).
In Arizona she meets siblings, Karin and Knut Larson. She starts a romantic relationship to Knut, eventually marrying him, but she sets very egalitarian terms upon their union. After two abortions, Knut orders her to keep quiet and behave as if business as normal, but Marie loses her cool and divorces him. She then goes to school in New York and lives there with Karin, working as a stenographer. There she learns about the Indian Independence Movement and the Socialist Movement in the U.S., becoming quickly wrapped up in both. When she agrees to hide some important documents for the IIM in her apartment, a thug named Juan Diaz breaks in and rapes her. After attempting suicide, Marie is imprisoned for her espionage work. She falls in love with Anand Menvekar after her release and marries him. Tragically their marital bliss is destroyed by his jealousy. He leaves her after Diaz tracks him down to brag about having had sex with Marie.
