Jane Addams
Jane Addams and the Importance of Fiber Arts
Cedarville, a picturesque little village in northwest Illinois, was the birthplace of Jane Addams (1860-1935), the social worker and humanitarian who founded Hull-House in Chicago and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Much of her time was spent improving the lives of Chicago's immigrant population, and she also advocated world peace and stood up for the rights of women, children and workers. Our event space, the Jane Addams Community Center, is named in her honor.
Like most Victorian women, Jane Addams was a knitter. Many of her hand-knit items were given away to friends, and some of her knitted work is on display at the Cedarville Area Historical Society Museum.
Miss Addams also saw the value in the lost arts of spinning and weaving, and invited spinners and weavers to demonstrate their "old world skills" at the labor museum in Hull-House. In her work Newer Ideal of Peace (1907), Miss Addams notes the companionship that is created between spinners, even from vastly different backgrounds. Over one hundred years later, modern spinners will recognize that the same spirit still holds true today:
We have made an effort at Hull-House to recover something of the early industries from an immigrant neighborhood, and in a little exhibit called a labor museum, we have placed in historic sequence and order methods of spinning and weaving from a dozen nationalities in Asia Minor and Europe. The result has been a striking exhibition of the unity and similarity of the earlier industrial processes. Within the narrow confines of one room, the Syrian, the Greek, the Italian, the Russian, the Norwegian, the Dutch, and the Irish find that the differences in their spinning have been merely putting the distaff upon a frame or placing the old handspindle in a horizontal position. A group of women representing vast differences in religion, in language, in tradition, and in nationality, exhibit practically no difference in the daily arts by which, for a thousand generations, they have clothed their families. When American women come to visit them, the quickest method, in fact almost the only one, of establishing a genuine companionship with them, is through this same industry.
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Like most Victorian women, Jane Addams was a knitter. Many of her hand-knit items were given away to friends, and some of her knitted work is on display at the Cedarville Area Historical Society Museum.
Miss Addams also saw the value in the lost arts of spinning and weaving, and invited spinners and weavers to demonstrate their "old world skills" at the labor museum in Hull-House. In her work Newer Ideal of Peace (1907), Miss Addams notes the companionship that is created between spinners, even from vastly different backgrounds. Over one hundred years later, modern spinners will recognize that the same spirit still holds true today:
We have made an effort at Hull-House to recover something of the early industries from an immigrant neighborhood, and in a little exhibit called a labor museum, we have placed in historic sequence and order methods of spinning and weaving from a dozen nationalities in Asia Minor and Europe. The result has been a striking exhibition of the unity and similarity of the earlier industrial processes. Within the narrow confines of one room, the Syrian, the Greek, the Italian, the Russian, the Norwegian, the Dutch, and the Irish find that the differences in their spinning have been merely putting the distaff upon a frame or placing the old handspindle in a horizontal position. A group of women representing vast differences in religion, in language, in tradition, and in nationality, exhibit practically no difference in the daily arts by which, for a thousand generations, they have clothed their families. When American women come to visit them, the quickest method, in fact almost the only one, of establishing a genuine companionship with them, is through this same industry.
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