KNOCKING ON LESBIAN HEAVEN`S DOOR
Jane Addaams (USA, 1860 – 1935) part 2

October 2011

 

PREVIOUSLY ON KOLHD: A purple jellyfish takes the author to Lesbian Heaven, where she is asked to be the correspondent and to interview its inhabitants. The first interviewee is Jane Addams, one of the most prominent reformers of USA’s Progressive Era and the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in 1931.

QUESTION: How did you become a social reformer?

ANSWER: To make a long story short, I’ll say through reading. I’ve always been a voracious reader. When I was young I devoured Dickens’ novels, and his portrayal of poverty made me want to work with the poor. As a teenager, I had big dreams of changing the world, of doing something useful to society. I was no angel in the house.

Q: By angel in the house, I guess you mean the ideal wife, devoted and submissive to her husband. Are you a feminist?

A: Why, of course! In fact, I was involved in the woman’s suffrage movement, was part of the Woman’s Peace Party and became the president of the Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Q: Amazing. The names of those organizations suggest that you were against World War I.

A: Indeed. And I received harsh criticism because of that. Americans thought I was being unpatriotic. Neither did they like my defense of immigrant’s civil rights. It was very important for us women to win the vote so that we were able to make our communities better places to live. Nevertheless, that didn’t happen until 1920.

Q: But you founded Hull House earlier than that, didn’t you? And it really made an impact on society.

A: Yes, my partner Ellen Gates Starr and I co-founded Hull House in Chicago, in 1889. It was one of the first settlement houses in the USA.

Q: What exactly is a settlement house?

A: It’s a place were social workers can live in order to share their knowledge and culture with the neighborhood. Hull House was located in the Near West Side of Chicago, where lots of recently arrived European immigrants lived. It was just a house at first, but by 1912 it had thirteen buildings as well as a summer camp, and by 1920 it had grown to almost 500 settlement houses nationally.

Q: Can you describe the activities which took place in Hull House?

A: Pages and pages could be filled with that information. In fact, I wrote a book about it, Twenty Years at Hull House. I’ll try to be brief here: twenty-five social workers, all women, lived there, but around 2000 people visited every week. We offered night classes for adults. Today, that’s very common in universities. It’s called continuing education. We were the forerunners. We also had a daycare center where women could leave their preschool kids, as well as children clubs.

Q: That is wonderful! And it sounds so ahead of the times.

A: Yes. We strived to turn the nation to issues of concern to women, such as the needs of children and public health.

Q: What else did Hull House offer?

A: We had a kitchen everybody could use, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gym, a girls’ club, a book bindery, a musical school, a drama group, a library… even a bathhouse! We also offered training for social workers and helped the immigrants in every way we could.

Q: But how did you get the idea to open a settlement house? I read somewhere that you wanted to be a doctor.

A: That’s right! I even started medical school. But I couldn’t complete my studies due to a painful back. I got really depressed and decided to travel to Europe. Ellen, whom I had met in college and instantly fell in love with, came with me. In London, we visited the first settlement house ever, Toynbee Hall. It became our dream to start something like that in Chicago.

Q: What made you turn your dream into action?

A: You’re going to think I’m joking, but I swear this is true: watching a bullfight in Madrid!

Q: Why?

A: I don’t know, something in that horrible and bloody experience made me decide to go back home and change the world. The rest is history. I mean, herstory!

NEXT MONTH ON KOLHD: Our correspondent in Lesbian Heaven interviews an Irish couple whose Sapphic relationship scandalized and fascinated their contemporaries… almost three hundred years ago! Don’t miss it in the November issue of MiraLes.