Yes, I’m a day late, but that’s because I’ve been thinking about this for several days and wanted to get it right.
Jane Addams is one of those amazing women who were famous and revered in their day, and then somehow disappeared from sight, in spite of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, her contributions and influence swept away by changing fashion, and dare I say it, because her social ideals are labeled too “feminine.” Ideals like feeding starving children, providing healthcare and education for immigrants, and keeping us out of World War I (for which there was a great deal of support across the country). Oh yes, and for supporting something as outrageous as the 8 hour working day.
You know, all those girly things.
She was a great hero of mine when I was a child, one of the few women included in my K-12 curriculum. A little hint of 1890s radicalism remained in our curriculum, thanks probably to the influence of Dewey and the Lab School in Chicago, since I grew up near Chicago. When I hear the nonsense spouted about immigration in our country right now, I think of her wise and thoughtful approach to considering the value immigrants bring to their new country, as well as what we owe to them. The same arguments and rhetoric we are hearing now have been used over the last several hundred years with astonishing regularity, from the time California passed a law to expel the Chinese, to deploring the “dirty and degenerate” Irish or Italians or Poles or Greeks in Chicago in the nineteenth-century.
Jane Addams addressed this head on at Hull House, set up to provide assistance to the wretchedly poor and exploited labor pool fueling the wealth of the stockyards, the railroads, and the other companies run by the titans of industry in Chicago.
I read her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull House in college and was surprised at her cultural approach to the immigrant communities. The arguments she was making were anthropological arguments for the differences in how the different communities adapted. And her insights about the embarrassment the children of immigrants felt for their parents’ old country ways were very shrewd. Hull House’s Labor Museum of crafts and industries from the ‘old country” helped the younger generation appreciate the skills and knowledge of their parents:
“There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was “the best stick-spindle spinner in America.” When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.
That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother’s whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities—to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church—and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.
It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.”
Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams
What has this to do with International Women’s Day? Addams was especially active in the International women’s movement, becoming one of the founders of the organization later known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. If you read the historical accounts of the conference they held after Hitler came to power in Germany, it’s chilling to realize that every one of their assertions about the danger of Germany re-arming (with American arms and resources) proved true. If the boycott they urged had happened, if Americans had forgone the profit they were making from Germany, who knows how history might have been different. It’s a complex subject and you can read more about it here.