by Susan Butler
Lucy Challiss passed through Boston one Saturday that June. Lucy lunched with a friend and shopped; she was readying herself for the European cruise she was about to take. She had no idea that Amelia and Amy were in Boston. So deep had the Earharts sunk, they had lost touch even with their dearest relatives; as far as the Challisses were concerned, they might just as well have dropped off the edge of the earth.
That month Amelia began working at Bournewood Hospital as a nurse-companion, signing on to work until October 1.
Bournewood, a private hospital for the treatment of mental diseases, located on an estate in Brookline, had been founded in 1884 by Dr. Henry R. Stedman, one of the first doctors to devote himself to the new discipline of psychiatry. It was a gracious place, run on the theory that its wealthy patients would get well faster if they were in a homelike setting and were cared for by “companion nurses,” accomplished and well educated, who would form close personal bonds with their charges. “Personal attention and influence suitably directed is the sine qua non” was the operating philosophy.
It was an odd choice of occupation for Amelia, considering that she had left her medical studies because the idea of ministering to hypochondriacs, of prescribing “sugar pellets to a patient with an imaginary illness,” had “floored” her. But working at Bournewood gave her another perspective: It made her more tolerant. “I did not see then that there was just as much of a problem in curing the somewhat mentally ill as those physically so—even though the methods used might differ.” But if it was educational for Amelia, she was much too ambitious for it to be satisfying. Companion nurses were not doctors; they could not control methods of treatment or prescribe medication. Nor was there any chance of advancement, any chance to grow, for to become a psychiatrist meant not just getting a degree in medicine but undergoing psychiatric training—eight long expensive years. For an impecunious woman of twenty-nine, the gulf was unbridgeable.
However attractive the job had first sounded, the reality was that most of the work was menial and much of it distasteful. She lasted only several months before deciding to leave. “Work too confining and pay small,” she would later write, but it was the former reason that was of primary importance; her salary was seventy dollars a month—her next job would pay less. She carefully let none of the impatience she felt over her limited role show, and as a result the hospital was sorry to lose her. “She leaves to increase her salary,” wrote Dr. Torney, who ran Bournewood. It was the end of summer.
There was in Boston a unique, thriving vocational guidance and referral center staffed exclusively by women called the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU). The first such center for women in the nation, it had been founded by an Englishwoman, Harriet Clisby, “to increase fellowship among women and to promote the best practical methods for securing their educational, industrial and social advancement.” It did everything from providing free legal advice to poor workers, to calling attention to the rights of women and children, to running a school of housekeeping, to opening a school for salesmanship for women to train them “to be as competent in purchasing accounting and general salesmanship” as men. Just a few years before, it had set as a condition for the Massachusetts Legal Aid Society to take over the work of its Protective Committee the stipulation that they hire a female lawyer. To Amelia, still gamely pasting clips about female doers in her scrapbook, the way the WEIU had forced the Massachusetts Legal Aid Society to hire a female lawyer would have been a riveting achievement.
There are turning points in people’s lives, sometimes little noticed at the time, sometimes never noticed; but going to the WEIU was Amelia’s turning point. Through the WEIU, her teaching ability, her intelligence, and her desire to be of service all came together and into focus. She had undoubtedly gone to the Union, as it was called, because it had a reputation for helping women find their calling. She probably did not even know of the similarity between the early career paths of its founder and herself—both had studied medicine at Columbia University (although Harriet Clisby completed her training), and both had ended up in Boston.
There Amelia was, an intensely ambitious woman without any professional training, blocked at every turn. For years her highest priority had been a career. She wanted to succeed on her own—and yet in spite of all her efforts, she wasn’t getting anywhere. Instead, she was getting backed into a corner, and it was beginning to look like marriage to Sam Chapman (patiently waiting in Marblehead for just such an eventuality) was what she might settle for. The WEIU was her last hope.
On August 18 Amelia went to 264 Boylston Street in Back Bay to register with the Union for employment and to fill out their forms. Now she was twenty-nine. Two years of short-lived study plans and short-term jobs, two years of going nowhere, had taken their toll. Suddenly Amelia had no professional aspirations at all. She, the keeper of a superachiever scrapbook, now wrote down in the space on the employment form for Work Desired, “Teaching English to Foreigners, Hostess, Anything connected with an Aeronautical Concern.” The grit was still there, but the focus was gone. She would settle for a job now; forget a career. And she wasn’t sure, given her rootless past and lack of accomplishments, that a job was even in the offing.
