Hull House Research Articles

Apostles of beauty: arts and crafts from Britain to Chicago

The Arts and Crafts movement in architecture, interior design, and decorative arts reached its peak between 1880 and 1910 in Britain and North America. The movement's emphasis on aesthetic quality and a high level of craftsmanship, promoted as an antidote to the ubiquity and uninspired appearance of machine-produced products, remains much admired today. Arts and Crafts enjoyed special resonance in Chicago, the home of Jane Addams's Hull House, where immigrants and women received training in handicraft skills not only to beautify domestic life but also to provide them with viable, honorable work. Apostles of Beauty presents outstanding examples by the movement's British originators, such as William Morris and Charles Robert Ashbee, as well as its greatest American practitioners, such as Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright. The volume highlights a wide range of objects, including ceramics, furniture, metalwork, paintings, photographs, and textiles. It focuses on Chicago's absorption and interpretation of the movement, featuring works from the Art Institute, the University of Chicago, the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Crab Tree Farm, and private collections. Contributors to the book explore the complex influences of the Arts and Crafts style and provide a thematic history of the movement, including a section on design and collecting in Chicago.

Struggle or Mutual Aid: Jane Addams, Petr Kropotkin, and the Progressive Encounter with Social Darwinism

the pluralist Volume 5, Number 1 Spring 2010 : pp. 21–43 21 the year is 1901. Two minor celebrities from opposite corners of the globe share an evening meal in Chicago. Both are politically left-leaning, both are evolutionists of a sort, both are concerned with the plight of the poor in the face of the escalation of the Industrial Revolution. The Russian man has been giving a series of lectures to the people of Chicago; he is staying at the American woman’s settlement house—Hull House. They are Jane Addams, Chicago’s activist social worker and Petr Kropotkin, Russian nobleman by birth, anarchist in politics, and naturalist by inclination. Each awaits publication of their first full-length book concerning politics and moral development: Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) on Addams’s part and Mutual Aid (1902) on Kropotkin’s. They discuss the status of moral development at the dawn of the twentieth century over dinner at Hull House. Odds are, such a meeting took place. Kropotkin, on his second tour of the United States, was indeed a week-long guest at Hull House in Chicago. Throughout the week Kropotkin gave lectures on “mutual aid” to various Chicago area organizations. The lectures Kropotkin gave were drawn from the essays he had published in The Nineteenth Century over the past seven years, essays which would shortly appear in book form, as Mutual Aid. I initially had hoped that an archival search would reveal telling discussions of evolutionary matters between Addams and Kropotkin. What I found in written documents were travel arrangements and complimentary thank-you notes—documents that did not further the analysis and provided no delicious details of those discussions. So it remains a task for thoughtful conjecture as to how those discussions illuminated the influence and the fine controversies of nineteenth-century evolutionary social thought. This article proposes to draw from their known writings to speculate on the substance of those conversations—what were their grounds of agreement; on what points

