The (Vainglorious) Beneficence of Lady Bountiful? The Contradictory Life of Lillian Wald
Book Report: Americana
By Mel Freilicher
Lillian Wald: A Biography by Marjorie Feld on The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Lillian Wald was largely responsible for stimulating New York’s Public Health Department into treating poor people, especially immigrants. Founding the Henry Street settlement in New York’s lower east side in 1893, she created the first entrepreneurial Visiting Nurse service with no formal ties to religious or charitable institutions. “A fine old house, once the abode of the wealthy, but long abandoned to the poor of the city,” as Lillian described it. Three stories high, and made of brick, with all the marks of a genteel home.
Wald’s many significant accomplishments are rightly heralded here. Graduating from the New York Hospital’s School of Nursing in 1891, she then took courses at the Women’s Medical College. Coining the term “public health nurse” to replace visiting nurse, Lillian encouraged members of this profession to join forces with public and private agencies in efforts for “social betterment”—to promote the more even distribution of resources: the minimum wage, health care for all citizens, pure milk, better houses, sanitation and fire protection.
An early advocate for both neighborhood playgrounds, and placing nurses in public schools, Wald cofounded the National Organization of Public Health Nursing in 1912, which crossed the color line. However, her organization’s 25 black nurses were neither allowed to visit white homes nor be promoted to supervisory ranks. “But she paid them equal salaries, and afforded them professional courtesy and recognition.”
Seen as “a staunch friend of black nurses,” Lillian was one of the first white leaders to support The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, established in 1908. The next year, she was on the original committee which conceived of the NAACP: their first public conference was held at the Henry Street building.
Shortly before opening Henry Street, Lillian took up residence at the College Settlement in the lower east side. This group had chapters with reform-minded students from Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar (where Lillian applied but was told at age 16, she was too young), and other women’s colleges: “educated in the new ideal of womanhood which Wald took as her own.” Instead of being sheltered from the harsh realities of life, these women had special skills to play a key role in the progress of civilization.
An early and consistent lobbyist for federal child labor laws, Wald participated in organizing the Women’s Trade League in 1903, later serving on its executive committee. To bring better trained women into the field, Wald helped initiate a public nursing lecture series at Columbia’s Teacher’s College in 1899, which led to the formation of the university’s Department of Nursing and Health in 1910. She also created a national partnership with Henry Street nurses and Metropolitan Life Insurance which became a model for other corporate projects.
Utilizing her most salient talents during the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, Lillian was appointed Chair of the Nurses’ Emergency Council: overseeing and calling for greater coordination of services from hospitals, social work agencies, nursing schools and religious institutions. Taking out an advertisement, “A Stern Task for Stern Women,” the Council summoned nurses and even untrained volunteers to help care for the sick.
Distribution of this advertisement tapped resources of the wealthy. “Dignified and discerning women stood on the steps of Altman’s and Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue shops and accosted passers-by.” “Before the day was half spent,” Wald later recalled, “hundreds of men and women came into the office to volunteer their services.”
At the International Health Conference in Cannes in 1919, including medical experts from France, England, Italy, Japan and the United States (those from former enemy countries and Russia were excluded), Wald represented the Children’s Bureau and the Red Cross Nursing Service. Participants proposed to pool the resources and scientific knowledge of all nations’ Red Cross organizations by establishing the League of Red Cross Societies.
As Ms. Feld comments, “This corresponded to Wald’s vision of international cooperation…Hers was the Progressive ideal of the scientific gathering of firsthand knowledge and the subsequent formation of public policies, an idea she had worked on since 1893.”
Throughout her entire career, Lillian saw herself as firmly planted in one variety of progressive era ideology. Her [seemingly quite naïve—but maybe you had to have been there!] goal was to help achieve a society where individuals of all ethnic and religious differences were assimilated into an interdependent melting pot. For her, Henry Street was a place “where boundaries between individuals fell away revealing universal communalities.”
The melting pot concept—contrasted by viewing the country as a kind of cross-cultural, living mosaic—first came into use in 1780. Wikipedia proffers a [hideous] example in Henry Ford’s English school, established in 1914. The graduation ceremony for immigrant employees involved symbolically stepping off an immigrant ship: entering the melting pot at one end in costumes designating their nationality, and emerging at the other end in identical suits, waving the American flag.
