Lillian Wald: A Biography

Lillian Wald

Lillian Wald

A Biography

Marjorie N. Feld

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2008 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feld, Marjorie N.

Lillian Wald : a biography / Marjorie N. Feld.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3236-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Wald, Lillian D., 1867–1940. 2. Feminists—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 3. Social reformers— New York (State)—New York—Biography. I. Title.

HQ 1413.W 34F 45 2008

361.3092—dc22 2008019176

12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Claiming Lillian Wald

CHAPTER 1 Wald’s Hometown Lessons: From Rochester to Manhattan

CHAPTER 2 The Woman at the Head of the Table: Negotiating Universalism and Difference at Henry Street

CHAPTER 3 Universal Peace and Brotherhood: Wald’s Internationalist Vision

CHAPTER 4 The Society We Might Be Living In: Modern Challenges to an Ethnic Progressive Vision

CHAPTER 5 Windows Opened Upon a Moving World: New Deals and Old Faiths

Conclusion: She Is All Religions: Wald’s Enduring Legacies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Lillian Wald’s 1891 yearbook photograph from the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses 34

Jacob H. Schiff and his wife, Therese Loeb Schiff 39

1908 planning meeting for the National Federation of Settlements 56

Henry Street visiting nurses leaving an old settlement building early in the twentieth century 60

Calligraphy design of the Chinese character Bao (brotherhood) 99

Wald at the height of her career, ca. 1915 100

House on the Pond 165

Photo pasted into a booklet given to Wald on her birthday in March 1933 179

Wald’s gravestone at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York 184

Acknowledgments

I have traveled with Lillian Wald for a long, long time and have been lucky to have had the assistance of many helpful people along the way. Kathryn Kish Sklar first introduced me to Wald when I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She and Allan Arkush guided me through a senior honors thesis on Wald there. At Brandeis University, I had the sound advising of Joyce Antler and Morton Keller.

The summer before I began my graduate work, I secured a job at Henry Street Settlement, which Wald founded in 1893. I headed the Greening Challenge, a summer recycling program. My students that summer taught me about urban life, and I am grateful to them; my boss, Christine Koenig, taught me about politics, reform, and professionalism. She and Catherine Cullen, both open about their admiration of Wald, gave this project momentum by alerting me to the role settlements can still play in urban transformation.

Every historian is indebted to talented librarians, archivists, and administrators. Jim Baillie at Brandeis and Barbara Kendrick, Kate Buckley, and Hope Tillman at Babson found me the sources I needed on so many occasions. Sari Weintraub at Henry Street, Michael Delaney and John Belleci at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, and Laurie Deredita at Connecticut College, along with Mary Driscoll, Pat MacAlpine, and Sheila Dinsmoor at Babson, offered crucial assistance to me at various stages of this manuscript’s preparation.

I am truly grateful to colleagues who took time to share their thoughts and suggestions with me over the years: Jonathan Sarna, Riv-Ellen Prell, Jane Kamensky, Kandice Hauf, Daniel Soyer, Louis Kampf, Saul Slapikoff, Tom Dublin, Kathryn Kish Sklar, David Engerman, Michael Staub, Rachel Rubin, and Erica Rand. For allowing me forums for my work, I thank Debbi Simonton at the Women’s History Magazine and Maureen Flanagan at the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Conversations with Leo Nevas helped me map out the landscape of Westport, Connecticut. Annie Polland and Miriam Leberstein combed the Yiddish archives for Wald and Henry Street and then helped me theorize why she simply wasn’t there.

This work benefited immeasurably from a semester spent writing and researching, afforded by a grant from the Babson Faculty Research Fund. A Koret Foundation Jewish Studies Grant helped make the illustrations possible and assisted in this book’s publication. I also thank Chuck Grench at the University of North Carolina Press for shepherding this manuscript through to its completion.

