With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!
ATTRIBUTION:
Jane Addams (1860–1935), U.S. social worker and social reformer. Twenty Years at Hull-House, ch. 8 (1910).
Addams was the founding director of Hull-House, a pioneer “settlement house” in a poor, largely immigrant, Chicago neighborhood. Here she had in mind poor women who worked long hours in factories out of economic necessity. This is not to say, however, that she would necessarily have approved of more affluent mothers working outside the home at more congenial jobs.
