On December 8, 2007, the Chicago History Museum will host a lecture, play and film on Jane Addams (1860-1935), Hull House maven and pioneer founder of what has become known as the Chicago School of Social Work. December 8, 2007 is an auspicious day for many reasons—a Catholic Feast day (the Immaculate Conception of the BVM) and activist Vernita Gray's birthday among others. Though this is the marking of what will become an annual affair, the official Jane Addams Day is, and will henceforth be, December 10th. Chicago has previously honored Addams with a hunk of expressway, and a lakefront park, dedicated on Women's Equality Day in 1996 with a poem composed and read by laureate Gwendolyn Brooks.
Addams, widely held to be a lesbian, received many honors in her lifetime. In 1931 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace. She had been a pacifist well before WW I, and was outspoken against Republican President William McKinley's (1843-1901) instigation of war after an explosion that sank the battleship Maine was (questionably) laid at the feet of Spain. In 1899, Addams joined with others, notably Mark Twain and Chicagoans attorney Clarence Darrow and the gay novelist Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929), in an Anti-Imperialist League to protest the war in Cuba and the Philippines, which they saw as a 'murderous extension of American Capitalism.' Addams would go on to found the Women's Peace Party that morphed into the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Henry B. Fuller, who frequently traveled to the south of Italy and spoke the language fluently, also worked with immigrants as part of Hull House's Saturday evening meetings of the 'Sons of Italy.' Addams spoke glowingly of him in a memorial volume published after his death.
Addams was deeply concerned with the welfare of women and children in Chicago, and in securing legislation for their protection. She was involved in private clubs and public committees agitating for social change. She publicly supported the candidacy of attorney Pearl Hart, long active in juvenile and women's court cases, when she ran for Associate Judge of the Municipal Court in 1928. Hart (1890-1975) would later become a well-known civil rights attorney in the McCarthy era, and supporter of gay rights (Chicago's Gerber-Hart Library bears her name).
Addams and Ellen Gates Starr had founded Hull House together in 1898, with much of its early financial support coming from Addams' intimate friend Marie Rozet Smith, one of the richest women in America at the time. Marie and Jane traveled together frequently; a letter preserves their demand of a hotel for a double bed to be shared, instead of two singles. Smith maintained a summer home they shared in Bar Harbor, Maine. Their 'loving partnership' ended with Smith's death in 1933. Addams died in 1935, just days after attending a celebratory dinner hosted by another woman-loving woman, former first lady and UN delegate, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Copyright 2007 Marie J. Kuda
The lecture, scheduled for Dec. 8, 10 a.m.-1 p.m., at Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark, will feature Charles J. Masters, author of Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and The Great Depression, describing the Chicago that Jane Addams found when she moved here in 1889, as well as the reform activities that helped make Chicago what it is today.
There will also be a special performance of The Halsted Street Play in the tradition of Reader's Theatre as well as a screening of Dinner at Jane's, a 50-minute documentary by Suzanne Lacy made at Hull-House in 1993.
The cost is free with museum admission ($12, $10 for seniors). For more information, call 312-799-2012 or see www.chicagohistory.org .
AAUW-Illinois and Chicago History Museum are co-sponsoring the event.
