Jane Addams and the Devil Baby: A Play In One Act

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Thank you for notifying us. The page you are attempting to access contains content that is not intended for underage readers. Jane Addams and the Devil Baby: This item has not been rated yet. Jane Addams locks horns with an elderly Irish woman, in an attempt to understand the strange obsession that has gripped Chicago. How can I use this format? Log in to rate this item. You must be logged in to post a review. There are no reviews for the current version of this product Refreshing There are no reviews for previous versions of this product.

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Many worked hard at menial jobs throughout their entire lives. Too many were stressed to the point of a mental breakdown. For Addams, these older women were particularly vulnerable to the Devil Baby myth. As she later claimed,. Whenever I heard the high eager voices of old women, I was irresistibly interested and left anything I might be doing in order to listen to them. It was a very serious and genuine matter with these old women, this story so ancient and yet so contemporaneous, and they flocked to Hull-House from every direction; those I had known for many years, others I had never known, and some whom I had supposed to be long dead.

Something about the mystery of the Devil Baby and its horrible consequences brought new life to old lives. Now, Jane Addams herself was no longer what one would call a young woman, as so many of the Hull House residents were. On September 6, , she turned The average life expectancy for women at that time was only Her body was no longer slim; the skin on her face had begun to sag, and her hair was graying. On many days, dark shadows appeared under her sad-looking eyes as exhaustion took its toll, and her chronic back pain plagued her.

Yet, Addams was one of the most vital and optimistic women of her day. She traveled the world, having spent the six months before the Devil Baby incident visiting nations in Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps when Jane Addams looked at her contemporaries in the Hull House neighborhood, they appeared older than she did.

In actuality, many were close to her in age; others, much older. It was often hard to tell when poverty, constant grueling work, and lives full of disappointment and heartache had worn them down. Yet, Addams felt an affinity with them. As younger women, they had been vital to the well-being of their families and community, but as older women, they had become invisible. To most of their younger relatives, they were at best a reminder of their family history. To others, they were a burden, especially once they needed to be taken care of instead of being the care givers.

They especially longed to feel their self-worth return, and perhaps the Devil Baby could help them do this. They certainly took great risks to see it. One elderly woman, whose very appearance touched Addams deeply, dragged herself from her small bed in the poorhouse to come and see the Devil Baby. This was no easy feat as she had absolutely no money and was physically disabled as well. For days, she planned her escape so as not to be noticed by the poorhouse wardens. Finally, she made her move, struggling across the street to a saloon in order to beg the ten-cent car fare from a young bartender.

She promised she would pay him back, and even though he barely had enough money to survive on, he lent it to her. Then, he and the conductor lifted her into the street car. That woman felt mighty proud of herself.

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Whereas at that time, poor men took off during the summer to travel the highways and byways seeking work, no self-respecting woman would consider that option. Yet, here she was breaking the traditional rules by heading off to complete a most urgent task. Being unable to do very much for herself, she was simply elated over the fact that she had escaped the poorhouse and was a paying customer on the street car.

She felt so sorry for her that she could not bring herself to immediately tell her that the Devil Baby did not exist. Instead she settled her into a comfortable chair in the Hull House parlor, served her a cup of tea, and listened intently to her story. In large part, she was doing anything to postpone revealing the truth. In turn, the old woman told Addams that her mother, who had spent her life in Ireland, had possessed second sight.

She had heard the fabled Banshee cry out three times before a poor soul was called to Heaven. She, herself, she bragged, had heard the Banshee once. She offered Addams her great expertise. The very next day, another woman from the neighborhood called on Jane Addams. The Devil Baby seemed an answer to her prayers. If she could actually see the child and relate this to her neighbors, she would gain credibility, and perhaps, some charity.

Immediately after receiving the call, Addams donned her hat and coat and walked the crowded, dirty streets to see her. By this time, she felt so bad that she had almost convinced herself to concoct a description of the Devil Baby as not to bring heartbreak to another poor, unhappy woman. After all, what harm could there be in giving an old woman, so ill that she had but little time to live, a bit of satisfaction? She felt her reluctance to enter her room.

Putting the signs together, she knew she was about to experience just one more disappointment in her life. For some unexplainable reason, the Devil Baby gave them the confidence to relate to Addams their lifelong sufferings. Several described scenes of domestic violence. I was ten when it got that way, the night after I saw my father do my mother to death with his knife.

The ugliness was born in the boy as the marks of the Devil was born in the poor child up-stairs. For all of these women, the Devil Baby represented something basic.

Jane Addams and the Devil Baby

An innocent woman—like themselves—had been mistreated. Husbands and grown children had beaten, humiliated, and impoverished them. Yet, these women were the ones punished, just like the poor mother of the Devil Baby, who was a victim, not a perpetrator, of a great injustice. However, there were ways in which a tired, forgotten older woman or an angry middle-aged one could use the Devil Baby to exert her influence and be seen as a sage.

A number of older women, for example, used the Devil Baby to help out those daughters and grand-daughters who had abusive husbands. Remembering their own weary years of poverty, numerous pregnancies, neglect, and domestic violence, they pressured those younger than themselves to get their men to Hull House. Maybe witnessing the reality of the Devil Baby would scare them into decency. What story could be better than this to secure sympathy for the mother of too many daughters and for the irritated father; the touch of mysticism, the supernatural sphere in which it was placed, would render a man quite helpless.

For Jane Addams, women throughout the ages knew that myths like the Devil Baby could provide aid in shaping human relationships. In fact, in a world where men held the power, the Devil Baby offered a tool of change and control. What was the proper behavior for married men and fathers? The answers will seem quite simple and logical to us in the twenty-first century. Instead, it meant bringing the pay envelope home to be opened by the wife. Since earnings were in the form of cash, not checks or direct deposits to banks, the first thing was to be sure the expenses for the upkeep of the family were taken out.

