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In 1899, Hilda Satt, the daughter of Jewish immigrants to Chicago, visited Hull-House for the ¤rst time. Her father had recently died, and although her mother “faced life with the heroism of the true American pioneer” (Polacheck 44), she was barely scraping by. Hilda hoped that Hull-House, with its low cost cafeteria, activities for immigrant women, men, and children, and focus on neighborhood outreach, would be able to alleviate her family’s dire ¤nancial and emotional situation. While the initial visit made some impression, it was Hilda’s second trip to Jane Addams ’s settlement house that had the greatest effect on the girl. Jane Addams took Hilda on a tour of Hull-House, starting off with one of the house’s most innovative projects, the Labor Museum. The Museum featured the traditional crafts of the immigrant communities that made up Hull-House’s neighborhood, and “showed the evolution of cotton, wool, silk and linen” (Polacheck 64). Next to the textiles were descriptions of how each crop was raised, spun, woven, and dyed. The spectators at the Museum were a mixed crowd: immigrants and their children, well-heeled philanthropists, devotees of the then avant-garde Arts and Crafts movement. The Museum was also fully interactive; when Hilda ¤nished looking around, Mary Hill, the Museum’s coordinator “asked me whether I would like to learn to weave something that was typically American. . . . [V]ery soon I was weaving a small Navahostyle blanket” (Polacheck 64). 9 “To Reveal the Humble Immigrant Parents to Their Own Children” Immigrant Women, Their American Daughters, and the Hull-House Labor Museum Sarah E. Chinn As Hilda soon learned, the Labor Museum was not simply a showplace for traditional handicrafts. It was also a moneymaking venture: Hull-House sold the products of the people who exhibited their skills in the Museum, and used the money to fund settlement-house projects. However, as Hilda Satt, writing decades later as Hilda Satt Polacheck, pointed out, one of the Museum’s primary concerns went beyond consciousness or fundraising. She realized that “Miss Addams found that there was a de¤nite feeling of superiority on the part of children of immigrants towards their parents” who participated in the Museum’s exhibits (65). Hilda saw that for these children, mostly in their teens, “the Labor Museum was an eye-opener. When they saw crowds of welldressed Americans standing around admiring what Italian, Irish, German , and Scandinavian mothers could do, their disdain for their mothers vanished. . . . I am sure the Labor Museum reduced strained feelings on the part of immigrants and their children” (66). Addams’s discovery of this “feeling of superiority” was hardly a surprise to her. She designed the Labor Museum with that result in mind, a fact of which Polacheck, whose memoir, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, was dedicated in “humble gratitude to the memory of JANE ADDAMS” (2), could hardly have been unaware. Jane Addams created the Labor Museum as a way to address a problem that obsessed her contemporaries: the attitudes of American-born children of latenineteenth -century immigrants toward their parents on the one hand, and the United States on the other—what was often thematized as the con®ict between the “Old World” and the “New World.”1 This generation of new Americans was entering adolescence as Addams was embarking on what would be a historic philanthropic project, and by 1900, when Hilda Satt was making her way through the Hull-House Labor Museum, they constituted a huge demographic bubble comparable to the baby boom of the 1940s and 1950s.2 In this essay I explore how the Labor Museum dealt with the “problem ” of American-born teenage children of immigrant parents, particularly the daughters of immigrant women, and how Addams represented that problem in her writing. These children provided a bridge between their parents and the culture of the United States that was often undecipherable to the older generation and also built a wall between themselves and their parents, a wall that popular American cul228 Sarah E. Chinn ture helped construct and maintain. For a variety of reasons, Jane Addams wanted to demolish that wall and reunite foreign-born parents and U.S.-born children—she had, as she put it, “an overmastering desire to reveal the humble immigrant parents to their own children” (HH 171–72)3 —and she imagined that the Labor Museum would go some way toward achieving that goal. But she was ¤ghting...

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