Hard Choices in Hard Times

These are challenging times for libraries. Stories of budget cuts abound while librarians report rising demand for library services. (1) As we slash budgets and defer expenses, we may wonder how libraries coped during the Great Depression. Then, as now, library use increased sharply as millions of unemployed hunted for career information and sought light reading fill their enforced leisure hours. (2) Librarians were forced make difficult choices between services, staff, buildings, and books. Libraries responded by forging new partnerships with state and federal agencies and involving community residents in large-scale book drives. experiences of the Chicago Public Library provide a fascinating case study of efforts maintain a public service under trying circumstances. Chicago in the early 1930s was on the brink of collapse. As unemployment soared ah estimated 30 percent, desperate workers took the streets where they were met by tear gas and baton-wielding police. (3) Chicago Public Library's financial fortunes declined rapidly. As early as January 1930, the library predicted a budget shortfall of 20 percent. initial response included reducing library branch hours and laying off about one-fifth of the staff. Prominent progressive reformer Jane Addams evocatively captured the toll of this belt tightening. Writing the library, she noted the unusually large number of men standing in the cold outside the Hull House library, unable get in: They stand looking through the windows into a warm room with a great air of protest which is not always silent. library agreed increase the reading room hours, but made no promises for the future, noting, The unemployment conditions have increased our own work enormously in every part of the city. (4) Facing protests over reduced hours, the library reexamined its priorities. Branch hours were restored and many staff were rehired at reduced salaries. collections budget would be the target for additional cuts. In May 1931 all book ordering was halted. Ah institution that normally expended $200,000 $250,000 a year on collections simply stopped acquiring new materials. In a 1932 letter, the library director, Carl Roden, summarized the situation: are afflicted by the worst financial hardship we have ever suffered. We have bought no books for eight months, the magazine subscriptions for 1932 were cancelled.... No budget for the current year has been attempted and the prospects of funds for even our curtailed activities, are, at this writing, far from encouraging. (5) Some subscriptions were reinstated, but regular book purchasing would not resume for another four years. Despite eliminating new book purchases, the Chicago Public Library was besieged by new users. Branch libraries reported packed reading rooms. army of unemployed came not just forget, but also learn--or, as the Chicago Tribune romantically expressed it, to emerge out of the valley of depression and into the sunlit halls of the kingdom of thought. (6) While the service cuts drew immediate protests, the impact of the slashed book budget only gradually made itself felt. Without new books entice readers, circulation eventually declined, dropping from 15.8 million in 1931 10.2 million in 1935. As one young patron put it, Gosh, we can't read the same one more than three times.(7) While times are different, it's worth remembering that users attracted the library during the current recession may drift away if we are unable provide the resources and services they need. Although extreme, the circumstances in Chicago were not unusual. Detroit saw its library appropriation decline by 24 percent. Knoxvilles budget was slashed 36 percent in three years. Relatively fortunate cities such as Louisville and Springfield, Massachusetts reported salary cuts and other austerity measures,(8) How did public libraries cope? A 1932 survey identified two compensating mechanisms adopted by libraries: rental collections and calls for book donations. …

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Uneasy Alliances: Hull House, the Garment Workers Strikes, and the Jews of Chicago

Uneasy Alliances: Hull House, the Garment Workers Strikes, and the Jews of Chicago

The Connections among Immigration, Nation Building and Adult Education English as a Second Language Instruction in the United States

Since its inception at the turn of the last century, adult education English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction in the United States has been entwined with immigration processes and ideas of the nation. In spite of current uncertainty about the overhauling of federal immigration policy, increasingly anti-immigrant laws in states such as Arizona, and attempts to restrict immigration in cities like Hazelton, Pennsylvania, demand for ESL instruction continues to be the fastest-growing sector of adult basic education (U.S. Department of Educational Statistics, 2005). Adult educators need to know about the origins of English-language teaching in the United States because the past can reveal ways to better shape the future. invites us to use imagination to enter the lives of our predecessors, a kind of cross-cultural experience through time. Indeed, none of us has come to our worldview through logic alone; we are all formed in large part by our own personal and social histories. History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier (Fry, 2006, p. 3). This article offers a history of adult education ESL instruction in the United States, followed by a discussion of key issues in the immigration literature that impact adult educators and their work in program development and classroom teaching. A Brief of Adult Education ESL Adult education ESL originated as part of the settlement house movement, made famous by Hull House in Chicago. Founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 (Addams, 1910), Hull House served the needs of recent immigrants, most of whom were from Southern and Eastern Europe. Settlement houses marked the beginning of the field of social work in the United States, and adult education classes, including English education, were intimately linked to that endeavor. Around the same time, the ethnic press was emerging in large industrial cities, and with it came ethnic organizations devoted to maintaining the immigrant's native languages and cultures (Mohl, 1982). The Polish, German, and Irish were able to create parochial schools, but Chinese, Greek, Russian, and Jewish immigrants faced more barriers, and established afternoon and weekend classes. Ethnic organizations were run by immigrants, and their goals were to teach English and promote bilingualism/biculturalism for youth. The International Institutes Around 1910, the International Institute movement began as part of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). International Institutes assisted immigrants in finding housing and work, and they offered English classes. The YWCA, a Protestant organization, grew from the social gospel movement, which emphasized the protection of women and immigrants over evangelism (Mohl, 1982). The International Institutes' pluralistic approach to immigration was in stark contrast to that of the public schools, where the unabashed goal was to eliminate immigrant languages and cultures in order to produce Americans. Before, during, and after WWI, anti-immigrant sentiment was steadily building in the United States, and the founder of the International Institutes movement, Edith Terry Bremer, spoke against the xenophobic discourses of the time. In regards to the Americanization Movement, she said, was ignorance in it; there was the arrogant assumption that everything American was intrinsically superior to anything foreign. There was fear in it. There were the germs of hate in it. None of these things make for anything but a sharp division, a deeper separation between peoples (Cited in Mohl, 1982, p. 119). Bremer saw immigrants' languages and cultures as resources that would contribute both to the newcomers' success and to the richness of the nation. Her contemporary was Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology (Stocking, 1974), who used anthropology to argue for racial equality and the benefits of immigration, just as Bremer did. …

