"The Devil Baby at Hull-House"

Jane Addams, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and celebrated philanthropist wrote The Devil Baby at Hull-House in 1916 during her time operating the Chicago located Hull-House. This “settlement house” was essentially a halfway house for struggling, low-income women. The house attracted many struggling mothers, and in 1916 it was rumored that one had given birth to a deformed Devil-Baby. While completely false, the tale attracted much attention from the surrounding population, especially women. What followed from Addams’s observations of these women became the topic of The Devil Baby at Hull-House. Addams analyzed the various women that made their way to see the Devil-Baby, ultimately surmising that there was an underlying motivation for the women’s curiosity. Addams made the revelation the women’s fixation wasn’t purely curiosity; instead it was born of a desire to find meaning in anomalous events in order to cope with conventional woes. As she explores this concept, Addams writes “all human vicissitudes are in the end melted down into reminiscence, and that a metaphorical statement of those profound experiences which are implicit in human nature itself, however crude in form the story may be, has a singular power of healing the distracted spirit” (Addams 15).  Thus, Addams’s purpose of informing the reader to this revelation is evident as she argues that humans seek meaning in the metaphorical (the Devil Baby) in order to heal their spirits.  Addams relays this to the reader by using the rhetorical mode of classification and division. After describing the circumstances surrounding the Devil-Baby, Addams begins to classify the visiting women. She contends that there are three types of women visiting the baby: old, sage-like women who have lived long sad lives; women hoping to instill fear in their husbands through tales of the Devil-Baby; and failed mothers who can relate to the sadness of a lost child. Despite their obvious differences, Addams asserts that these women share the same motive: they hope to find peace through interpreting that which they cannot understand. Through this classification, Addams relays to the audience of assumedly other women her argument, thus achieving her intended goal.

The Women of Hull-House
The various women who came and went to Hull-House provide an interesting look into the sociology of females. (Via voicesinwartime.org)