The Ethnic Universalism of Lillian Wald

Often viewed in the shadow of fellow progressive reformer Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, the founder of Henry Street Settlement in New York’s Lower East Side and pioneer social worker, emerges as a more complex and influential “ethnic Progressive” in Marjorie Feld’s new biography. Frustrated with the fragmentation of Wald’s significance by particularist interpretations that define her on the basis of gender or “Jewishness,” Feld attempts to create a nexus between the competing claims of both women’s and American Jewish historians by focusing on Wald’s universalist worldview instead. Feld contends that Wald’s approach to gender and ethnicity reveals a commitment to “universal human interdependence” (p. 9) that defies simplistic appraisals of her womanhood and “Jewishness.”

It is only too fitting then that Feld opens her discussion with Wald’s election to the American Hall of Fame in 1970 in order to highlight her influence beyond the confines of women’s history and Jewish America. In fact, a list of her accomplishments compiled for the occasion not only underscores her wide-ranging activities, but also her ties to many different communities in New York and around the country. Wald’s work as founder of Henry Street Settlement on behalf of the immigrant poor of New York’s Lower East Side and her advocacy on behalf of women’s rights, African Americans, antimilitarism, and global public health brought her into contact with fellow progressive reformers, government officials, colleagues in the medical and nursing profession, and prominent members of the American Jewish community.

Feld calls her an “ethnic Progressive,” a label, the author admits, that Wald herself would not have appreciated but that best describes how “Wald’s ethnic background and the women’s political culture she joined combined to shape her identity” (p. 8). We learn early on that Wald’s universalism was rooted in her hometown of Rochester, New York, where she came of age in an assimilationist and reform-minded German Jewish community that “endorsed consent over descent, culture over biological concepts of racial Jewishness,” and a “liberal Americanism based on white Christian norm.” (p. 23). Feld explains that Wald’s family rejected the racial definition of Jewishness and sought inclusion and acceptance into mainstream Protestant society instead. This sense of belonging to a brotherhood of man would shape Wald’s approach to life’s challenges and practically inoculate her against movements of particularism and separatism.

Yet Wald’s optimism about a synthesis between her own background and American society would be repeatedly tested. We learn that the universalist who did not want race to be the defining factor of her life or work, “went to great lengths to ensure that her photograph,” which displayed Wald’s darker complexion, “was reproduced as infrequently as possible” (p. 6). Wald was keenly aware that a focus on her ethnicity took away from her universalist mission. At the same time, Wald continued to downplay Jewish difference, even as her work at Henry Street Settlement expanded into the surrounding neighborhoods of the Eastern European Jewish community. In fact, Wald prided herself on the fact that she founded “the first visiting nurse service without formal ties to religious or charitable institutions” (p. 61). This, on the other hand, would lead to repeated questions by Jewish communal leaders about her Jewish identity and what role religion and culture should play in her work.

Consequently, Wald’s relationship with Jewish America makes for the most intriguing aspect of her story and also defines the organization of Feld’s book. Beginning with the introduction, Feld addresses the issue of wrongly claiming Lillian Wald as a distinctly Jewish reformer, only to locate her worldview of universalism in the hometown lessons of Rochester’s assimilated German-Jewish community in chapter one. Likewise, Feld’s discussion in chapter two of Wald’s work at Henry Street Settlement, her fight against immigration restrictions, and her crossing the color line by supporting civil rights not only illustrates her universalist philosophy...