Friendships have helped to make these years enjoyable. For their friendship, I thank Tobin Belzer, Ellen Tanowitz, Ann Trinh, Jenna Tranh, Missi Diamond, Meenakshi Khanna, Michelle Cheeseman, Julia Resnitsky, Ankit Jain, and the board of Radical Teacher. At Babson, Jeff Melnick has been a great friend and mentor and a reminder that juggling parenting, politics, teaching, and research is possible. I’m also grateful to Kevin Bruyneel for his warm friendship and calm advice.

I thank my family for their support and encouragement: Arthur and Eena Feld; Debra, Greg, and Rubin Harris; Marvin and Soni Feld; Sunny and Maier Fein; Matt, Lisa, and Corey Fein; and Joseph and Sylvia Fein. The memory of my mother, Rosalind Sperling Feld, never fails to inform all that I do.

My husband, Michael Fein, brings light to every one of my days. Our sons, Izzy and Nathan, know little of Wald, but their beauty, sweetness, and grudging acceptance of Mommy’s work bring me great happiness. I have traveled far from my own hometown, and they have shown me just how joyful life can be.

Lillian Wald

Introduction

Claiming Lillian Wald

In 1965, in the middle of a decade of liberation movements that challenged and reinvigorated American democracy, the Committee for the Election of Lillian Wald to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans compiled a list of the many reasons she deserved to enter this pantheon. Wald’s advocates praised her work in arousing public opinion and legislative power to pass laws to assure pure milk, protection for immigrants, better housing, minimum wages, better sanitation and fire protection. They trumpeted her work in public health, her campaigns for world peace, and her leadership in the settlement house movement. But Adolf A. Berle, a member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet and chair of Wald’s committee, went further. He lamented that most knew her only as a pioneer social worker, a great nurse, or as someone who spearheaded social reforms. It is time, he proclaimed, for all to see her as a great American.¹

This compilation of Wald’s accomplishments appeared in a biographical pamphlet that spanned Wald’s lifetime, from 1867 to 1940, beginning with her Jewish background and her nurse’s training. A section entitled Lillian Wald’s Genius followed, in which committee members enumerated the achievements that had earned her a place among the Hall of Fame’s great American patriots: in 1893, she founded a nursing-center-turned-settlement house—Henry Street Settlement—to serve the immigrant poor on New York’s Lower East Side; she had moved from nursing and social work to advocating for the rights of women, workers, immigrants, and African Americans, for antimilitarism and global public health. Like Wald’s two books, The House on Henry Street (1915) and Windows on Henry Street (1934), nearly every page of the pamphlet for her candidacy contained anecdotes, these authored by colleagues, politicians, and other public figures. The composition of the committee reflected Wald’s long-standing ties to various communities in New York and around the nation: it included Robert F. Wagner, mayor of New York City; Frances Perkins of Cornell University, the first woman cabinet member as secretary of labor under President Franklin Roosevelt; descendants of the Warburg, Schiff, and Sulzberger clans, some of the most powerful Jewish families of New York, who had befriended Wald on the common ground of culture and class; and officials from medical and social work schools, law firms, and government agencies who had been Wald’s professional colleagues and allies.² Neighbors from Wald’s retirement town of Westport, Connecticut, also signed on to earn her the honor of election to the Hall of Fame.

All contributors to the pamphlet sang her praises using patriotic flourishes. All testified to her work toward universalism, her success in bridging the divides of class, ethnicity, race, and religion among people worldwide. The final tribute to Wald was reserved for American critic and author Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks called Wald the fulfillment of the American promise, her house on Henry Street the interpreter’s house where Americans, new and old alike, learned the meaning of their country. Wald was a glowing presence who vindicated America as the Land of Promise.³

Administrators of New York University founded the Hall of Fame, located on their campus (now Bronx Community College), in 1900, just as Wald rose to public visibility, in order to honor prominent Americans who have had a significant impact on this nation’s history. Designed by the celebrated American architect Stanford White, the hall is, according to its Web site, a unique and patriotic reminder that this country’s phenomenal growth has been due to the vitality, ingenuity, and intellect of its honorees.⁴ Those first inducted included George Washington, Daniel Webster, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, with new inductees elected every five years. Berle echoed the sentiments of Brooks and others when he wrote that Wald deserved the honor because her achievements in rich abundance form an everlasting heritage to this nation, and her friends feel that her fame and memory should now be forever enshrined.⁵