The "Rosies" of Rockford: Working Women in Two Rockford Companies in the Depression and World War II Eras

The Great-Depression -era image of the Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange and the Riveter from WWII became iconic images of their respective eras. These pictures represent the lives of women during these two time periods. The poor mother with her children shows the difficulties that women and families faced during the Depression. Women struggled to feed and clothe themselves and their families with meager wages while society discouraged mothers from working to preserve the ideal of bread -winning fathers. In Rosie, promotional image by the United States government, women were promoted as strong individuals and productive citizens because their labor was needed to replace the men who went to war. Despite how memorable these images portrayed the women of their times, they did not reflect women's entire experiences. Historians have shown how deceptive these images were in respect to women's actual lives. Despite the difficulties involved in finding job, many women during the Depression era had to work to help their families survive; they could not just be stay-at-home mothers. During the war, many Rosies in the nation also worked to feed and clothe their families, and many more women took pride in the work they did. Yet Rosie does not show how these women's household duties, or the second shift remained unchanged even though they worked jobs. After the war, women were expected to return to their roles as mothers and wives regardless of their need or desire to work. Historians such as Alice Kessler Harris and Ruth Milkman have shown how employment was gendered by the early twentieth century. Women's jobs in the economy as whole were segregated from men's jobs and were also segregated within factories. The rationale was that men needed family wage and women were only secondary earners. This conditioned women's encounter with all jobs and institutionalized the labor market gender structure and popular prejudice that relegated women to low-pay, dead-end jobs. Women's limited job opportunities and the segregated labor industry have been documented in Nancy F. Gabin's, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, and Ruth Milkman's Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. Yet, micro-level analysis of women in city such as Rockford, Illinois, then the state's third largest city, has been largely neglected. Rockford women's employment reflected both national and corporate expectations for women in the 1930s and 1940s and challenged local ideas of married and single women's role in the home and workplace.1 By looking at women in Rockford, Illinois, an industrial city transformed by World War II, it is possible to look beneath the iconic images to uncover the real lives of women as they lived and transitioned between these two eras. Rockford had its own history of generating strong, independent women. In 1849 Anna Peck Sill started the Women's Seminary, which eventually developed into Rockford College. One Rockford newspaperman of the era had declared it a women's rights hotbed. The college did influence several notable graduates, such as Julie Lathrop, the first woman to head federal agency, Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, Catherine Waugh McCulloch, and other champions for women's rights. Most women of Rockford, however, lived according to the conventional expectations of the times. It would take nationally transformative events, such as the Great Depression and World War II, to change the lives of these women. Did job opportunities for Rockford women in the late 1920s to the middle 1940s change? If so, what did this mean for women? How did the Depression and war years economic boom affect Rockford businesses and who they hired? How did societal ideals rather than the free market impact companies' hiring policies regarding women? …

