Among her many achievements, the late Jill Ker Conway (“Former Smith president Conway dies at 83,” June 4) devoted her doctoral dissertation at Harvard to a pathbreaking study of Jane Addams (1860-1935) and her entourage of brilliant women reformers at Hull House in Chicago.
With a helpful introduction from David Tebaldi at Mass Humanities, I recorded an informal interview with Conway in October 2016 on that topic. She told me that her interest in Hull House was sparked by her neighbor and friend Archibald MacLeish, who greatly admired Addams and the role of Hull House as a catalyst for social reform. He helped her meet several former Hull House residents who, in Conway’s words, were encouraged by Addams “to believe they could change society through personal labor and effort.”
Many of those who experienced the “Hull House aura” did exactly that, most notably Frances Perkins (“The Woman behind the New Deal”) and Eleanor Roosevelt, who as the first U.S. ambassador to the United Nations championed the “U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights” — the consummate expression of Jane Addams’ social philosophy.
My conversations with Conway and other senior Hull House scholars helped inspire me to organize the public forum held last fall with support from Mass Humanities on “Rediscovering Jane Addams in a Time of Crisis.”
The video record of panel discussions by Valley leaders in immigration, social justice, and nuclear disarmament is posted by the Jane Addams Papers Project (Digital.JaneAddams.Ramapo.edu).
Rutherford H. Platt
Florence