Over the years, electors of the hall—college presidents and academics, noted public officials, activists and intellectuals—had inducted only a few women, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan B. Anthony (whose grave lies not far from Wald’s in Wald’s hometown of Rochester, New York). In 1965, though Wald was on the ballot, she lost out to her good friend Jane Addams, a Chicago social worker, settlement house founder, and Nobel Prize winner. Real estate mogul Aaron Rabinowitz, who spearheaded the campaign for Wald’s election, believed that this was because most of the electors [were] from the west . . . and thus knew Miss Addams’s work better than Miss Wald’s.⁶

Rabinowitz continued his campaign with renewed energy during the late 1960s. He had emigrated from Russia in 1884 and was a young client of Wald’s Henry Street Settlement before he became the first commissioner of the state board of housing, a wealthy real estate developer, owner of Tudor City, and a pioneer in public housing, a cause close to Wald’s heart. He had moved to Westport, Connecticut, near Wald’s retirement home, to be close to one of his childhood heroes. To prepare for the 1970 election, Rabinowitz called again upon the members of the Committee for the Election of Lillian Wald. Together, under Rabinowitz’s direction, they bombarded the electors with special pamphlets and letters of recommendation. Rabinowitz would say only that the cost was considerable. At age eighty-seven, he clearly felt strongly about honoring the woman who had done so much to help him achieve success.⁷

Wald was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1970. One of the first two Jews to enter the hall (alongside German-born physicist Albert Michelson), hers was the first ceremony to have a rabbi provide the invocation. Wald would no doubt have preferred a representative of the secular Ethical Culture Movement, such as her friend and settlement colleague John Lovejoy Elliott, who officiated at her private funeral. But she probably would have accepted the rabbi chosen: the senior rabbi of Congregation Emanu-El. This was the temple her benefactor and friend Jacob Schiff supported for many years. The musical selection for the event was more in keeping with Wald’s universalist sentiments: Henry Street’s community chorus sang a Hebrew melody and an African American spiritual.⁸

Wald’s election to the Hall of Fame marks a fitting starting point to a biography that charts competing claims on Wald’s work and analyzes Wald’s life alongside how individuals have remembered it. The event remains significant not least because it reinforced the claims Berle and Brooks placed on her legacy. In this memorial, they claimed her work for social justice and social welfare as the truest expression of American ideals. Despite Wald’s vast contributions, and despite her visibility in the Hall of Fame, she is today, as Berle lamented in 1965, less often positioned with other patriotic Americans than she is with more narrowly defined groups: as a footnote to other social work and settlement luminaries; as a friend of the more famous Jane Addams; or, most visibly in the last few decades, as a Jewish leader whose contributions were to Jewish America. The latter claim is made despite Wald’s lifelong rejection of Jewish claims on her work and her insistence that her work served universal, rather than particularist, ideals.

In 1970, the popular press paid little attention to Wald’s role as one of the first Jewish inductees. Indeed, the medal issued in her honor received more column space in the coin collectors’ section of the New York Times than did Wald’s election in its front news sections.⁹ Over the next generation, however, the Jewish community broadly, and the field of American Jewish women’s history in particular, began to count Wald’s achievements, with increasing regularity, as Jewish ones. Locating her in these areas, one finds Wald Jewhooed, to use a contemporary term, with startling frequency, her difference consistently accented. Borrowing the term Jewhoo from a Web site with the same name, Susan Glenn studies the history of Jewhooing, defining it as the social mechanism for both private and public naming and claiming of Jews by other Jews. Though the term Jewhooing is a modern one, the practice it describes dates to the early twentieth century, as Jews integrated into mainstream America and used the acts of claiming and naming to reinforce tribal membership through blood logic.¹⁰

