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5 “the transfigured few” Jane Addams, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman, and Immigrant Women Workers in Chicago, 1905–15 karen pastorello Learning of the proposed demolition of Hull-House in the spring of 1961, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) vice president Bessie Abramowitz Hillman pleaded with Chicago mayor Richard Daley to do everything in his power to save the institution she regarded as “not only hallowed and venerable,” but as “sacred to every American with the slightest understanding of the social forces that have given America its internal strength and vitality. . . . In the fullest sense,” Hillman elaborated, “it is woven into the fabric of America.” Bessie Abramowitz Hillman joined “a concerted effort by labor unions, civic organizations, and leading citizens that raised over three hundred thousand dollars to preserve the historic building” and, in the process, paid a lasting tribute to the valuable lessons she learned at Hull-House.1 As a young immigrant in the early 1900s, Hillman’s interactions with settlement residents determined her life’s work. The middle-class women centered at Hull-House not only taught her how to work with political officials such as Daley, but also provided a foundation for the skills that enabled her to engage in cross-class collaborations and effectively organize workers for more than half a century.2 Immersion in the community of women reformers at Chicago’s premier settlement transformed a number of young immigrant women from passive victims into determined activists. Hull-House associates introduced Abramowitz and other women who were novice working-class activists to progressive endeavors in the fields of labor, education, and politics. Hillman’s lifelong admiration for Hull-House and particularly for its founder, Jane Addams, began during the 1910 Chicago Men’s Garment Workers’ Strike. Fischer_Addams_text.indd 98 10/29/08 10:26:08 AM The pair’s acquaintance evolved into an enduring friendship when Addams served as a negotiator between the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx Company and a group of striking employees led by the young Russian garment worker, Bessie Abramowitz. Abramowitz, along with other strike leaders, who met at Hull-House frequently during the strike, affectionately began to refer to it as the “House of Labor.”3 The strike marked both the birth of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—once heralded as the largest men’s garment workers’ union in the country—and the emergence of Bessie Abramowitz as a labor leader. Addams’s twenty-year-old protégé proved instrumental in initiating the largest strike of its kind by clothing workers and, ultimately, in the founding of the union that she helped guide for the next sixty years. Historians studying the early years of women’s activism within the American labor movement have long recognized that middle-class women and their organizations often joined working-class women in the struggle to better the lives of workers. A number argue that the middle-class “allies” were merely patronizing the so-called “girls” as they pushed their own agendas forward.4 Obvious class tensions in the female support networks suggest that this may have been true in some cases, especially in New York City, where the male-dominated labor movement complicated matters by never fully endorsing the efforts of working women to improve their working conditions .5 In Chicago, however, the relationships between Hull-House residents and the working women who frequented the settlement appeared genuine. This study explores the nature of the bonds established among Hull-House reformers and the young immigrant women they befriended by analyzing the early years of the lifelong friendship between Jane Addams and Bessie Abramowitz Hillman. By the time Bessie Abramowitz met Jane Addams in the opening decade of the twentieth century, Addams presided over Chicago like a “mythical Amazon of social reform.”6 To fully understand the evolution of the relationship between Addams and Abramowitz requires tracing Addams’s perceptions of and actions toward foreign-born workers. This process will explain how immigrant workers, particularly immigrant women workers like Abramowitz , shaped Addams’s own activism and, conversely, how she shaped theirs. Moreover, it will reveal the ways in which both Addams and Abramowitz were transformed by their relationship and what transpired because of it. When twenty-nine-year-old Jane Addams launched Hull-House in 1889, she purposely situated it in the midst of the “large foreign colonies which so easilyisolatedthemselvesinAmericancities.”Hull-House’sproximityprovided both a refuge for immigrants and the opportunity for direct interaction between residents and the immigrant poor whose lives they sought...

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