When I decided to write about my grandmother Rachel’s professional career as a social worker, I ran up against an uncomfortable truth: she was an energetic, warmhearted perpetrator of institutionalized racism. This was widespread in the early 1900s, and therein lay my dilemma as a nonfiction writer: finding the middle ground between whitewashing and condemning. I wanted to present a clear, accurate narrative, neither retouching it nor viewing the past and its attitudes through the cultural lens of the present.
Rachel was a young woman employed in the earliest days of social work who still clung tightly to her family’s WASPish traditions. Her passionate desire to do “real work” in settlement houses in three New England communities led to a 10-year career helping immigrants and economically challenged residents. She had a fine sense of observation, compassion, youthful energy and a sharp mind.
The settlement house movement emerged in England in the late 19th century and had its peak activity in the first two decades of the 20th century. Early leaders had backgrounds in religion, philanthropy and education. This infused their work with insight and compassion, despite their Anglo-centric worldviews and limited experience working with immigrants and others enduring terrible conditions in newly industrialized urban centers.
Settlements were sometimes criticized for their emphasis on assimilation, seen as steering immigrants toward the American way of life and away from the culture of origin. But compared to the accepted mores of the time, settlement workers were on the radical end of society. “While most middle-class Americans were comfortably enjoying the benefits of technology and new money, [Robert Woods, founder of South End House] and other settlement workers were living among those bearing the full brunt of the cost of such luxuries – the poor and working classes – trying to ameliorate their conditions and persuade society to somehow ensure that all Americans could have equal access to basic human rights such as tolerable living conditions, bearable work days, and reasonable compensation, as well as some middle class luxuries, such as arts and entertainment. While most Protestant churchmen were echoing Andrew Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth,’ Woods and others were challenging the deeply entrenched ideas about sin and poverty, attempting to prove that sin was corporate as well as individual and poverty was not necessarily God’s just punishment upon the poor.”*
In some ways, 2020 is similar. There’s great energy toward moving away from systemic injustice. To make that happen, however, the “haves” must challenge what they’ve quietly accepted and enabled, due to their privileged standing in society.
In Rachel’s journal about her first year as a settlement worker, she wrote extensively about her new job in Boston’s South End. Her descriptions sometimes struck me as judgmental and WASP-centric—and this made me squirm. But those attitudes were rampant in the budding profession of social work. Profiling and categorizing ethnicities according to their perceived behavior and habits was an everyday occurrence. Social workers, essentially in triage mode, needed to quickly become familiar with the huge, diverse influx of immigrants and decide how best to meet their needs. Then, as now, the values of privileged whites became the default setting. This was sometimes well-intentioned, but too often it was deployed as a means to keep the powerful in power.
For example, Rachel’s journal describes a dinner at South End House with a medical doctor and a Syrian refugee. One of the topics at the table was the proposed Immigration Act of 1917, specifically the requirement that all immigrants over the age of 16 should be able to read 30–40 words of their own language from an ordinary text. Rachel agreed with the doctor’s view that literacy indicated an individual’s drive to succeed and better themselves, and for that reason, those individuals would have a natural tendency to thrive in America.
But the Immigration Act also banned “alcoholics, anarchists, contract laborers, criminals, convicts, epileptics, “feebleminded persons,” “idiots,” “illiterates,” “imbeciles,” “insane persons,” “paupers,” “persons afflicted with contagious disease,” “persons being mentally or physically defective,” “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority,” “political radicals,” polygamists, prostitutes, and vagrants.” Most infamously, it designated the Asiatic barred zone, from which people could not immigrate, including much of Asia and the Pacific islands.
As a nonfiction writer, it isn’t my job to speculate on what someone was thinking. I don’t know if Rachel knew all the details of the Immigration Act and agreed with them, or if she merely thought that literacy was something everyone should aspire to. But during the time I spent with my grandmother in her later years, I saw her strong attachment to New England ways and values. She was a product of her era as well as a boundary-pusher. This must have been uncomfortable at times during her career, and might have provoked the reaction to cling to the known and widely accepted, for better or for worse.
Rachel was also on the pioneering wave of women with careers. She was entirely comfortable with the academic and intellectual aspect of that, but when it came to appearances and manners, she was a hidebound traditionalist. From that came another “what do I do with this” moment in my research.
I came across one of her poems about urban street life, which described a “leering old crone” with a “sluttish” green feather in her hat. After much thought, I decided to quote the poem in its entirety, and also to write about my negative reaction to it – back to the idea of accuracy within a cultural context. And in this case, I was able to see how attitudes of the past can be slowly watered down with each generation. This played out in the heated arguments I had with my parents about women’s clothing choices leading to bad things happening to them. In Rachel’s world, women of good breeding were supposed to look good, but they weren’t supposed to get noticed. In other words, no sluttish green feathers.
Throughout the research and writing of my book Courage Says Keep On, I was presented with many examples of the tension between old ways and new. I found ways to let the Rachel tell her own story — speaking her words within her cultural framework. In that way, clarity, context and completeness contributed to the narrative and perhaps offered a relevant connection to the present.
*Linford F. Fisher, 2002 master’s thesis, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
