She was the
first woman to serve as the Nineteenth Ward Garbage Collector, and it was one
of her proudest achievements.
Back then
in 1895 in Chicago, half of all children died before their fifth birthdays.
That meant 10,000 to 12,000 deaths a year, half of all deaths in the city. A
major cause was disease due to horrible sanitation. The Chicago River was a
"cesspool, seething, boiling and
reeking with filth, which fills the north wards of the city with [noxious]
gases,” a contemporary account observed. What's more, corruption and
incompetence plagued the city sanitation department.
Jane Addams
wouldn't stand for it. She filed 700 complaints with the city, and the mayor,
weary of fielding her grievances, gave in, and put her in charge of garbage
collection in her neighborhood.
The Garbage Buggy
Every day
thereafter she and her colleagues rose at dawn to pile into their official garbage
collection buggy to follow the ward's garbage collectors. She handed out 300 official
junior garbage collector badges to children so they could collect tin cans for
recycling. She hauled landlords into court and nearly doubled the number of
collection wagons in her area.
Indefatigable.
Relentless. Unstoppable. That was Jane Addams. "If she began doing
it," said a childhood friend, "You couldn't make her quit."
A tireless
advocate for the poor, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and is regarded as
the mother of social work in America.
She was
born to it. She adored her father—a staunch abolitionist. When she was two
years old, she witnessed her mother's death in the throes in premature labor.
An obituary noted her mother's "constant willingness" to aid
"the suffering."
Her Deformities
From her
earliest days, she felt sympathy for the weak. At the age of four, she
contracted tuberculosis of the spine, which left her with deformities. She
often called herself an 'ugly duckling.' She knew what it was like to be
'different,' to feel shame through no fault of one's own.
"I
prayed with all my heart," she wrote, "that the ugly, pigeon-toed
little girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held very
much upon one side, would never be pointed out to visitors as the daughter of
[my father]."
When she
was six and her father took her on a buggy ride to the poor part of town, she
felt wounded. "I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why
people lived in such horrid little houses so close together," she wrote in
her autobiography. She told him that when she grew up her home "would not
be built among the other large houses but [would be] right in the midst of
horrid little houses like these."
“Dangerous” Ideas
True to her
prediction, in September 1889 she founded Hull House in a "congested
quarter" of Chicago. She called it a settlement, and she likened herself
and her co-workers to "pioneers in the midst of difficult
surroundings." Why this neighborhood? The poorest immigrants lived there. Mud ran thick in the
streets. Few homes had tap water. The stench from garbage and human sewage was
stomach churning. She had found her home.
Over the
next 40 years she fought against dishonesty in government and for sanitary
codes. She helped win the vote for women and build playgrounds. She demanded
factory safety laws and urged an end to child labor. Her enemies said she had
'dangerous' ideas. She co-founded the ACLU. She advocated world peace and
pacifism and was called unpatriotic. In a word, she was fearless, the
embodiment of courage.
Perhaps a
phrenologist knew her best. When she was 16, he 'read' the bumps on her head to
estimate her character. (This quack practice was taken seriously back then.)
His conclusion: "If she builds castles in the air, she always has some
good foundation for them."
MORAL: Someone else's garbage can be your gold.
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