The history of Jewhooing, of Jewish claiming, provides a telling and compelling portrait of American Jewish concerns across the past century. It is one of the ironies of modern Jewish history, Glenn writes, that concepts of tribalism based on blood and race have persisted not only in spite of but also because of the experience of assimilation. Motivating the many Jewish encyclopedias, who’s whos, biographical dictionaries, and other scholarly and nonscholarly works compiled since 1900 is an agenda of Jewish public relations: they serve as both a method for promoting the acceptance of Jews and an ambivalent response to the absorption of Jews into mainstream American society. They codify Jewish contributions to that mainstream and inscribe the contributors as acting solely as Jews.¹¹

The philosophy behind these works is that descent (biology, genetic background, blood) trumps consent (choice) in the matter of group belonging.¹² Examples of these claims on Wald—when she has been positioned among other Jews in biographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and databases, often with little mention of her ambivalence toward Jewish belonging—are many. She can be found in the Jewish Women’s Archive, an online database; in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia; and in multiple surveys of American Jewish women’s history.¹³ In an interesting bookend to her induction into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Wald’s most recent mention in any media was her spring 2007 induction into the Jewish-American Hall of Fame, a Jewish museum in cyberspace. The hall began honoring individuals in 1969, highlighting the Jewishness of Americans from diverse areas of American life—from Louis Brandeis to Golda Meir to Arthur Miller. When the hall announced Wald’s induction by labeling her a Jewish Florence Nightingale, it pulled her into the prioritization of descent in ways that would have greatly disappointed her.¹⁴

Indeed, these claims ill suit Wald’s legacy and are a source of great irony. Wald dedicated her life to the triumph of consent, to an ideal or vision wherein people would transcend all that divided them and bring about universal belonging. Her own description of this vision is inscribed on her statue in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans: The Social Workers of Our Time Are Dreaming a Great Dream and Seeing a Great Vision of Democracy, a Real Brotherhood Among Men. Wald self-consciously borrowed these words, and this vision, from the Protestant Social Gospel, a movement among religious leaders that addressed the social problems accompanying rapid industrialization in England and the United States.

Jewish claims on Wald rarely mention her ambivalence toward Jewish affiliation, and so the majority of these sources fail to take her on her own, more complicated, terms. Indeed, Wald saw herself as so much a part of the Social Gospel movement, and so dedicated to this ideal of brotherhood, that she specifically rejected inclusion in a collection entitled Jewish Women in America on the ground that the title suggests work done by women as Jews.¹⁵ Even when invited to a Jewish gathering as a Jewish social worker who worked among Jewish clients, Wald took great pains to present herself as a universal representative of all of the urban poor. As these invitations were frequent, so too were Wald’s insistent statements of her secularism—her lack of adherence to Jewish religious tradition, but also her solely informal connections to Jewish communal or religious organizations and institutions, her refusal to think of herself as doing Jewish work.

Moreover, Wald even maintained deep apprehensions about her own image—possibly because her dark features made her look conspicuously oriental, a fear linked with her ambivalence toward her Jewishness. Laudatory portraits of her, even in mainstream magazines, often took note of her dark complexion, such as when the New Yorker described her as the dark-eyed girl in the nurse’s uniform.¹⁶ Wald went to great lengths to ensure that her photograph was reproduced as infrequently as possible.¹⁷

Works of U.S. women’s history, like public and academic American Jewish histories, also neglect critical aspects of Wald’s life. Whereas American Jewish historians tend to rely on some essential Jewishness as the primary means of interpreting Wald’s life (ignoring her more complex ethno-religious identity), women’s historians often sidestep the issue of Wald’s ethnicity altogether. They approach her with agendas that limit their purview of her accomplishments and legacies, focusing only on isolated aspects of her life and career. First, they emphasize her education at the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses and its importance to the development of her gender consciousness and support for women’s rights issues. Though there are no extant Wald writings from her two years of clinical training, these scholars note those years’ importance as Wald’s first immersion in a women’s network.