The Grace Abbott Reader

Introduction John Sorensen Edith Abbott and Sister's Memories Grace Abbott: A Biographical Timeline Part 1: Immigrants Introduction: Hull House Days (ca. 1952) Edith Abbott 1. The Immigrant Girl (1909) 2. The Education of Foreigners in American Citizenship (1910) 3. The Immigrant as a Problem in Community Planning (1917) 4. Problems of the Immigrant Girl (1917) Part 2: Children Introduction: The Maternity and Infancy Revolution (ca. 1952) Edith Abbott 5. A Constitutional Amendment (1920) 6. Public Protection for Children (1924) 7. Perpetuating May Day (1929) 8. The Next Steps (1929) 9. Boarding Out (1930) 10. The Challenge of Child Welfare (1931) 11. The Real American Vice (1931) 12. The Washington Traffic Jam (1931) 13. Why Did Child Labor Ever Develop in America? (ca. 1933) 14. Promoting the Welfare of All Children (1937) 15. Children and the Depression (pub. 1941) Part 3: Women Introduction: How Women Achieve in Government (1939) Frances Perkins 16. Dorothea Dix (1926) 17. Women (1933) 18. The Changing Position of Women in Government (1930) Postscript Dr. Jeanne C. Marsh Source Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Collaborative experiments: Jane Addams, Hull House and experimental social work

The social reformer, sociologist and feminist Jane Addams (1860—1935), who established Chicago's Hull House as one of the first settlement houses in America, described her work as experimental, but at the same time she and many of her co-workers rejected the idea of Hull House as a laboratory for social scientific investigation. The present article discusses Addams's unique understanding of social experiment beyond the laboratory. Through `experimental' improvement of social conditions for underserved people and communities in the city of Chicago, Addams and her co-workers perceived the laboratory experiment as an inferior variation of the experiment in society, and not vice versa. Based on the description of experiments at Hull House, this essay attempts to show how different dimensions of experimentation beyond the laboratory can be framed and how alternate phases that combine knowledge production and knowledge application can be conceptually comprised.

Profiles and Perspectives: Jane Addams, Stories, and Imagination

Early twentieth-century social activist Jane Addams is best known for her work at Hull House, the settlement house she founded with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Addams was also a pacifist, storyteller, writer, and philosopher. Through her actions, stories, and writing, Addams modeled a philosophy of democracy-in-action based in imagination and sympathetic understanding.

Reflections on the practice of research

In this essay, we consider the relevance of research. To support our argument of its relevance, we offer three cases – Hull House, the Indian Trust Fund, and accounting standard-setting – that examine the taken-for-grantedness of accountability and the ways in which the term is frequently used.