Lillian was one of the first prominent Jewish nurses and activists in a field comprised almost entirely of Christian women. Indeed nursing schools at Bellevue Hospital and the New York Hospital together graduated only four Jewish women from 1875-1920. Born into the affluent German-Jewish community of Rochester, who’d mostly emigrated right around the time of the 1848 revolution, Lillian Wald had absolutely no Jewish education, or interest: only as an adult was she even introduced to the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays.
Feld’s sociological perspective on the Wald family is useful to a point. The men—Lillian’s less affluent father died young—were assimilationists of a particular stripe. That is, they themselves were desperate to assimilate. And equally desperate to not allow downtown eastern European Jews to assimilate into their circles.
Forming manufacturing associations ostensibly to standardize procedures, they followed the example of industry leaders across the nation: “employing significant resources to engage in bitter battles against labor without much fear of state intervention”—locking out workers who attempted to unionize in the strikes of the 1890s.
In the past, Rochester’s conservative newspaper, Jewish Tidings, proclaimed clothing manufacturers had been “led around by the nose by their employees.” Previous manufacturers had been emasculated, the paper stated: “the subject of ridicule around the country on account of their horrible submissions to the demands of irresponsible blackmailers.” But, they boasted, “Now they act like men!” Management’s successes in crushing labor organizations were equated with achieving white middle class masculinity. They were congratulated on their “firmness and courage.”
The women in the family, on the other hand, passed along a maternal caregiver heritage. Lillian’s mother, Millie, along with her aunts, the wives of these aggressive businessmen “followed the example of their Christian counterparts. They took leadership positions in philanthropy." Feld writes, “While such work offered newfound opportunity for Jewish and non-Jewish women, it did not challenge this new world.”
In contrast to their husbands, this charity work did aim at Americanizing eastern European downtown immigrants—“using themselves as models.” Millie’s prominent characteristic appeared to be refined taste in home decorating. More importantly, with “other-worldly kindheartedness: she offered food to unemployed men who came to the house, so much so that the police asked her to stop.” An earlier biographer stated Lillian’s impulse to give things to people who needed help “was the same as her mother’s.”
What pushed Lillian to go far beyond the goals and lifestyles of her family and peer group in Rochester? Her formal education was in a girls’ school, known for its “liberal and humane spirit.” The same school which most of her social circle attended: candidates were recommended by clergy of elite churches and B’rith Kodesh (the oldest and largest Reform synagogue in the greater Rochester area, originally started by a cadre of Orthodox men).
While Feld’s study is informative, as “A Biography,” it omits many personal details, and specific historical contexts. We learn early on that Lillian was a lesbian, as first reported in 1979 by Blanche Weisen Cook (who also wrote about Eleanor Roosevelt’s long term love affair with journalist Lorena Hickcock). But once the author states, “Claiming Wald as a lesbian sheds light on the sustaining, intimate and very private relationships she had with other women,” we get no further details at all.
We do hear in passing Lillian had two main love relationships in her life. Perhaps no information was available. Her friendships with Jane Addams, Florence Kelley and other female settlement house leaders (not New Yorkers, though Kelley lived there for a while) were very positive; she felt quite comfortable in this female milieu.
About Lillian’s overarching commitment to her vision of the Progressive era: Despite frequent descriptions of her acting as a savvy Networker, it was disheartening to find—except for mostly vague references to unnamed benefactors and legislators—almost no information about which individuals and groups Lillian connected with among the multitude of specific organizations, political parties and media outlets, sectors, or leaders of the heady and cacophonous Progressive era.
Even more bizarrely, the book mentions nothing about the insanely heinous anti-sedition laws which terrorized and decimated the American left: imprisoning and exiling many of its strongest leaders once the U.S. entered the imperialist grab bag of WWI.
This all seems part of a larger concern: Wald is depicted almost mechanistically—that is by her actions. Her own interiority isn’t adequately discussed: especially in negotiating the ever-growing disparity between her melting pot idee fixe and the deepening grimness and slaughterhouse mentality of the times.
Somewhat paradoxically, a major source of Lillian’s funding was from Jews—mainly from her own social circles, of course. A chief funder of Henry Street, Jacob Schiff, Lillian’s “mentor, benefactor, and close ally,” was a prominent leader of New York’s uptown German-Jewish community. Their motives were somewhat contrary: Schiff, like most of her Jewish backers, was concerned with preserving the religion, and its communities, into the future. Not at all a “melting pot” ideologue.
But the pair worked well together. In fact, “both were vehement about the settlement’s secular nature, consistently striving to make the institution appear less Jewish.” Schiff was in favor of finding a Gentile to be President of the board of directors. With his mind always attuned to how the non-Jewish world viewed him as an exemplar of American Jewry, “Schiff followed the commonly understood set of guidelines formed out of fear of anti-Semitic hostility and possible reprisals.”
