The Long Road of Woman's Memory

By Jane Addams

2001

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

196

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5H58M

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This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1916. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV WOMEN'S MEMORIES INTEGRATING INDUSTRY If it has always been the mission of literature to translate the particular act into something of the universal, to reduce the element of crude pain in the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a realization that his is but the common lot, this mission may have been performed through such stories as that of the Devil Baby for simple, hardworking women who at any given moment compose the bulk of the women in the world. Certainly some of the visitors to the Devil Baby attempted to generalize and evidently found a certain enlargement of the horizon, an interpretation of life as it were, in the effort. They exhibited that confidence which sometimes comes to the more literate person when, finding himself 84 morally isolated among those hostile to his immediate aims, his reading assures him that other people in the world have thought as he does. Later when he dares to act on the conviction his own experience has forced upon him, he has become so conscious of a cloud of witnesses torn out of literature and warmed into living comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes them from the likeminded people actually in the world whom he has later discovered as a consequence of his deed. In some of the reminiscences related by working women I was surprised, not so much by the fact that memory could integrate the individual experience into a sense of relation with the more impersonal aspects of life, as that the larger meaning had been obtained when the fructifying memory had had nothing to feed upon but the harshest and most monotonous of industrial experiences. I held a conversation with one such woman when she came to confess that her long struggle was over and that she and her sister had at last turned their...

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Author

Jane Addams

Author · 8 books

American social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams in 1889 founded Hull house, a care and education center for the poor of Chicago, and in 1931 shared the Nobel Prize for peace. Her mother died when she was two years old in 1862, and her father and later a stepmother reared her. She graduated from Rockford female seminary in 1881, among the first students to take a course of study equivalent to that of men at other institutions. Her father, whom she admired tremendously, died in that same year, 1881. Jane Addams attended medical college of woman in Pennsylvania but, probably due to her ill health and chronic back pain, left. She toured Europe from 1883 to 1885 and then lived in Baltimore until 1887 but figure out not what she wanted with her education and skills. In 1888, on a visit to England with her Rockford classmate Ellen Gates Starr, Jane Addams visited Toynbee Settlement Hall and London's East End. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr planned to start an American equivalent of that settlement house. After their return they chose Hull mansion, a building which had, though originally built at the edge of the city, become surrounded by an immigrant neighborhood and had been used as a warehouse. Using an experimental model of reform—trying solutions to see what would work—and committed to full- and part-time residents to keep in touch with the neighborhood's real needs, Jane Addams built Hull-House into an institution known worldwide. Addams wrote articles, lectured widely and did most of the fund-raising personally and served on many social work, social welfare and settlement house boards and commissions. Jane Addams also became involved in wider efforts for social reform, including housing and sanitation issues, factory inspection, rights of immigrants, women and children, pacifism and the 8-hour day. She served as a Vice President of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1911-1914. In 1912, Jane Addams campaigned for the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Teddy Roosevelt. She worked with the Peace Party, helped found and served as president (1919-1935) of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 1931 Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, but her health was too fragile to attend the European ceremonies to accept the prize. She was the second woman to be awarded that honor. By Jone Johnson Lewis, About.com