Centennial Finds Juvenile Research Institute Thriving

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Community NewsFull AccessCentennial Finds Juvenile Research Institute ThrivingAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:2 Jan 2009https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.44.1.0008bHow do you connect the “Dick and Jane” elementary school readers and the Chicago Cubs to the history of child psychiatry research?The classic reading primers, familiar to a certain generation of once-young scholars, grew out of work done by Chicago's Institute for Juvenile Research, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, said Bennett Leventhal, M.D., director of the Institute's Center for Child Mental Health and Developmental Neuroscience. (We'll get to the Cubs in a minute.)Leventhal recapped the institute's history as he received the George Tarjan Award for Contributions in Developmental Disabilities at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Chicago last October.Founded as the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, t he center grew out of a movement that saw delinquency not as a cause for punishment, but for the“ treatment, care, custody, and discipline of the neglected and dependent child.”Bennett Leventhal, M.D., addresses attendees at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry after being presented the George Tarjan Award for Contributions in Developmental Disabilities. He recounted the history of Chicago's 100-year-old Institute for Juvenile Research.Credit: Aaron LevinThe institute was housed first in Hull House, the settlement house (it would be called a community center today) founded by social reformer Jane Addams in Chicago in 1889. By the late 19th century, rapid industrialization and immigration had produced intense poverty, crime, and disease in Chicago. Child labor was uncontrolled, homeless children slept in the streets, and playgrounds were nonexistent. When children drifted into crime, they were sent to prisons with adults. The creation of juvenile courts changed some of that, but more was needed.The institute's first director, William Healy, M.D., began a five-year research program funded by private money, said Leventhal. His work resulted in a textbook on delinquency—one of the first of its kind—and a systematic method of evaluating a child's medical, social, and psychiatric history.In 1917 the institute was taken over by the state of Illinois and renamed the Institute for Juvenile Research. It established cooperative programs with freestanding child guidance clinics and schools in the city and around the state. Emphasis shifted from criminal to noncourt referrals over the same time.In the 1920s and 1930s, the organization began including a sociological dimension in its work. The Chicago Area Project concluded that crime and delinquency were not caused by ethnicity but by physical deterioration of the neighborhood and community disorganization. Geography mattered most. Even if the ethnicity of a neighborhood changed, delinquency was likely to continue there if the community remained disorganized and poor.The Behavior Research Fund was begun in 1926 and supported hundreds of publications on delinquency, child development, intelligence, and related subjects. Psychologist Marion Monroe's work on early childhood reading programs led to the Dick and Jane readers.The institute reflected the intellectual waves that drove psychiatry in general, adopting a psychoanalytic orientation in the 1940s and 1950s, followed by a more biological approach in subsequent years, said Leventhal. The state gave up control in 1990, and the institute became part of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois-Chicago. In 2008, 15,000 patients visited the institute, which trains psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and conducts $60 million of research.Leventhal did not limit his remarks to his own institution. The current site of the University of Illinois Medical School, to which the Institute for Juvenile Research belongs, was once the West Side Grounds, where the Chicago Cubs played before settling into the friendly confines of Wrigley Field.The Cubs, of course, haven't won a World Series since 1908, the very year the institute was founded. It's a record of failure that leaves fans feeling anxious during the season and depressed every October.Moreover, Leventhal swears, beyond the left-field wall of the old ballpark stood the state psychiatric hospital, a location that gave rise to the expression “out of left field,” conveying a source of the unexpected or irrational and providing another link between mental health and the Chicago Cubs. ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Accountability re‐examined: evidence from Hull House

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to re‐examine accountability in a concrete historical context from the perspective of pragmatism and feminist theory.Design/methodology/approachAn archival case study of Hull House.FindingsBoth pragmatism and feminist theory of Benhabib provide new insight into alternative conceptions of accountability, conceptions at odds with the prevailing and dominant emphasis on quantitative measures of performance. Further, this paper suggests that this limited view severely narrows the understanding of organizational “success.”Research limitations/implicationsWhile this research serves to problematize notions of accountability further, it leaves the task of developing alternative practices to future researchers.Originality/valueThis paper contributes in two ways: first, there is a paucity of research linking pragmatism to the actual workings of concrete organizations. This paper begins to fill that gap. Second, this work draws the attention of accounting and other organizational researchers to the important role played by the settlement movement, and particularly Hull House, in the development of contemporary organizations.

Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South (review)