Only then could the bread-giver claim a piece of his earnings for a drink or two with his pals at the nearby saloon. Next, being kind and considerate were essential. Not slapping a child or hitting a wife meant peace for a home. Jane Addams witnessed the bruises on many a woman and child and made it a mission of Hull House to teach that there were better ways to end conflict, both inside and outside of the home. She also saw conflict resolution as a useful tool in bonding people of different ethnic and racial groups together and, taking it a step further, to securing international peace and justice.

In addition, for many women, a religious man was a good man as religion offered a moral code of conduct and discipline. If a man was a regular church goer, he was less likely to use his hard earned money for alcohol or gambling. Indeed, many men did make the trip to Hull House. Others came on their own, believing their mothers and wives must have seen it, and therefore, its existence was proved. They offered from twenty-five cents to two dollars to get a peek at this curiosity attraction.

This was no small sum for a poor family. The layers of meaning of the Devil Baby were numerous and complex. It frightened them to see their girls head off to dance halls or go out walking with strange men they met on the streets. They longed for adventure, flirtations, and, perhaps, a bit of love. One young woman wrote Addams a letter about her fear of reproducing a Devil Baby. She was so afraid that someone would identify her from the information she included that she refused to sign her name to it. Her letter reveals the low literacy level that many of the people living near Hull House had, and it must have been difficult for Jane Addams to even understand the message.

This anonymous author told Addams about the men who flirted with her and her friends on their way home from the tailor shop where they worked.

Harriet Alonso

The men were usually drinking beer and trying to tempt the girls to go to a dance hall with them. On a sadder note, some of the women who sought out the Devil Baby at Hull House came because they felt guilty that they had given birth to developmentally disabled or mentally ill children or those with physical disabilities. The Devil Baby became a symbol of what they saw as their own failures. Women whose children had become criminals also felt cursed by a devil in their midst.

The presence of a supposed Devil Baby at Hull House brought up the memory of their own tragic lives. It also made them feel companionship with other mothers in similar situations. The Devil Baby hysteria ended as abruptly as it had begun. The Chicago Examiner article seemed to take the wind out of its sail. People found no evidence of a Devil Baby or even a deformed baby born in the neighborhood.

Within the blink of an eye, everything returned to normal, and the Devil Baby was forgotten. Jane Addams herself learned several lessons from the Devil Baby experience which stayed with her for the rest of her life. It changed the way she looked at aging and poverty, especially for women, and gave her insight into the world of tradition, myths, and the power of superstition.

Jane Addams always kept her discussion of the Devil Baby within the confines of the Hull House neighborhood. Although her analysis reached across borders into the world of mythology, it did not consider other factors that could have sparked off the mania that autumn of In a situation like this, a historian who has the luxury of hindsight can offer new ideas to the discussion.

In particular, newspapers are an excellent source for understanding the past. They are immediate, dramatic, and revealing. In , its co-editors, the cousins Robert R. McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson, took the newspaper to a broad audience by introducing advice columns, comic strips, cultural events and campaigns reflecting the spirit of the Progressive Era.

At the end of March, , the Tribune had a daily circulation of , and a Saturday circulation of , It also produced a Sunday edition of over one-hundred pages including a separate cartoon section and a magazine. I decided to concentrate on the Tribune rather than The Chicago Examiner because the latter was considered more sensational, and I wanted to have a more reliable source in terms of what was going on in Chicago and the wider world at the time of the Devil Baby incident. I decided to go through entire issues of the newspaper dating from September 1 through November 8, with this primary question in my mind: I looked closely at the approximately four weeks before the incident began and then continued for a week past its conclusion.

Jane Addams and the Devil Baby: A One-Act Play by Carolyn Gage (eBook) - Lulu

The first thing that struck me was that in mid-September, the Spiritualist Association of the U. The Tribune reported that during its sessions, twenty-five dead people wrote notes to those in attendance. News of spiritualists communing with the dead certainly fit the bill. Of more consistent interest, however, was the weather and its interplay with living conditions and health.

This may sound strange, but think about it for a moment. The population most deeply invested in the Devil Baby was poor. They lived in tenements, shacks, the rear apartments of small two and three-story houses, rooming houses, or, if need be, in temporary shelters or even on the streets and in parks. They rarely benefitted from heating in the winter, and they most certainly did not have air-conditioning or fans in the summer.

Many did not yet have electricity. They often lived in crowded spaces where smells from summer sweat, unwashed bodies and clothing, and garbage from uncollected piles in the streets assaulted their olfactory nerves. Winters in Chicago were often cruel, with bitterly cold winds coming off of Lake Michigan, extremely low temperatures, and plenty of snow.

The poor people living around Hull House were lucky to have any heat in their apartments, most coming from small coal or wood burning stoves or fireplaces also used for cooking the meager meals they could afford. They could not afford fur-lined or insulated winter coats or boots for traversing through the icy streets.

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Rather, they piled on layers of thin clothes and shivered all night while huddled under thin blankets. Poor people, especially the newly-arrived immigrants in Chicago, who did seek out physicians often fell victim to quacks who knew nothing about healing the ill but did know a great deal about bilking people out of the few dollars they had in their pockets. In late October, the Tribune started a campaign against these frauds. Hot or cold, living a healthy and comfortable life was almost impossible.

This said, the summer of was a doozy. Temperatures reached 97 degrees at four in the afternoon. They took up residence along paths and by the lake, causing trouble for themselves and for the police.

Located in West Park No. Folks could swim, shower, and bathe. More than 60, men and 30, women took advantage of the free showers during June and July alone.