Certainly, Wald was a firm believer in women’s biological differences. She presented herself as a maternalist figure, interested in nursing as an extension of women’s moral duty to heal, but also as a women’s profession. Importantly, though, she viewed her work for all maternalist causes—for playgrounds, milk stations, and school nurses, to cite just three early examples—as growing naturally out of her commitment to international public health, a commitment that, for Wald, emanated from her lessons in gender and ethnicity. By examining aspects of Wald’s worldview only as they line up with others’ crucial contributions to women’s political culture, and by failing to place Wald’s worldview at the center of their analysis, women’s historians have not yet presented a complete portrait of her motivations.¹⁸ They pay little heed to the way gender and ethnicity intersected in important ways during Wald’s formative years in Rochester, and they stop short of considering her subsequent exposure to, and work with, mixed-gender networks of Progressives and American Jews.

Another area where historians of women sometimes isolate issues of gender is in discussions of Wald’s sexuality. In 1979, for example, Blanche Wiesen Cook first drew attention to Wald as a lesbian based on collections of intimate letters. These letters demonstrate the acceptance of loving women’s relationships in early-twentieth-century women’s activist networks and the importance of those relationships in enabling the Progressive political work of Wald and other women.¹⁹ Claiming Wald as a lesbian sheds light on the sustaining, intimate, and very private relationships she had with other women and is part of a larger project of striving for a more complex and complete history by naming gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals from the past. It also challenges us to think about the ways in which her assumed heterosexuality (and assumed sexual passivity) underscored her self-presentation as a maternalist figure, the mother of Henry Street.²⁰

Focusing on women’s issues—maternalism, nursing, sexuality—highlights many of the important components of Wald’s life. Isolating women’s issues, however, also reveals the danger of seeing those components as far too self-contained. Thus, though women’s history scholars raise important points about Wald that draw us closer to a fuller understanding of her biography, they too have distorted her life history by dismissing certain aspects of her life and legacy. While American Jewish community members and scholars misread Wald’s Jewishness, women’s historians ignore her Jewishness in focusing exclusively on issues of gender, sexuality, and power. The story of Wald’s election to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans alerts us to the importance of making sense of Lillian Wald on her own terms, and in the broadest context. Should her fame draw only from her achievements in and around New York? Her membership in a Progressive women’s community? Her connection to Jane Addams? Should she be known as a Jewish Jane Addams or Florence Nightingale, or a protofeminist? This study takes the widest possible view in analyzing the moments in Wald’s career, and the moments since her death, when Wald has been seen through those lenses. Precisely because she long faced (and continues to face) these competing claims, I describe Wald in these pages as an ethnic Progressive. Though Wald herself may have bristled at the label, it alerts modern readers to the important ways in which Wald’s ethnic background and the women’s political culture she joined combined to shape her identity.

This study analyzes the tensions Wald encountered in her approach to ethnocultural and gender difference in her public career, as the landscape of modern identity politics was just emerging. Placing Wald at the center of historical analysis, it focuses on the history of Jewish claims on Wald as they intersect with her life and legacy, and on the history of social reform strategies grounded in gender difference. Beginning in Wald’s hometown of Rochester, tracing the complicated ways she connected to American Jewry, this study ends with an analysis of why Wald is now most often found in books with titles such as Rebels and Reformers: Biographies of Four Jewish Americans (1976), Daughters of the Covenant: Portraits of Six Jewish Women (1983), Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2002), and In the Promised Land: Lives of Jewish Americans (2005).²¹ What emerges from this twenty-first-century study is a portrait of Wald at a fascinating crossroads, standing at the intersection of two historical conversations: one within American Jewish history, the other within American gender history.

Scholars see the Progressive Era as a defining historical moment, a time of tremendous experimentation with governmental power, social relationships, and economic arrangements. Wald’s committed involvement in these areas of experimentation unquestionably qualifies her as a Progressive. She thought of herself as belonging to a global community of those working toward progress in public health, diplomacy, and peace. I label Wald an ethnic Progressive because she had to navigate claims of ethnic belonging in ways that other Progressives did not.