Reviewed by: Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South David Blanke Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, by Peter M. Ascoli. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 453 pp. $35.00. Peter M. Ascoli's wonderful new book about the life and legacy of Julius Rosenwald succeeds on many levels. On the one hand Ascoli explores and explains Rosenwald, arguably the most overlooked businessman and philanthropist in modern American history, within the context of his times, his family, and his faith. The narrative is lively, even chatty, but Ascoli never loses his objectivity (a remarkable feat, given that he is a grandson of his subject) or fails to place Rosenwald's deeds within the extended narrative arc of U.S. history. This is a biography that explains the Progressive Era as much as one man who helped define it. On the other hand, Ascoli is also persuasive when explaining Rosenwald's motivations, his hopes, fears, and intentions. More than just a businessman who chose to share his wealth, Rosenwald was an ethical pragmatist, a champion of the ascendant modern middle-class ethos, and the product of a "quintessential Jewish immigrant" family in America. Ascoli, quite logically, focuses the text on explaining Rosenwald's significance as a successful capitalist and philanthropist. Benefiting from a hardworking and supporting German immigrant Jewish family, Rosenwald parlayed his experiences as a clothier and an extended network of friends and associates (that included the young Henry Morganthau, Sr., and Henry Goldman) into a thriving Chicago wholesale business. Joining Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1895, the young "JR" brought order and rationality to a firm driven by the mercurial marketing magic of Richard Sears. As Ascoli notes, "the true problem" solved by Rosenwald "was not persuading people to buy but filling orders satisfactorily" (p. 29). Here, and throughout his life, Rosenwald demonstrated that the true power of industrial capitalism was not just building a better mousetrap but in efficiently integrating the multiple business processes required of the corporation. In addition to overseeing the company's initial public stock offering, Rosenwald also rationalized the firm's accounting, mail-order, retailing, and manufacturing divisions. He personally saved the company from ruin, in 1921, with a $21 million loan. Rosenwald served as company president from 1908 until 1924, and remained active in the firm until his death. Fittingly, Ascoli shows that while we associate the mail-order and retailing giant with its founder, it was really Rosenwald who gave life to the "Cheapest Supply House on Earth." Similarly, Rosenwald's remarkable philanthropy is often obscured behind the omnipresent brand names of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and George [End Page 206] Foster Peabody. Following the 1906 IPO, which made him a very wealthy man, Rosenwald demonstrated a penchant for what historians frequently term Social Gospel progressivism. Rosenwald's generosity funded thousands of Black schools in the South, rural agricultural extension agents, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and dozens of Northern organizations such as Hull House, the Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and the Hebrew Union College. While Ascoli treads lightly on this theme, the irony is that while Rosenwald gave generously to numerous Christian initiatives, including the YMCA, the Baptist-oriented University of Chicago, and decidedly evangelical southern Blacks, Rosenwald was more greatly influenced by the "Social Gospel" (or more reasonably, the civic morality) of Reform Judaism, especially as directed by Rabbi Emil Hirsch. It was Hirsch's teachings, Ascoli argues and Rosenwald acknowledged, that "were of particular importance to JR because they also touched on the special duties that capitalists and men of wealth owed to society." (p. 54). Combined, the picture Ascoli paints of Rosenwald is a man who successfully merged his secular ethics and religious faith into an engine of American civic reform. Here Progressivism ceases to be a Weberian bureaucratic search for order and emerges, rather, as the conscious and sustained desire by the some of the nation's economic elite to uplift the masses. Rosenwald's pragmatism and faith in self-help define his life. In a 1910...

A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (review)

Reviewed by: A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Melissa R. Klapper (bio) A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. By Karen Pastorello. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xvii + 273 pp. Karen Pastorello’s new book is both a throwback and a welcome innovation. It is a throwback in the sense that it offers a biography of a labor leader through a lens trained rather narrowly on the public dimensions of a life. But it is a welcome innovation in the sense that it restores Bessie Abramowitz Hillman to a photographic panorama that has far too long focused on male leaders to the exclusion of women, the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to the exclusion of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW), and New York to the exclusion of Chicago. That Pastorello, working with admittedly limited resources, manages to use Hillman’s experiences as an ACW founder and lifelong union organizer to illuminate the evolution of labor feminism is an accomplishment indeed. The outline of Hillman’s life in some ways parallels the stories of other Jewish women who became labor leaders. Born in eastern Europe, she emigrated rather than face an arranged marriage, began working in the needle trades shortly after arriving in Chicago, and was politicized by the conditions of her work environment. In 1910 she participated in a major strike at Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, a strike initiated by women, and in the aftermath of the successful settlement became first an organizer for the United Garment Workers and then a founder of the ACW. A roughly similar story could be told of Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Rose Pesotta, and Pauline Newman, all of whom worked within the ILGWU in New York. All these leaders struggled with similar problems. Union executives were almost exclusively male and usually hostile to any perceived encroachment of women into the ranks of leadership, despite the predominance of women workers in some sectors of the needle trades. Like her ILGWU colleagues, whom she knew and with whom she cooperated, Hillman depended, at least to some degree, on the kind of middle-class female allies she had first met at Chicago’s Hull House. All the women labor leaders were constantly confronted with a choice [End Page 124] between prioritizing their gender and class identities. Their refusal to make that choice (most of the time) yielded a particular strain of labor feminism that sustained them all over many decades. There were important ways in which Hillman’s path diverged from those of other women labor leaders, however. At the time of the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx strike, she was already involved with the ACW’s first president, fellow Chicago striker Sidney Hillman, whom she married in 1916, moving to New York to join him at the union’s headquarters. The Hillmans had two children, owned a home, and experienced at least some upward economic mobility. For the thirty years of their marriage, Bessie Hillman worked tirelessly as a union organizer and education director, starting many of the programs that made the ACW such an important union, but she never accepted a salary during her husband’s lifetime. The other Jewish women labor leaders supported themselves and their families and fought bitterly to be paid what their work was worth. Though her family life was far from perfect and she spent a substantial amount of time on the road, Hillman does not seem to have experienced the devastating loneliness and weariness of Cohn, Pesotta, and others. Nor does she seem to have relied quite as heavily on a network of female friends. It is difficult to know how to evaluate the role these differences played in Hillman’s life because, unlike the most prominent ILGWU women, she did not leave behind substantial personal papers. Pastorello reconstructs her public life in some detail and provides plenty of contextual information, sometimes to the point of repetition, but the kind of sophisticated, interior landscape of women labor leaders that other historians have managed to map is missing here. The biographer cannot be faulted for a...

