" by 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.
259-280.
[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]
CHAPTER XII
TOLSTOYISM
The administration of charity in Chicago during the winter
following the World's Fair had been of necessity most difficult,
for, although large sums had been given to the temporary relief
organization which endeavored to care for the thousands of
destitute strangers stranded in the city, we all worked under a
sense of desperate need and a paralyzing consciousness that our
best efforts were most inadequate to the situation.
During the many relief visits I paid that winter in tenement
houses and miserable lodgings, I was constantly shadowed by a
certain sense of shame that I should be comfortable in the midst
of such distress. This resulted at times in a curious reaction
against all the educational and philanthropic activities in which
I had been engaged. In the face of the desperate hunger and
need, these could not but seem futile and superficial. The hard
winter in Chicago had turned the thoughts of many of us to these
stern matters. A young friend of mine who came daily to
Hull-House consulted me in regard to going into the paper
warehouse belonging to her father that she might there sort rags
with the Polish girls; another young girl took a place in a
sweatshop for a month, doing her work so simply and thoroughly
that the proprietor had no notion that she had not been driven
there by need; still two others worked in a shoe factory;--and
all this happened before such adventures were undertaken in order
to procure literary material.
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