Initial text
entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of
volunteer Jill Thoren.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
"Chapter VIII: Problems of Poverty." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)
From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by
Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.
154-176.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
CHAPTER VII
PROBLEMS OF POVERTY
That neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the
attention of a Settlement which undertakes to bear its share of
the neighborhood burden imposed by poverty, was pathetically
clear to us during our first months of residence at Hull-House.
One day a boy of ten led a tottering old lady into the House,
saying that she had slept for six weeks in their kitchen on a bed
made up next to the stove; that she had come when her son died,
although none of them had ever seen her before; but because her
son had "once worked in the same shop with Pa she thought of him
when she had nowhere to go." The little fellow concluded by
saying that our house was so much bigger than theirs that he
thought we would have more roomfor beds. The old woman herself
said absolutely nothing, but looking on with that gripping fear
of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living embodiment of that
dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of the County
Infirmary themselves seem scarcely less wretched than those who
are making their last stand against it.
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