Twenty Years At Hull-House

9 Pages 2291 Words

e Addams’ were notified that she was taken ill. As Jane sat with her dying friend she felt a sense of solitude and heard Polly call out “Sarah”, Jane’s mother’s name. The experience of looking death in the eyes brought Jane into the mysteries of the unknown. Jane’s father pointed out what was most important and because of his comfort and wisdom she stated, “ I felt a new fellowship with him because we had discussed it together.”
Some of Jane’s feelings of kinship with the immigrants and attitudes towards her social work may have come from an incident she describes in her book about an argument with her father. In 1872, Jane found her father upset over the death of Joseph Mazzini and like most eleven-year old children she could not understand why he was grieving for a man he did not know. She argued that this man was not American and that they should not feel badly for him. Through this argument with her father and the death of a man she did not know, she had learned a lesson that she held priceless for the rest of her life. On page 14, Jane stated, “ …in the end I obtained that which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality, language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy” which proves that lessons learned by a young child influence her morals and values that are evident throughout her work in her adult life.
Tommy was one of five sons enlisted in the Civil War whose parents owned a little farm near Jane’s home. Growing up during the Civil War Jane learned at an early age about the pride and excitement of knowing Tommy the hometown hero who was wounded and honorably discharged so he could be brought home to die. Jane was no st...