As chapter 1 makes clear, Wald’s Progressivism was tied to the strivings of her family’s immigrant beginnings. Though her later fellowship among women reformers and other Progressives, along with uptown Jewish patrons and friends, profoundly affected her worldview, Wald’s lifelong approach to reform began with the universalism that was the zeitgeist of Rochester’s nineteenth-century German Jewish community. That community’s insistence on a future of universal belonging was a means for its members to make room for themselves in mainstream America on the terms set by mainstream America. They embraced the idea that Jewish difference could be undone to meet with acceptance, and that gender difference could be reinforced to match the perceived needs of the capitalist marketplace. This chapter begins with Wald’s family history in Rochester and argues that Wald began her public career very comfortable with these ideas. Ethnic universalism and gender difference continued to be key components of her approach to reform, as the emphasis on collective acceptance prepared her for the Social Gospel’s vision of a brotherhood of man. Wald gave voice to these ideas in frequent references to her philosophy of mutuality, her notion of universal human interdependence.

Perceptions of Wald within her multiple communities reveal the ethnic aspect of her Progressivism, a topic introduced in chapter 2 and examined throughout the text. She had multiple audiences, portraying herself differently to—and being perceived differently by—American Jews within the organized American Jewish community, American Jews outside of the organized Jewish community, and non-Jews. With a focus on these audiences and on the tensions she encountered in her approaches to gender and cultural difference, chapter 2 moves from her Rochester beginnings to her first immersion in mixed-gender Jewish and non-Jewish networks in New York in 1891, as she founded what was first known as the Nurses’ Settlement. This chapter locates Wald’s approach to gender difference within her nursing and Progressive communities. It examines her stunning achievements in coalition building for maternalist causes and her rich exchanges over women’s responsibilities and Jewish communal boundaries. As her institution grew to be Henry Street Settlement, Wald faced questions about what role religion—and the Jewish community—would play in her work.

To American Jews who, unlike Wald, claimed membership among the organized Jewish community in social, religious, political, or professional organizations, Wald was a maternal Jewish figure, a mediator between rich and poor Jews, one of their own. The Jewhooing, or Jewish claiming, of Wald by this community began formally in 1905, when she was first quietly mentioned in the American Jewish Yearbook. She relied on her belonging to Jewish networks in order to raise funds for—and awareness of—her work for immigrants (many of them Jewish) on the Lower East Side. Periodically, as this study shows, some American Jews demonstrated their investment in her settlement work by criticizing it as not Jewish enough.

Members of the Jewish community watched as Wald integrated herself completely into Social Gospel and Progressive reform networks—so completely that she joined international campaigns and associations without a mention of her Jewishness. The positive reception of Wald’s universalist work afforded her access to these transatlantic communities. Chapter 3 charts the application of Wald’s vision of a brotherhood of man to international reform efforts before World War I. The chapter ends in 1920, with Wald’s personal conflict over how to memorialize one of the most prominent American Jews of that era, her close friend Jacob Schiff. Should his legacy be recorded as a specifically Jewish legacy? This conflict foreshadowed the many claims that individuals would make on Wald’s own achievements, often remembered more as Jewish work than in the way she would have preferred: as internationalist work toward a universal vision. During the conservative years following World War I, Wald found herself in the center of anguishing debates over issues of special import to Jews and non-Jews alike as a result of these claims.

Wald’s approaches to ethnocultural and gender difference led to her most difficult challenges: confrontations over the Equal Rights Amendment, Russian revolutionary politics, and Zionism, the subjects of chapter 4. Her time-tested methods and strategies proved less and less successful in the modern era, as her ideal vision of modernity did not come to pass. Instead of a continued reliance on gender difference, a new generation of feminists agitated for gender equality by emphasizing the sameness between the sexes; instead of cultural differences becoming obsolete, as she had hoped, they became more pronounced through cultural movements, identity politics, and ardent nationalism.