Dancing Americanness: Jane Addams's Hull House as a Site for Dance Education

This paper explores the role and influence of dance education in Jane Addams's Hull House from its opening in 1889 through roughly 1900. I contend that the ideology of middle- and upper-class women of the Progressive Era, asserted through channels like Hull House, privileged particular forms of dance over others. In effect, they denied the validity of American vernacular dance as a legitimate movement vocabulary. To illuminate these Progressive postures, I investigate the trajectory of American dance education in relation to Jane Addams's attitudes toward diversity, the role of art, and the value of dance at Hull House. I draw from women's, race, and cultural studies for this project and employ historiographie analysis. By contextualizing the elements above, I suggest that as a site of socialization and education Hull House assisted in maintaining the separation of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” dance in the United States.

Our Nation's Immigrants in Peril: An Urgent Call to Social Workers

Social workers have always been at the forefront of work with immigrants. From our profession's earliest days working with immigrants at the Hull House in Chicago to the current immigration debate, our commitment to social justice has driven both our service and policy positions regarding immigration. Our values have not changed, neither have some of the more divisive and destructive aspects of the immigration debate. Historically a nation created by immigrants seeking respect for individual freedoms, the United States has a history of anti-immigrant rhetoric and public policies criminalizing immigrants or viewing them as a threat to U.S. security. The same themes that were raised in the 1800s are being raised today, but now with a focus on Latino immigrants and under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Since March 2003, the functions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service were transferred to the new DHS as three bureaus: Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Following immigration protests in May 2006, DHS and ICE have increased their raids, arrests, and deportations, creating a hostile climate for all immigrants regardless of their legal status and making undocumented immigrants, their families, and communities especially vulnerable. Given the heated debate on immigration, it would seem that the United States would have extremely high numbers of immigrants. In fact, only 11.7 percent of the current population is foreign born (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004), and of them 30 percent are naturalized citizens (Passel, Capps, & Fix, 2004). Children in immigrant families make up 20 percent of U.S. children, and four-fifths of them were born in the United States and are therefore citizens. Although people from all nationalities immigrate to the United States, the majority of immigrants are from Latin America. In fact, more than 53 percent of all foreign-born individuals are from Latin American countries, primarily Mexico (U.S. Census Bureau). Between 80 percent and 85 percent of the immigrants from Mexico initially enter the country as undocumented immigrants (Passel, 2005). It is this undocumented population that has led to controversial state and federal proposals. NATIONWIDE PROPOSALS Across the country, state legislatures and localities are grappling with immigrant policy. In 2007, more than 1,400 bills were filed addressing immigrant policy at the state level (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2007). Much of the state legislation has focused on increasing employer sanctions and denying public benefits on the basis of immigration status. In Texas, a bill was filed that would deny public benefits, such as state health insurance, to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants. Arizona passed legislation to create harsh employer sanctions for businesses who hire undocumented workers. We believe both these bills are an attack on the Latino populations in these states. In addition to state legislation, the attack on immigrants has also surfaced within local communities. A suburb of Dallas, Texas, voted to prohibit landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants, who are primarily Latino in that area. When municipalities have moved to create local ordinances offering rights or protections to immigrants regardless of status, such as New Haven, Connecticut's, creation of a municipal card for city services or Chelsea, Massachusetts's, passing of a Sanctuary ordinance, ICE raids and detentions have immediately increased. Perhaps the most prominent debate over the past several years has occurred at the federal level. Ignited by fears of terrorism, immigration proposals have been considered that fail to balance security concerns with respect for constitutional protections, human rights, or equality. In 2005, Congress passed the Border Protection Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act, which would have made it a crime to assist undocumented immigrants. …

