The Business of Being a WomanTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
General
The Business of Being a Woman
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Women -- Social and moral questions
The most perfect type of this spirit of neighborliness which we have
worked out in this country, outside of the thousands of little homes
where it exists and of which, in the nature of the case, only those
who have felt their influence can know, is undoubtedly Hull House, the
Chicago Settlement under the direction of Jane Addams. Hull House is
an "open house" for its neighborhood. It is a place where men and
women of all ages, conditions, and points of view are welcome. So far
as I have been able to discover, genuine freedom of mind and
friendliness of spirit are what have made Hull House possible and are
what will decide its future after the day of the great woman who has
mothered it and about whom it revolves. There is no formula for
building a Hull House--any more than there is a home. Both are the
florescence of a spirit and a mind. Each will form itself according to
the ideas, the tastes, and the cultivation of the individuality at
its center. Its activities will follow the peculiar needs which she
has the brains and heart to discover, the ingenuity and energy to
meet.
Hull House serves its neighborhood, and in so doing it serves most
fully its own household. Its own members are the ones whose minds get
the most illumination from its activities. Moreover, Hull House from
its first-hand sympathetic dealing with men and women in its
neighborhood learns the needs of the neighborhood. It is and for years
has been a constant source of suggestion and of agitation for the
betterment of the conditions under which its neighbors--and indirectly
the whole city, even nation--live and work. Health, mind, morals, all
are in its care. It is practical in the plans it offers. It can back
up its demands with knowledge founded on actual contact. It can rally
all of the enlightened and decent forces of the city to its help. Hull
House, indeed, is a very source of pure life in the great city where
it belongs.
So far as attitude of mind and spirit go, the home should be to the
little neighborhood in which it works what Hull House is to its great
field. In its essential structure it is the same thing; _i.e._ Hull
House is really modeled after the home. Most interesting is the
parallel between its organization and its activities and those of many
a great home which we know through the lives of their mistresses, that
of Margaret Winthrop, of Eliza Pinckney, of Mrs. John Adams.
The social significance of Hull House is in its relative degree the
possible social significance of every home in this land. The
realization depends entirely upon the conception the woman in a
particular house has of this side of her Business--whether or no she
sees neighborliness in this big sense. That she does not see it is too
often due to the fact that even though she may have "gone through
college," she has no notion of society as a living structure made up
of various interdependent institutions, the first and foremost of
which is a family or home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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