From Dec ’07 Spotlight: Way back in February, I told you that Illinois would celebrate its first annual Jane Addams Day on December 10, and December is now here. According to Gioia Diliberto’s highly-readable account A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams: “Of the 19th Ward’s approximately 10,00 voters, 2,500 were Irish, 1,000 were German, 3,000 were Jews, and 2,000 were Italians. Native Americans, Bohemians, and French made up the rest.” In other words, Jews were Jane Addams’ largest group of neighbors. In 1989, University of Chicago musicologist Dena Epstein (now retired) published her mother’s memoir I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, a wonderful first-person account of how Jane Addams directly influenced the life of one ordinary Jewish woman.
Learn more about the life and times of Jane Addams at a special program on Saturday December 8 from 10 AM to 1 PM at the Chicago History Museum on Clark Street. The keynote speaker will be Charles J. Masters, author of Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and The Great Depression. (Horner was the first Jewish governor in the United States.)
For complete details, visit: www.aauw-il.org/jane.html
