Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [50]
Yet, like in most industrial urban centers in America, the financial Panic of 1893 threw thousands of capable Chicago working-class men and their families into destitution and despair. Over 100,000 remained out of work in the winter of 1893–94, yet transients continued to ride the boxcars into the city in search of jobs.10 These men, unable to find employment, ended up in flophouses or homeless on the streets. A burgeoning immigrant population from Europe poured into the city, too, often living in crowded, disease-ridden tenements. This contributed to the outbreak of diphtheria that occurred during the month of Helga and Clara’s visit, with over 5,000 diagnosed with the disease.11
These destructive conditions affecting the lives of many of America’s newest immigrants drew the abiding interest of Jane Addams, a young woman who began a settlement house amid the urban misery of Chicago’s slums in 1889. Born in America the same year as Helga, Jane benefited from the new educational opportunities for women and attended Rockford College in Illinois. An excellent student with a strong moral code, but physically frail, she longed to be “useful” in the world. After graduation, however, very few professional occupations were open for educated women.
During her early twenties, while Helga was gaining confidence homesteading on the prairie, Jane often lamented that the idle leisure life of privileged women left them with no significant work to do. In her early twenties, after back surgery ended her medical school ambitions, Jane traveled twice to Europe on “grand tours,” a favorite diversion for women of means in the late nineteenth century. Often traveling for a year or more to pursue culture by visiting museums, seeing theater and opera, learning languages, or going on shopping sprees, it also provided a means to fend off boredom or depression. However, after an encounter with the wretchedness of urban poverty in East London, she visited Toynbee Hall. Educated young men in England lived and worked here, striving to ease the life of the poorest in the East End, and this model became a catalyst to Addams’ solution of something useful to do.
She returned to Chicago and founded Hull House with her friend, Ellen Gates Starr. As with Helga’s choice to walk across America, Addams’ choice to live amid the poor was unheard of in her era. But she insisted that this work “saved” those who were serving, giving educated women like herself meaningful work, as much as it helped immigrants. Living among Italian, Polish, Greek, Russian, and Bohemian immigrants, the women in Hull House offered friendship and services for their neighbors. They opened kindergarten and daycare facilities for children of working mothers, an employment bureau, art gallery, playgrounds, libraries, and classes.
By the time Helga and Clara came to Chicago, Addams’ innovative efforts as a social reformer were becoming well-known. As she saw the wretched living and working conditions of her neighbors, she wrote and spoke persuasively for more humane and just conditions. She also befriended influential clergymen who taught that Christians needed to help change the unjust structures that brutalized the vulnerable, not just provide individual charity after the fact. This “social gospel” offered an intellectual and spiritual framework for Addams’ efforts to abolish child labor and to improve conditions in unsafe factories, sordid tenements, and garbage-filled streets.12
Even during the depressed years of the 1890s, Chicago manifested the raucous confidence of a pivotal city standing on the brink of a new era at the turn of a century. Despite the nation’s financial collapse, Chicago hosted over twenty million visitors at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, financing a 586-acre tribute to American ingenuity. This fair demonstrated the newest technological wonders for farms, factories, and homes, reassuring nervous Americans to expect a positive future. It even included a Women’s Building exhibition that highlighted women