All too often, Feld invokes the structural contradiction of “universalism” vs. “peculiarism” (specific concerns about the Jewish population) to locate Wald’s behavior. Useful to a point, but also tending to obscure some of the real difficulties in complex improvisatory strategizing which Lillian needed to move forward.
For example, Irving Howe points out, “some of the immigrants kept themselves apart from Miss Wald’s nurses—there were rumors they were secret agents proselytizing for Christianity.” (And some were resentful of the rather sumptuous Henry Street house where Lillian both lived and worked.)
Wald herself invited such suspicions. In her book, The House on Henry Street, she describes her first contact with “the lives of the industrial poor.” When a child from Rochester’s Minnie Louis Sabbath School took her into a tenement, Lillian termed this transformative moment as her “baptism of fire.”
About those words, Ms. Feld writes: “Miss Wald identified herself with the Social Gospel Movement…which grew out of Protestant churches” as church leaders in the U.S. and England “strove to address the growing social problems of rapid industrialization and urbanization.” Christian teachings, they believed, could bring about “the kingdom of God, the brotherhood of man on earth.”
Of course, occupants of the tenements were “the same cohort,” as Feld puts it, who “struck against—and were once again locked out by—her uncles in Rochester’s garment strikes.”
The second part of the book is replete with Lillian’s correspondences with England’s first Labour Party prime minister of England, James Ramsey MacDonald and his wife, Margaret. Commenting that their “decades long friendship grew from their shared idealism and political beliefs,” Feld appears to have unlimited access to this archival material. This section feels rather drawn out, and would undoubtedly be most valuable to historians specifically engaged with those figures.
Returning home from the 1919 International Health Conference in Cannes. Lillian saw “the spirit of cooperation threatened in her more immediate neighborhood, as labor strikes broke out on an historic scale” around the country. But she remained rooted in her experiences with Henry Street: encompassing voluntary assimilation and integration alongside cross-class coalition building. “Even as the devastation of World War I suggested another more brutal model of modern times, and even as the emerging ethnic landscape suggested new terms of difference in modern identities.”
After Jacob Schiff’s death in 1920, Lillian appeared increasingly independent of New York’s Jewish communities. Tracing her work through the ‘20s and ‘30s, especially her positions on Stalinism and Zionism “brings into relief the difficulties she faced in applying her vision to developments in the conservative interwar years.”
Initially, of course, the Russian revolution excited so many Americans, erupting during one of the most repressive periods in the benighted history of this country. Access to truthful information about what was going on in Russia was a significant problem for Americans. Also, in their lectures, those revolutionaries who visited the United States downplayed the bitter and war-like divisions in their own country.
Looking to Russia as a model of democracy and equality, “Wald’s faith in Russian collectivism remained unshaken.” She was a fervent supporter of Kerensky (who she later called “pathetic”), Lenin, and then Stalin until her death in 1940, long after many Jewish communities and others had sounded the alarm about Stalin’s abuses, and many Americans she knew had indicted this repressive regime.
Wald visited Russia in 1924. Though she was in Red Square during Lenin’s burial, on her return, she wrote, and spoke little about politics there—not even the ubiquitous Trotsky/Stalin leadership battles. Addressing audiences at home, Lillian dismissed reports of religious persecution and inefficiency, dwelling, instead, on Russia’s progress in building and organizing effective schools and hospitals, also touting her own abilities to enlighten uninformed Russians regarding improvements in American nursing, and public health.
Lillian spoke of her “great surprise” at the “evident religious expression in Russia.” Her use of religious imagery in describing her visit demonstrates, Ms. Feld insists, “continuing deep commitment to the new Russian society and to the language and goals of the Social Gospel movement.” In a somewhat crazy, or at least quite star-stuck, manner, she wrote of her poignant dream after following Lenin’s funeral wagon, “overflowing with crosses.”
“When the driver turned,” she said, “I saw the face of Christ, radiant.” There, Feld remarks, Lillian saw the realization of her own “religion,” a universalist vision. Russian society was reborn into righteousness and justice, into Christ’s teachings, the goal of the Protestant Social Gospel. Soon the rest of the world will follow!