Introduction: Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures

The language of food fills the pages of multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. Food tropes, metaphors, and images serve as figures of speech which depict celebrations of families and communities, portray identity crises, create usable histories to establish ancestral connections, subvert ideology and practices of assimilation, and critique global capitalism. In the United States, relationships between food and ethnicity bear historical, social, cultural, economic, political, and psychological significance, in other words, ethnic identity formations have been shaped by experiences of food productions and services, culinary creativities, appetites, desires, hunger, and even vomit, This special issue of MELUS presents seven essays that centralize the multivalent meaning of food in various ethnic literary traditions, such as African American, Arab American, Asian American, Italian American, and Caribbean writing. Until recently, there had been little work done on the subject of food and American culture. The most celebrated writer has been M. F. K. Fisher, whose articles and personal essays on cooking are among the best literary renditions of food. A number of essay collections that have been published since the late 1980s, including Literary Gastronomy (1988), edited by David Bevan, Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture (1989), edited by Mary Anne Schofield, Gian-Paolo Biasin's The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel (1993), Susanne Skubal's Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction after Freud (2002), and Denise Gigante's Taste: A laterary History (2005), are single-author volumes that seriously consider the role that food plays in literature. None of these books explore the role that food and foodways play in ethnic American literature, however. Recently a few books have focused on the relationships between food and ethnic literatures and cultures, and each of them deals with a single ethnicity, such as Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Food and the Polilics of U.S. Identity (1999), Andrew Warnes' Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twenteeth-Century African American Literature (2004), and Jennifer Ann Ho's Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (2005). Two journals, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, edited by Dara Goldstein, and Alimentum: The Literature of Food, edited by Paulette Licitra and Peter Selgin, have appeared; these journals consider the diversity of American cuisine and its impact on changing notions of American culture. As demands for assimilation and inculcation of ethnic inferiority often impact the ethnic individual's alimentary desires, so does the restoration of ethnic dignity and pride operate through culinary enjoyment. In literature we have met many characters who spurn their ethnicities through disavowal of ethnic foodways. This particular expression of self-loathing is often engendered by the racist culture that degrades ethnic foodways as filthy and unhealthful, and the association with filth predictably gestures toward immorality. An exploration of foodways in ethnic American literature reveals much about the way cultural superiority and inferiority have been measured by native and ethnic groups. It is hard today to think that eating spaghetti was once considered to be downright uncouth, but a quick look at an article that appeared in the April 1897 Arena magazine by Frederick O, Bushee of South End House, a Boston settlement house similar to Jane Addams' Hull House, shows us how Italian foodways were considered un-American: The dinner of the ordinary Italian is made up largely of macaroni, French or Italian bread, and usually some meat and potato. That form of flour preparation known as spaghetti is the most frequently used. This is boiled whole and served as a first course. The Italian experiences no difficulty in eating this slippery food, for he merely sucks it into his mouth from his fork in a very unconventional if not elegant manner. …

Craft Bookbinding in Chicago and Iowa

SUMMARY This paper focuses on three traditions of bookbinding that flourished in Chicago but are equally tied to the history of the craft in Iowa. These are exemplified by Ellen Gates Starr who founded a small bindery at Hull House and worked in the tradition of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Hertzberg Bindery that created fine bindings for a select clientele, and Bill Anthony who established a binding and book conservation practice and who in his role as a mentor and teacher influenced a generation of binders.