Ebook: I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl

Hilda Satt Polacheck's family emigrated from Poland to Chicago in 1892, bringing their old-world Jewish traditions with them into the Industrial Age. Throughout her career as a writer and activist, Polacheck never forgot the immigrant neighborhoods, markets, and scents and sounds of Chicago's West Side. In charming and colorful prose, Polacheck recounts her introduction to American life and the Hull-House community; her chance meeting with Jane Addams and their subsequent long friendship and working relationship; her marriage; her support of civil rights and women's suffrage; her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; and her experiences as a writer for the Works Progress Administration.| Part I: A Polish Childhood, 1882-92 1. Memories of Poland 5 Part II: The Voyage to America: A New Life Begins, 1892-95 2. The Voyage to America 21 3. Transplanted 25 4. South Halsted Street 29 5. My Father 35 6. My Mother 43 Part III: Growing Up with Hull-House, 1895-1912 7. I Discover Hull-House 51 8. A Funeral 53 9. My First Job 56 10. Growing Up 61 11. The Oasis in the Desert 68 12. The West Side Turner Hall 81 13. The University 86 14. New Horizons 91 15. Jane Addams 96 16. New Horizons [II] 105 17. The Forward Movement 111 18. The Walking Delegate 118 Part IV: Family Life and Politics in Milwaukee, 1912-29 19. Milwaukee 129 20. War 142 21. Peace 147 22. Woman Suffrage 152 23. Women's International League for Peace and Freedom 157 24. December 1927 160 Part V: Return to Chicago, 1929-35 25. Going Back to Chicago 167 26. WPA 172 27. May 1935 177 Afterword 179 Appendix A: Time Line 187 Appendix B: The Writings of Hilda Satt Polacheck 189 Notes 195 Sources Consulted 239 |

"Scholars will find much to mine from Polacheck's vivid descriptions of urban life and socialist politics at a time of vast change. . . . General readers will be entranced by this sometimes dramatic, frequently funny, always engrossing autobiography."—Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times

"From the little details of immigrant life to the broad sweep of progressive politics, Hilda Satt Polacheck has given us an enormously valuable historical document. I Came a Stranger is the story of one of the 'obscure women' of history as she really was, an acute observer and an energetic actor in the public life of her time."—Ellen Carol DuBois, coauthor of Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe
|Hilda Satt Polacheck (1882–1967) was a writer, activist, and teacher. Dena J. Polacheck Epstein (d. 2013) is the author of Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Lynn Y. Weiner is a professor emerita of history at Roosevelt University and the author of From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980.