Regarding Zionism, Wald was averse to both its political and cultural ramifications. In the “camp that advocated for negotiations with Arab residents of Palestine,” Lillian’s warnings “joined those of others with prescient concerns.” Fair enough! But distinctly unlike many others, such as the venerable Hannah Arendt, these warnings also demonstrate how Lillian’s ethnic Progressive vision “distanced her from any understanding or sympathy with the Zionist cause. In striving for a universalist internationalism, she had lost sight of the justification for any particularism” [that rhetoric!].
Following the Immigration Act of 1924 which limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe and ended Asian migration, “American Jewish communities became predominantly middle class and native born…By the late 1930’s,” Feld claims, “all denominations of organized Judaism accepted Palestine as the center of Jewish culture.”
Most astounding were Lillian Wald’s reactions to Nazism. In 1934, she wrote a letter to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller of the Young Women’s Christian Association, likening the situation in Germany to “other incidents of repressions she had witnessed in her lifetime.”
She continued, “Though I think the Hitler anti-Semitism is more brutal than anything else they do, it is not more fundamentally dangerous than their other outrages…their suppression of Catholic freedom and liberal thought, and their suppression of the rights of women.” Declaring their anti-Semitism “the easiest red herring to deflect people,” she concluded, “Would it not clarify thought for men and women to declare the propaganda to be not anti-Semitic but anti-Christianity?”
Feld comments: “Shocking as this letter might seem from a post-Nazi Holocaust perspective, it fits with a view of Wald as someone whose experience had encouraged her to reject Jewish difference. Her membership in a women’s reform network with Rockefeller was “proof” she was part of the white Protestant mainstream.
Notably, Wald’s only anti-Nazi activism was with the Emergency Committee in Aid of Political Refugees from Nazism, a group that raised money for German political refugees “primarily among non-Jews” by emphasizing the “consequences of Nazi barbarism were not restricted to Jews.”
“The modern identity politics that emerged out of the challenges” brought on by Nazism and Zionism “gradually undermined” Wald’s vision. [One wonders just how gradually.] As did her continued opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which alienated younger women who did not share the fear the ERA would undo “all the protective measures…we [as women] certainly do require…” Lillian wrote, “in order to fulfill duties as women and mothers”—particularly concerned with shielding wage-earning women from unregulated capitalism.
The National Women’s Party, started in 1916, saw gender-based protective legislation as an “anachronism.” Led by Alice Paul who’d been closely linked to England’s militant Women’s Social and Political Union, organized by Emmeline Pankhurst, an all-female suffrage advocacy group dedicated to “deeds, not words.” Their militant tactics included hunger strikes, eventually adopting bombings and arson.
Shortly after Lillian’s health began to decline in the summer of 1925, she bought a home in the affluent town of Westport, Connecticut. Embracing country life, Lillian “took great pleasure in sharing it with visitors.” She particularly “adored” watching local animals, including her dog, Ramsay, as well as turtles, ducks, and geese.
Westport “counted many assimilated Jews among its residents.” But due to anti-Semitic “gentlemen’s agreements” any “Jewish Jews” had to buy land directly from a seller, as the real estate boards would not sell to them. The town also “boasted a small artists’ colony,” including members of networks she’d worked with for decades. Karl Anderson, the artist brother of Sherwood Anderson, lived nearby, as did critic and author Van Wyck Brooks (who received the second National Book Award for non-fiction and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize in history).
Clinging to her fixations established in the bygone Progressive era, Wald turned to the pioneering work of anthropologist, Franz Boas, himself a Jew, which “emphasized the instability of the concept of race, the profound influence of environmental factors of human cultural life…Boas represented the growing Jewish presence in American intellectual, literary, and reform movements, notable in the schools of thought that would integrate Jews into the category of mainstream whites.”
Writing to friends the world over, Wald could hardly contain her enthusiasm for the New Deal and for the Roosevelts. “Despite occasional lapses on the part of mankind [see Adolph Hitler!], I haven’t lost my optimism. I am as happy as happy can be at the good will and progress that are discernible in greater measure than before,” she wrote.
At a memorial at Carnegie Hall, honoring Lillian as “one of the great Americans of her time,” Van Wyck Brooks offered a brief tribute. He credited Wald’s “cosmopolitan sympathies” with helping her to become “the fulfillment of the American promise…a radiant incarnation of the beliefs and instincts expressed in the great documents of the Revolution, in the acts and speeches of Lincoln, in the poems of Whitman, at a time, in a place where these instincts seemed smothered and lost.”
