I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (Women in American History)

Hilda Satt Polacheck's family emigrated from Poland to Chicago in 1892, bringing their old-world Jewish traditions with them into the Industrial Age. Throughout her career as a writer and activist, Polacheck (1882-1967) never forgot the immigrant neighborhoods, the markets, and the scents and sounds of Chicago's West Side. Here, in charming and colorful prose, she recounts her introduction to American life and the Hull-House community, her friendship with Jane Addams, her marriage, her support of civil rights, woman suffrage, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and her experiences as a writer for the WPA. "Scholars will find much to mine from Polacheck's vivid descriptions of urban life and socialist politics at a time of vast change. . . . General readers will be entranced by this sometimes dramatic, frequently funny, always engrossing autobiography."--Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times "From the little details of immigrant life to the broad sweep of progressive politics, Hilda Satt Polacheck has given us an enormously valuable historical document. I Came a Stranger is the story of one of the 'obscure women' of history as she really was, an acute observer and an energetic actor in the public life of her time."--Ellen Carol DuBois, co-author of Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe Dena J. Polacheck Epstein is the author of Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Lynn Y. Weiner is the author of From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980.