Jane Addams DNA

I spent a good deal of time this winter knitting in the round. For those who are not familiar, rather than knitting with two separate needles, knitting in the round uses circular needles, two needles attached with a flexible cord or cable. The process of knitting in the round involves joining the cast-on stitches to create a circle and knitting in a spiral to form seamless tubes. I knitted two hats, one that was too big and another that was just right. The hat that fits uses soft wool. This wool features shades of different pastels, with lilac being the most prevalent. The lilac complements my coat and the lavender triangle scarf I also crafted.

I spent a good deal of time this winter doing what I now call, “reflecting in the round”. By this, I mean I circled backward, revisiting smaller circles or moments in my life. From this perch of older age and experience, these moments enlarged with new understandings that I could not fully apprehend or appreciate as I was living them. I can remember those moments now, though in the past I tried to forget them, or even worse, split them off as shards that stabbed me from time to time. When re-visited these memories are available to be woven back into my life as different colored strands, much like those that appear in the vibrantly colored cowl I also knitted with my circular needles.

I am learning about weaving in my class that meets one Saturday a month. In my class, which meets once a month on Saturdays, I am learning about weaving. I learned how others spin something from a seed, an animal’s fur, or a silkworm cocoon into a thread, and then weave that thread into linen, cotton, wool, and silk. I turn these woven things into garments that I will wear into this next season of life. Knitted edges trim my wool coat. I come across a museum catalog from an 2025 exhibit at Hull House Museum in Chicago, titled Radical Craft. As part of the exhibit a young woman weaver works on an unfinished tapestry found in the remains of the original Hull House after the rest of it was bulldozed inn 1963 to make way for the expansion of the University of Chicago.

My granddaughter, who has been observing the knitting with interest, shares that she wants to learn to crochet. More weaving strands together. A hazy memory comes to me. I am sitting in the living room of the group residence for adolescent girls I was once the director of, and some members of the staff and some girls were teaching me how to crochet. I was working there when my daughter was born. From the staff and girls, she and I were gifted two beautifully crocheted sets of a coat, hat, and matching booties, thin satin ribbons woven through the lace-like wool and tied in bows. One set was white, the other a bright pink. In this moment of women and girls weaving strands of wool in and out, the sun is shining through the gritty city windows that, no matter how often washed, never seem to get clean. At night there will be nightmares and screams. I’ve kept the secrets they told me in the dark; I’ve kept mine. I’ve kept my mother’s.

I vaguely remember taking up the crochet hook, but with not enough proficiency to teach my granddaughter now. But we are girls of our time and armed with hooks and two balls of wool we pull up YouTube and soon we are both making long chains. We practiced this one stitch for a week before moving on to the next stitch goal, in the hope of eventually making granny squares. We’ll decide what to do with them when we get there. I’ll decide what to tell her about my life and when. Maybe I’ll write it all down.

Increasingly, this “reflecting in the round”, this weaving together of memory and experiences is triggered not only in these domestic moments but also by what is happening in the world outside. The public depression place. A world filled daily with violence, misogyny, institutional failure, killing and sexual abuse of children, the ever-widening disparity of wealth, all things I am quite familiar with from my past life as a social worker and from some experiences I have had as a girl and as a woman. These parts of me, fractured and (dis) membered from the narrative about me that most of you came to know me as, are being (re) membered. These are stitches that have been dropped. And if you want to be your full and true self on the day you die, as I do, going back, picking up those stitches and returning the stitch to the needle allows you to keep going on, to polish and make smooth the sharp edges of broken pieces, to create something beautiful from these memories, a life. A story.

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I recently attended a three-day writing workshop at a retreat center right on the river and close to my home. The topic was writing a hybrid memoir. A hybrid memoir blends personal narrative with other elements like research, history, and engagement with a well-known figure to explore a subject in a deeper way while sharing aspects of one’s own life story. Some stellar examples are, The Lonely City, Olivia Liang, The Yellow House, Sarah Broom, My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead, H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald and Heartland by Sarah Smarsh. These books deal with topics that resonate with others well beyond the personal experience of the author: loneliness, grief, racism, class.

I have wanted to write about my life as a social worker, a life that has always been yoked to my personal one, our lives lived together as women and girls, those I mostly worked with. I’ve found it hard to share these things because I am, surprisingly for someone who was once a social media darling and has published a memoir, very private and, in social situations, shy. I also feel a need to move beyond simply identifying and sharing trauma narratives to thinking, feeling, and writing about what we can make from them. I imagine this is how you approach things when you are old.

The first thing you might be told about me by any of my social work colleagues is that since my student days in a Ph.D. program I have been obsessed with Jane Addams. While I was familiar with her work founding Hull House in Chicago in the late 1800s as it appeared in social policy texts that relayed the history of social work (she is sometimes called the “mother of social work”), it wasn’t until I discovered during my forays into other disciplines while in my program, a much richer and more complex description of her and her work written by those from other disciplines: philosophy, performance studies, theater, systemic design, architecture, art history, sociology, criminal justice, public health, literature and rhetoric studies, peace scholarship. women and gender studies and more. There was something about her constant evolution as a person I discovered in these alternative views of her that deeply engaged me. I found inspiring her experimental approach to her work, her engagement with other intellectuals and creative disciplines. Her absolute insistence that she was being influenced by those she worked with as much, if not more, than she influenced them. One of the titles of several discarded dissertation proposals I recently found on an old memory stick was, Jane Addams DNA: The “Objective Value” and “Subjective Necessity” Of A Gender Perspective on the Work and Lives of Women Social Workers Working in Child Welfare. The word “subjective” was a bit of a sticking point with the powers that be.

Most especially I wanted to emulate her process, the way she acknowledged her mistakes (like her flirtation with eugenics and her misunderstanding of the ways racism is expressed). As I read her life over time from the perspective of multiple disciplines, I found evidence of her beliefs and opinions changing as she learned, collaborated, and grew from entering the lives of those who differed from her, much as mine have. One must read her body of work over a lifetime to see this process, not just focus on a moment in time where she was not fully formed and still becoming.

Although she began her work in 1860, there are echoes of similar social conditions today: disparity, migration, the power of the capitalist marketplace, strains of nationalism on world peace. While today there is Bezos, Musk, Thiel and Zuckerberg, back then there were “captains of industry”, Pullman, Carnegie, Gould, Vanderbilt, their message the same as today, the accumulation of wealth by a “few, exceptional men” was the foundation of a “gospel of wealth”. Similar challenges exist today: growing numbers of working poor and unemployed, the exploitation of workers, women and children, inadequate housing, unhealthy environments because of mass industrialization, fears of immigrants and “others”, social disorganization, crime and little or no support for working families. Women at the time had few rights, and Addams was one of the first to demand that a white, middle-class woman could have a profession outside of her home. Something the Heritage Foundation believes should be taken away from us white women and already has been taken this last year from thousands of black women due to federal job cuts and slashed DEI initiatives as well as private sector losses too.

Here I am going on and on about Jane, as my colleagues became rather used to. What I mean to say is that in the study, research, and writing of her life, perhaps I can write about mine as a social worker and a woman too. Where I made mistakes and where I grew from them. Perhaps there is wisdom to be found in revisiting Jane Addams’ story that may help me respond to where I find myself in this untethered world today and support the picking up of dropped stitches and the healing of sharp stabs as I head into this next time of life.

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