Ironically, contemporary writings about Lillian Wald “assert her as a model of Jewish womanhood, someone who drew on Jewish religious notions of justice and holiness.” The 1970s, Ms. Feld points out, marked a turning point for those writers, for both scholarly and nonacademic audiences. “They came to conflate Jewishness with religiosity.” Before that, there were “somewhat awkward” allusions to Wald’s lack of connection to organized Jewish religion.
This revisionist view of Lillian Wald as Great American Jewess, “never mentions her anti-Zionism, her resistance toward Jewish categorization, her self-professed inspiration in the Social Gospel,” or her very disheartening reaction to Nazism. Ms. Feld felt it was her responsibility to set the record straight. I found this significant, revelatory piece-d-resistance ending to make many of the book’s problems and gaps seem less troublesome.
“While acknowledging the myopia that accompanies all human decisions along with the hindsight of our own contemporary position, this biography shows the origins of Wald’s vision,” Feld writes, “in part to document why it did not meet the tests of twentieth century events.” (Indeed, to view sociopolitical reality clearly feels like the historical imperative of the epoch.)
Feld’s final paragraph offers an appropriate apologia: “No biographer can hope to capture the essence of her subject. She can simply offer a fresh perspective on her subject’s one and many lives. I offer my own perspective on Wald’s experiences inside and outside of the women’s and Jewish communities, claiming her only for the space between them, the site of her lifelong interpretive work toward universal understanding.”
Certainly, Feld gives Lillian Wald’s impressive achievements their just due. At the time of writing, Feld emphasizes, the Henry Street Settlement is still flourishing—and functioning as Lillian Wald established it. “The settlement continues to work with neighborhood residents of all backgrounds, providing day care, youth programs, and services for the elderly, homeless individuals, and AIDS patients.”
Social workers provide mental health counseling and training for jobs, and for the graduate record exam. Henry Street’s Abrons Art Center still stages community theatrical productions. The Visiting Nurses Service of New York continues to live out Wald’s legacy by providing health care to diverse populations.
The Progressive era’s commitment to affordable housing is another of Lillian’s projects. She had suggested to two wealthy male friends who’d been active in Henry Street to invest in the first cooperative housing sites on the lower east side. In the summer of 1941, shortly after her death, state financing laws made this possible. New affordable housing projects were built along the East River, named for Jacob Riis and Bernard Baruch, and in Chelsea. One development was named for Wald.
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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Given Wald’s manifold accomplishments, I was surprised at how disturbed I was by her disavowing multi-culturalism and clinging to ye ole melting pot—not to mention her disaffiliation with all Jewish community. Seems part and parcel of a massive denial of 20th century barbarism: particularly ever-popular, ever bloody, ethnic cleansing. And the unimaginable hell of Nazi genocide (though Lillian died before the “final solution”).
One problem has been my own over-idealizing the Progressive era—especially the Wobblies (who I still revere)—because, in my mind, this was the last time we had any reasonable hope for a more humanitarian future. At least that hasn’t precluded women and minority groups making some historical gains. Aside from decimating the U.S. left, WWI’s years of wretched trench warfare appear to have been quite germane to subsequent worldwide authoritarian horrors.
And I believe, basically WWII marks the end of western civilization, as James Baldwin insists in his amazing book on the Atlanta child murders, The Evidence of Things Not Seen.
Also, Wald’s life and consciousness are just so alien to my own acculturation into a kind of community which probably barely exists anymore. A baby-boomer (born in 1946), we lived in a determinedly upwardly mobile Jewish suburban section of Yonkers, New York: populated largely by first generation American born Jews and their families. Ranging from middle to upper-middle class, the latter group of kids mostly went to private school in the city; we attended the truly awful Yonkers public schools.
Proud of being a soldier in WWII (a non-combatant), my father was a manufacturer. Many of our neighbors were professional men: the doctors all had to get their training outside the country, of course, and were greatly admired for persevering.
Social life for the majority of the parents completely revolved around the Conservative Temple a few blocks away: meetings; fundraising; dances and theater parties sponsored by men’s and women’s clubs; personal friendships among congregants. (Not many signs of anyone being especially devout, but that was definitely beside the point.)
My parents, and presumably almost everyone around them, would NEVER have lived among Gentiles, anywhere. They both grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn when it was still all Jewish immigrants—which I had some fascinating familiarity with because my grandmother, until her death when I was in 10th grade, was a continuous resident, to my parents’ dismay, as the neighborhood was “changing.”
