1918: His Family

 

1918 

His Family,

by Ernest Poole

320 pages

Book Summary:

This book is interesting for a few reasons. First, it deals with women’s issues and their growing independence on the cusp of the Roaring '20s. Second, the main character’s business is a glimpse into the world before computers: Roger Gale, a widower with three daughters, runs a successful business clipping newspaper articles and society page references on behalf of wealthy clients wishing to manage their reputations. Third, the Settlement House movement is a large part of the book, which is an unusual choice. Roger promised his wife, who passed away, to always watch over their three girls. One daughter, a party girl, lives a self-indulgent life, like the 1920s flappers to come. Another daughter moves out of the established city neighborhood to raise her children in that wholesome new invention, the suburbs. The third daughter--Deborah--lives at home. She works as a school principal in a settlement house school. Between keeping her father company and her demanding work (as well as other plot complications), her father Roger worries that Deborah will never marry. An underlying theme is how a woman should best use her energies: is it moral to work for the betterment of strangers’ families, or are women obligated to pour all their energies only into supporting their own homes? 

Adaptations:

I found no film adaptations, but for discussing the role of reformers, you cannot find a better film than Major Barbara, a 1941 British film starring the brilliant Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. The film adapts the Bernard Shaw play in which the daughter of a wealthy munitions manufacturer flees her family to find meaningful work as a Salvation Army worker.

Related Activity:

Poole was born in Chicago and established himself as a reforming journalist in New York. He helped Upton Sinclair research The Jungle. Poole wrote other books focused more purely on reforming ideals, such as The Harbor (1915), about immigrant lives, and Nurses on Horseback (1932), about itinerant nurses in Kentucky.

To find more information about the women who found fulfilling work in settlement house work, visit the Jane Adams--Hull House Museum, 800 S Halsted St., Chicago (https://www.hullhousemuseum.org/). The museum portrays settlement work as symbiotic relationship between the immigrant poor who needed services, and the upper class women who needed a way to justify working outside their families’ homes and social circles. Hull House reforms were impressive: Jane Adams managed to establish many basic public services (like public garbage collection) as the norm for poor and wealthy alike. At the same time, Settlement Houses had a great impact on community arts, by providing theater clubs and music lessons to children and adults. (Benny Goodman had his first clarinet lessons at the Hull House.)