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Students of the life of Lillian
D. Wald (1867-1940) know her best as a Progressive activist. A
trained nurse and advocate for East European Jewish immigrants
on New York's Lower East Side, she founded Henry Street Settlement
House there in 1893 and worked for state intervention in public
health issues concerning women and children. Though she lived
until 1940, historians have focused almost exclusively on her
achievements before 1920: her founding of Henry Street, her key
role in the formation of the Children's Bureau, her anti- militarism
during World War I. This is not surprising, given that Wald's
rhetoric is that of a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive.2 She consistently cited
her actions as in line with her universalist philosophy of human
interdependence, which she referred to as "mutuality" and defined
as a vision in which "no one class of people can be independent
of the other."3
Wald's mutuality echoes the Protestant social gospel movement's
call for a "brotherhood of man" which inspired so many—including
so many middle-class women—to work for various currents of
Progressive reform.4
Predictably, scholars have consistently located Wald within this
"women's political culture," the network that comprised a "female
dominion."5
Wald's most recent biographer, Doris Groshen Daniels, explores
how feminism influenced and was influenced by Wald's life. Her
concluding chapter asks "What Happened to the Feminist Movement
after 1920?" and charts the eclipse of Wald's values with the
arrival of the "New Woman" in that decade.6
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By considering Wald's activism solely
within these categories, these works oversimplify her ethno-religious
heritage and ignore what her life's work reveals about the complex
ethnic foundation of Progressivism. Wald's philosophy of mutuality—which
she applied first to the needs of immigrants at Henry Street—rested
above all on her own family's experience as Jewish immigrants
from Germany and Poland in the 1840s. Her approach to the experiences
of turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigrants was informed by a
crucial precedent: her family's successful embrace of an Americanism
that allowed for their integration into the elite networks of
Rochester, New York, after they settled there during Wald's childhood.
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