Eventually, they moved to a new high rise complex in Florida, full of recently retired Jews. Clearly, the “outside” world was threatening; safety lay with their own kind. Incidentally, Lillian’s physiognomy would have fit seamlessly into any of these places: at one point, Ms. Feld suggests Wald’s aversion to a particularly Jewish looking individual may have mirrored discomfort with her own looks. [just sayin’]
I never got the impression of anyone being overly paranoid about another holocaust. Most seemed to enjoy their lives and each other (but my father, and many of his peers, were quite anxious and neurotic.) They believed in America, and reacted with some perplexity when their offspring didn’t share in the blind faith. (My father had a Communist cousin who visited Russia, and was blacklisted from his teaching job. As far as I could tell—despite Brownsville being a hotbed of communist organizing when they lived there—my parents chiefly felt disinterest or some bewilderment.)
Of course I rebelled—against the materialism and stifling homogeneity of the bourgeois suburb. Not against the religion, which I basically ignored—enjoying some of the holidays when I got to see my cousins. (Our rabbi was incredibly pompous and unappealing.) We hated going to Hebrew school—two days a week after school and on Sundays—where we learned about the importance of soliciting funds to plant trees in Israel.
While sneaking greasy potato chips from our briefcases, chiefly classes concerned famous Jews, and how much smarter they (we) were than those who hated us. Released once we were bar-mitzvahed: we could choose! We were men! Bye, Temple!
But both consciously and unconsciously, I came to revere some of the religion’s central tenets, like the principle of tzedehak, the Yiddish word for “justice” or “righteousness.” Charity is viewed not as a spontaneous act of good will or for ego gratification, but as an ethical and religious obligation—to empower poor people to support themselves. Learning, or scholarship, was also still highly valued. (Naturally, the acme of achievement lay in becoming a doctor, not a rabbi—and ensconcing one’s burgeoning family in a wealthier suburb).
Especially potent for me was the goal of growing up to be a mensch: a compassionate man who openly cared about others in need, and was capable of doing something about it. My father very often spoke of his father (who died when I was 2) as a kind of super-mensch of Brownsville: reiterating neither he nor his own progeny (us) could ever possibly approach grandpa’s character. The man did sound extraordinary.
I’m sure many, probably all, of these benign tenets existed in other religions. (Social Gospel = tzedekah?) But these were mine! And hard-fought to believe in: awareness of being gay (at least from the very onset of puberty) inherently gave me a critical distance on everything I was being taught, especially about the virulence and origins of hatred.
(Bolstered by much high school reading—entirely extra-curricular—about McCarthy, HUAC and the oh- so-unenlightened America South—the battle, which I eagerly joined, seemed to be about race, then persecution of the left: not anti-Semitism.)
Being a lifelong atheist (as a child and still, reconciling the concept of God with the Holocaust felt impossible—no matter how often “free will” was invoked), my connection to Judaism is not about spiritual beliefs: certainly not about Zionism, the idea of a holy land [dig that dirt!] or the currently genocide-mad Israel. Nor have I ever wanted to live in a suburb or a homogeneous neighborhood of any kind—not even a “college town” or a “gay ghetto” (though some could be a lot of fun to visit in the pre-AIDS years).
It’s about identifying with a rich culture, and feeling deep respect for individuals who were able to navigate within the contexts of subtle to hideously blatant historical persecution to achieve whatever they could manage to achieve. [This obviously excludes Roy Cohn, Stephen Miller, our current devil in disguise (as a devil), and other Less than Zeros.]
Sartre wrote in his Anti-Semite and Jew, ”Jewishness exists because others, especially anti-Semites, perceive and define it as such.”
I wonder how being a lesbian affected Lillian Wald. Maybe money shielded her from skepticism? (I do wish this bio revealed more about these issues.)
Still, bottom line: I can’t understand how she lived without the knowledge, even lacking the desire to know anything about what happened to her fellow Jews, or presumably how her own existential situation developed. What replaced this historical consciousness? Hollowness? The “privilege” of being part of—the most affluent part—of the majority?
Did she enjoy watching her uncles’ union-busting the same communities she was trying to provide with nursing care? Did she even notice, or care? (Or maybe she saw herself as a deliberate counterweight—which she was, to a point.)
The (vainglorious) beneficence of Lady Bountiful??
While Lillian Wald’s accomplishments were substantial and impressive, my own reactions to her life feel over-determined, inchoate, defensive. But definitely present, even deeply felt.
Mel Freilicher retired from some four decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, American Cream, and most recently, Privilege and Power: The Novel, all on San Diego City Works Press.