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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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older than I was, because I was quite young at the time - in my early twenties. She must have been thirty-five years old. She was a mature, from my point of view, grown-up person at the height of her power. She was also a woman, I learned from other people at Hull House, who had a great deal of money. She was plenty rich and therefore fearless. She was contributing her services to this trade union, helping Mr. Abe Somebody-or-other to organize.

There were a great many people around Hull House, either in the staff or among the residents, who thought that trade union organization was the answer to most of the problems of property. I remember young Graham Taylor, whose father was the head of Chicago Commons. He was a young man about my own age, or a little older perhaps. This was just a dawning on me - as I heard Gertrude Sarnum, saw these women carrying their bundles home, saw how they gave out free milk to people with children in the family, and so on. I was saying, “Why, why are people so poor that their babies die for lack of food?” I also was accompanying, at somebody's suggestion, the district nurse that worked out from Hull House. I was accompanying her on her rounds as a helper on her cases. We went into some pretty terrible and difficult situations where the mother was sick, the father was drunk, the children were crying, the dishes were





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