catholic schools for girls orphans chicago 1930

Addams explains the lessons she learned living in the city to other Americans equally unfamiliar with the urban environment. In contrast, Jane Addams’s classic account of the Chicago settlement she founded, Twenty Years at Hull House, is one of the most well-known accounts of women’s pioneering role in social reform and the development of the new female profession of social work. It provides unique insight into the experiences of American Catholic sisters who had a long tradition of both preserving the faith and providing social services to Catholic immigrants but left few records of their work. Sister Justina’s journal is a day-to-day account of the sisters’ response to urban industrial conditions in the Progressive Era. In the 1920s, the settlement purchased a Model-T Ford, which Blandina (in her seventies) learned to drive, thus expanding the scope of the sisters’ work and defying stereotypes of Catholic sisters and of older women in general. The sisters also taught English and other skills to acculturate immigrants during World War I the Santa Maria joined other social services in offering Americanization classes. They taught catechism classes for Italian children and tutored adults to prepare them for confirmation. Particularly interested in the welfare of girls and young women, Justina and Blandina encouraged education to prepare them for economic independence and even visited a prostitute whom they offered the opportunity to learn skills to find “honest” employment. They visited the city’s workhouse, jail, hospitals, and families in tenements, recording their encounters with poverty, illness and injury, and family conflicts. Sisters Justina and Blandina nevertheless undertook a surprising array of projects. In Cincinnati, the two confronted Protestant proselytizers and struggled to raise funds for their work in an impoverished immigrant community. When they began the Santa Maria, the sisters had recently returned to Cincinnati following thirty years of teaching in Ohio, Michigan, and the Southwest, where Blandina nursed a member of outlaw Arthur Pond’s gang back to health after a shooting. (Courtesy Sisters of Charity Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio)įrom 1897 to 1929, Sister Justina Segale, a Cincinnati Sister of Charity, kept a journal of the activities of the Santa Maria Institute, a Catholic settlement she founded with her biological and religious sister, Blandina. Elizabeth Bayley Seton Portrait by Bosseron Chambers, 1920

Catholic schools for girls orphans chicago 1930