Nineteenth-century German Jewish communities like that of Wald’s early years established the paradigm for American Jewish identity. It encompassed the soft permissive Judaism associated with the Reform movement, its federated organizational structure, its energetic commercial activity and rapid professionalization, [and] its liberal political culture. The eastern European Jewish immigrants with whom Wald worked in the 1900s and 1910s adopted the terms of that transaction, giving it their own far more secular twist. (Reform Judaism played the important role for German Jews in the nineteenth century, for example, that Zionism would play for Jews from eastern Europe in the twentieth.)²² Many members of the American Jewish community in the early twentieth century maintained optimism that full acceptance in America was possible, even inevitable.

In the 1930s, however, the global rise of anti-Semitism made many American Jews skeptical that this more secular formula could ensure the survival of Judaism. The Nazi Holocaust in Europe made survival itself a top priority, and American Jews subsequently began to change the terms of mainstream Jewish identity. As the brutalities of the twentieth century slowly eclipsed Wald’s universalist approach, so too were Jewish identities like hers—those based on secularism, informal belonging, and a commitment to universalism—gradually marginalized. For many American Jews, Jewish belonging grew to be synonymous with formal affiliation and, in time, an embrace of Zionism.

The final chapter of Wald’s life, after her retirement in 1933, offered her a chance to reflect on her life and legacy in the new era. Though she never fully recovered from an operation in 1932, Wald was exhilarated by the possibilities for state social welfare put forward by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chapter 5 examines Wald’s thoughts on the New Deal, along with her recollections of her neighborhood and international reform work. In words and symbols, she carefully laid out her own hopes for her legacy. This chapter measures her hopes up against the commemorations that began after her retirement and then followed her death and public memorial service in 1940.

Studying Wald’s place within the ethnic landscape of the early twentieth century offers us a fascinating perspective on that era, and studying her place in the modern ethnic landscape offers us a valuable perspective on our own. The conclusion surveys scholarly and popular debates that have invoked and analyzed Wald’s life in the last seventy years. It follows the rhythm of interest in Wald, asking why she’s more often studied in some eras than others, and from some vantage points and not others. Wald was not defined solely by her gender or her Jewishness, and yet nearly every past study privileges one at the expense of the other. This biography corrects the imbalance by examining how she contended with both in compelling ways throughout her lifetime.

This work is, ultimately, a biography of Lillian D. Wald that traces her public life while measuring how her accomplishments have been remembered. Two biographies precede this one. Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader was written by Wald’s close friend and neighbor in Westport, journalist Robert L. Duffus, in 1938. Based on interviews with Wald, along with ample research, Duffus offers a wealth of information in his hagiography, but it is not an analytic study. In Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald, Doris Groshen Daniels carefully examines the life of Wald through the lens of feminism, documenting Wald’s contributions to the advancement of gender equality. Both of these texts dismiss Wald’s Jewishness as unimportant to her worldview and her life work; indeed, neither analyzes Wald’s place on the ethnic landscape, save to place her among those with more gentle approaches to bringing about the assimilation of the immigrants who entered her Henry Street Settlement.²³

This biography traverses new territory in its examination of Wald. Its chapters document Wald’s public life and legacy to analyze the fluid and contested nature of the ethnic order, from her time to our own. They capture as well the changing views of women’s difference that marked crucial shifts in strategies for attaining gender equality. I analyze, for the first time, how Wald’s approach to woman’s distinct nature and her personal experience with assimilationist strivings proved essential ingredients to her universalist worldview.

This study also makes clear the profound impact of Wald’s lifelong struggles with particularist communities, specifically her struggles with members of the Jewish community who claimed her with little regard to her own sense of Jewishness. Their claims were in some ways reinforced by her maternalist presentation, in other ways buffered by them: as a Jewish woman, modern arrangements made her responsible for the Jewishness of her house, but she also accented her maternalism to deflect criticisms of her as not being Jewish enough. These crucial negotiations made her universalist work, her multiple allegiances and wide access to diverse networks, possible. Indeed, these negotiations were the foundation to her work as an interpreter among diverse groups.

Just as many American Jews made unfounded assumptions about Wald’s Jewish identity, so too did secular Jews and non-Jews fail