Pioneer

...She decided that "the best way to bring Alice Hamilton to public view was through her own words...

...Hamilton first came to Hull House in 1897, eight years after its founding by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr...

...In 1952, however, when she was finally convinced that the Amendment would not endanger the protective legislation for working women that she had helped to enact, she changed her position...

...Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to a defense of women's rights...

...During her protests against the scheduled execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, a colleague questioned what "sort of an investigation" she had made before signing the petition requesting a commutation of sentence by the governor...

...Her response was direct: "My acquaintance with the case has lasted for seven years, because I became interested in it from the beginning...

...My long opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment has lost much of its force during the thirty years since the movement for it started," she said...

...Is it your rule that a cause in which one believes, an effort one would wish to help, must be avoided because the communists also believe in it...

...The lake was still as a mirror and the moon was up and there was not a sound to tell us that we were near a big city...

...In the mid-1960s, a graduate student working on a Jane Addams biography for his Ph.D...

...She challenged the U.S...

...dissertation asked Hamilton whether there had been "erotic elements" in the relationships among the Hull House women...

...Alice Hamilton lived an extraordinary life—politically, socially, and emotionally, though there is no indication of a love interest...

...During most of her lifetime, Alice Hamilton opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, which was first introduced in the 1920s...

...The letters indicate her interests and involvement, from settlement work to industrial medicine, from pacifism to social reform, from debates on civil liberties with her friend U.S...

...she defended the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born...

...She responded that his question indicated a generation gap...

...Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters, by Barbara Sicherman, is a sensitive and fascinating biography of Hamilton—pacifist, civil libertarian, first woman on the faculty of Harvard's Medical School, pioneer in industrial medicine, social reformer, and long-time resident of Chicago's Hull House...

...Many of the letters were written to her cousin, Agnes Hamilton, and are personal...

...she asked...

...She wrote that life at Hull House "satisfied every longing, for companionship, for the excitement of new experiences, for constant intellectual stimulation, and for the sense of being caught up in a big movement which enlisted my enthusiastic loyalty...

...Attorney General for designating the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born as a Communist-front organization...

...The heart of the book is a selection of 131 letters written by Hamilton, which have been woven into an inspiring and definitive biography...

...The result is a brilliant biography that enables us to compare the events of Hamilton's 101 years with those of the contemporary world...

...Women of her generation, she said, would never have imagined homosexuality as a basis for the kind of friendship the Hull House women enjoyed...

...Most of the others, however, dwell on political and social issues: She protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti during the Red Scare of the 1920s and the execution of the Rosenbergs during the McCarthy era...

...He had always "respected" the "careful investigation" of her scientific work, he wrote to her, but now his confidence "has been shaken by what seems to me an action that could not be based on careful, thorough investigation of a nature required by a scientifically trained person...

...I do not believe this situation would be changed by the passage of the Amendment now...

...Hull House radicalized Hamilton, as it did many other residents...

...One example of some of the beautiful descriptive passages in the book is a letter to cousin Agnes about a bicycle ride along Chicago's lakefront with two friends, including Gerald Swope, then a Hull House resident, later board chairman of General Electric: "We leave the nineteenth ward steaming and choking and melting and in fifteen minutes we are on the lakeshore drive spinning along with the fresh air on our faces and the lake before us and the moon just coming up...

...The health of women in industry is now a matter of concern to health authorities, both state and Federal, to employers' associations, insurance companies, trade unions...

...Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters brings to life an exciting and important era in social and political reform in the United States...

...She had read the record of the trial, followed the appeals made to the judge over the years...

...Sicherman, Kenan Professor of American Institutions and Values at Trinity College, says the idea of the biography originated "nearly a decade ago" when she "discovered the letters of Alice Hamilton, the legendary pioneer of industrial medicine...

...Arthur Weinberg (Arthur Weinberg is co-author with his wife, Lila, of the award-winning biography, "Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel...

...We usually go to one of the most distant beer gardens, leave our wheels and stay for an hour or so listening to the music and drinking delicious cold Bavarian beer from stone mugs, then we mount again and reach home between eleven and twelve____One night it was so dreamy and still that we kept on far, far out along the lakeshore and when we felt we had left the world behind us, we got off our wheels and went down to the water and took off our shoes and stockings and sat on the embankment paddling in the cold water...

...Her colleague replied: "Any criticism of you that may have been implied in my letter I very gladly retract...

...Even if she had been unfamiliar with the case, she would still have joined the thousands who petitioned the governor for commutation or stay of sentence "till the sober doubts of the world as to the guilt of these men and the fairness of our treatment of them had been allayed...

...Hamilton resided at Hull House for twenty-two years before moving to the East Coast, and she returned for several months each year as long as Jane Addams was alive...