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WorkJane Addams

The Long Road of Woman's Memory

A rumour that a devil's child was hidden at Hull-House drew crowds for six weeks, and set old immigrant women telling what they remembered.

by Jane Addams113 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
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First published
(aged 56)
Original language
English

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Overview

Three Italian women came through the door of Hull-House one day in the autumn of 1913 and demanded to see the Devil Baby. There was no such child. For six weeks, all the same, visitors arrived from every part of Chicago and its suburbs, and the residents spent their days telling callers at the door and on the telephone that nothing was being exhibited. In the Italian version of the story, an atheist husband tore a holy picture from the wall and said he would as soon have a devil in the house as such a thing. In the Jewish one, a father of six daughters said he would rather have a devil than a seventh girl. Jane Addams, the head of the settlement, noticed that the visitors who cared most were old women. They were used to sitting silent at home, they held the tale over husbands and fathers as a warning, and it set them talking about their own lives: one had seen her father kill her mother, another had borne fourteen children and lost her two grown sons in one explosion. Against the common belief that the old are the stronghold of tradition, Addams argues from these conversations that memory does two kinds of work. It softens a hard life until the person who lived it can bear it and can tell it as a story. It also selects. When many people who do not know one another remember the same wrong, their memories add up to a protest against a convention. Her examples are the treatment of unmarried mothers, the conditions of women's work, and war. The protest against war she heard from mothers of soldiers on her journey through wartime Europe in 1915. The book closes on her own childhood memories returning during a winter in Egypt. Addams first wrote about the Devil Baby in the American Journal of Sociology in 1914 and again in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1916; Macmillan published the book the same year. She told the story once more in 1930, in The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House. The University of Illinois Press reissued the book in 2002 with an introduction by the philosopher Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and a study of 2023 reads it as an account of how a folk tale carries social criticism.

Key concepts

What two kinds of work does memory do, for Addams?

It interprets and it selects. First, memory softens a hard life until the person who lived it can accept it and tell it. Second, it picks out what mattered, and when many people's memories pick out the same wrong, they become a force for changing a custom. Addams found the two at work in the same old women and held that they support each other.

What does 'transmuting the past' mean?

Turning remembered suffering into something that can be told and even has a kind of beauty. Addams takes the idea from the aged Euripides, who said he could make song of old tales of sorrow because Memory, the Mother of the Muses, had done her work on them. She saw it in old women who related the worst events of their lives without resentment. The change comes from memory itself, she insists, and not from ignoring what happened.

What does the Devil Baby story stand for in the book?

A legend that old women used as moral teaching. No such child existed, and Addams asks why the tale was wanted: a man who insults a holy picture or despises a seventh daughter is punished through his own child. She reads it as a specimen of the stories by which women, with only words at their disposal, tried to restrain husbands and fathers and to win pity for themselves and their children.

How can a memory 'disturb a convention'?

By making someone doubt a rule that everyone around them accepts. A woman whose own experience drove her to act against custom carries that memory as a standing reproach to the custom. Addams's instance is the unmarried mother and her child, once cast out by family and community alike. One break changes little. Repeated in many lives, she argues, such variations may in memory's slow fashion establish a new norm.

What is 'interpretative memory'?

Understanding the experience of people long dead through one's own recollections. Addams's case is a winter in Egypt, where tomb paintings endlessly occupied with death brought back her childhood fears and guesses about the soul so strongly that her adult mind was swept aside. The early Egyptians, she felt, had set down what a child feels in the presence of death. She drew from it a sense of a life common to all the centuries.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Devil Baby and the old women

Why would a baby that never existed bring old women across a city to see it? Addams finds in the rumour a story they could use, and in their talk the way memory makes a hard life bearable.

For six weeks visitors demanded the Devil Baby, born, so the tale ran, to a man who tore a holy picture from the wall or cursed the coming of a seventh daughter. Old women prized it as a warning to hold over husbands and fathers, and Addams recalls the theory that women first shaped fairy stories to tame their mates, having only words to set against brutality. It also set them talking. One had seen her father kill her mother, another lost two sons in one explosion, and they told it without bitterness. Memory, she concludes with Euripides, had done its work on them.

  • memory
  • storytelling
  • folklore
  • aging
  • suffering
  • poverty
  • religion
  • gender
  • family relationships

Enter a dialogue

Memories that unsettle a convention

Are the old really the guardians of tradition? Addams heard elderly women recall what a custom had cost them, and argues that when enough such memories agree, the custom itself is put in question.

Remembering also selects. A woman driven by her own experience to break a rule keeps that memory, and many such memories, held by people who never met, may in time set a new standard. The chief case is the unmarried mother. A deserted laundry worker took in her son's pregnant girl, lost her place with her respectable daughters over it, and went back to the laundry to support her guest. Another woman worked for more than fifty years to keep her mother and a sister with a mental disability out of a public institution. Addams sees social advance begin there, in one conscience torn between its scruples and its affections.

  • collective memory
  • social change
  • sexual morality
  • social stigma
  • social norms
  • moral judgment
  • forgiveness
  • maternal love
  • caregiving
  • care ethics
  • solidarity
  • labor
  • compassion

Enter a dialogue

Mothers' memories set against war

What goes on in a mother who sent her son to the front from duty and then lost him? In 1915 Addams heard two loyalties at strife in such women: the tribe's, and the older one that a child must live.

Patriots, the women she met in wartime Europe called themselves. One had worked for a children's court and come to see the state as an agency for nurturing life. Another watched it close schools and take food and men until it seemed an alien and hostile thing, and her son, a professor of industrial chemistry, was killed in a scouting aeroplane. Addams hears in them tribal loyalty against the instinct that one's child must be made to live. She compares the moment to the revolt against human sacrifice, once piety and later an abomination, and thinks conscience may be nearing that point about war.

  • war
  • patriotism
  • grief
  • death

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
113
distinct concepts
268
by passages held, corpus-wide
#479

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “childhood” and “death”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 12 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
childhooddeath7
agingmemory6
deathmemory6
childhoodmemory5
agingstorytelling3
laborpoverty3
agingpoverty2
memorywar2
agingdeath1
labormemory1
laborstorytelling1
povertystorytelling1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1902 Democracy and Social Ethics

    Her first book, published eight years before the memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House. Her later books on youth, prostitution and peace stand on its claim that people must be asked about their own good.

     EN
  2. 1907 Newer Ideals of Peace

    Finished seven years before the war of 1914, this is the hopeful one among her books on peace. Peace and Bread in Time of War returns to its question after that war.

     EN
  3. 1909 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets

    The one she named as her favourite, written in her twentieth year at Hull-House. Three years later A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil followed the girls of these same streets into the trade in prostitution.

     EN
  4. 1912 A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

    Five magazine articles from McClure's, built on the case files of Chicago's Juvenile Protective Association. The book came out two years after her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House.

     EN
  5. 1916 The Long Road of Woman's Memory you are here EN
  6. 1922 Peace and Bread in Time of War

    Part memoir and part argument, covering 1914 to 1921. It returns to the question of Newer Ideals of Peace fifteen years on, after the war that book had not expected.

     EN
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