“A remarkable man whom I know says, ‘Beware of the honest man when he is in a tight place,’ ” Amelia had written down in the notebook she kept in Los Angeles. It must have stuck in her mind, that an honest person might act out of character when severely threatened. Now, so worried about her credentials or lack of them, she was in just such a tight place. She didn’t just gloss over her background, she lied—extensively—on the WEIU job application. She wrote that she had attended Hyde Park High School from 1911 to 1915 instead of just the one winter of 1914-1915, doubled the time she had been enrolled at Columbia to three years rather than a year and a half, and took two years off her age. Then she grossly inflated her professional background, claiming, “I have had five years of tutoring experience as well as class work,” when in fact she had had just one.
That last lie gave her a reference problem. Her teaching and tutoring had been done under the aegis of the Educational Service Bureau of Boston, but if she gave the Educational Service Bureau as a reference (and the form demanded professional references), the WEIU would find out that she had been teaching less than a year. For that reason she gave only her two most recent jobs as referrals: the Biddle and Smart Company and Bournewood.
Both places recommended her highly.
She gave Sam Chapman as her character reference. He was either the best she could do, or she thought he would write a superb reference. Instead, he wrote a barely adequate, undistinguished letter. It has no salutation, is undated, is not on proper stationery and is not properly centered, being just a series of lines improperly placed at the top of the page.
Miss Amelia M. Earhart is all right. I have known her four years and she is a very dear friend of mine. She is a good scholar and is capable in any field that she may claim. Samuel Chapman
“Holds a sky pilots license?” someone scrawled firmly across the form.
The WEIU woke her up—or perhaps it was the alert interviewer who probed, and saw her spark, for she drew her out and formed her own conclusion of Amelia’s capabilities. There is another firm scrawl: “an extremely interesting girl—very unusual vocabulary; is a philosopher—wants to write—does write.”
The best and the brightest women of the time were going into social work. It was the one field where women could achieve positions of authority, the one profession where they could reach the top. Later, career-minded women could go into law or business, run for public office, join the military, become university professors. But in the 1920s those career paths were closed.
Settlement houses and settlement house workers were at the cutting edge of social change. Forward-thinking social activists took part in settlement house work, notable among them Frances Perkins, who would become Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and in that capacity help set Roos
evelt’s agenda for social programs, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who worked at Rivington House before she was married and introduced her then-suitor Franklin to social work and the realities of poverty. (“My God,” he said to Eleanor, “I didn’t know anyone lived like that.”) The most famous, of course, was Jane Addams. In those early years of the twentieth century, social work attracted the best of the well-educated women of the day. The settlement houses and the social workers who operated them considered themselves a conservative force; they didn’t seek to change the social order or to make things any more “classless” than they were. On the contrary, according to Jane Addams, “Hull house was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of expression that has peculiar value.”
It is hard, in a later age, to appreciate the power and prestige attached to the early social workers, but what they accomplished was a revolutionary change in social thought. After the founding of Hull House, which was immediately hailed as the leader in the wave of social change, Jane Addams became a widely known lecturer and writer, the author of numerous books, and in 1910 the first woman awarded an honorary degree by Yale—the first acknowledgment by that bastion of the eastern male establishment that a woman (even if she would not be admitted as a student) was worthy of respect. The men and women who had been in the settlement house movement from its inception were looked upon with reverence by their peers, respected by the entire nation, and singled out for honors by the world. In 1931 Jane Addams would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Denison House, one of the oldest settlement houses in the nation, had been started in 1892, just two years after Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago, by three idealistic college-educated women, Vida Scudder, Katherine Coman, and Emily Balch, who had been “distressed” and “made restless” by a “sense of privileges unshared.” They were the ultimate female role models: highly unusual, gifted, respected women. All three were professors at Wellesley.
Vida Scudder, of an old New England family, had gone to Smith; Katherine Coman had graduated from the University of Michigan, class of 1880; Emily Balch, a Bostonian, the youngest of the three, had graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1889. All were pacifists and, at least at the beginning of their careers, socialists. Scudder, who combined a love of literature with a highly developed social conscience, the author of Social Ideals in English Letters, had taken a leave of absence from Wellesley to help the staff open Denison House. In spite of the demands Wellesley made upon her, she continued to be the prime mover and supplier of ideas at Denison House.
Katherine Coman, chairman of the Boston Settlement Committee, which superintended the formation of Denison House, was a professor of economics and history at Wellesley; she was as well an English historian and editor of English History Told by English Poets. It was she who made Denison House a center for labor activity
Emily Balch, powerful and effective in every field of endeavor she entered, who would become the most famous of the three, was chairman of the departments of economics and sociology at Wellesley. By the 1920s Balch had left the Socialist Party, become a Quaker, and written a major study of immigrants of eastern and southern Europe. She would go on to become an active organizer and member of the Women’s International League for Peace, and in 1946, for her labor for freedom and cooperation among individuals and peoples, she would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Very much in keeping with the settlement house movement from which it sprang, the philosophy of Denison House was “Not philanthropy but democracy,” which was defined as “a free flowing life between group and group.” In keeping with that philosophy and in keeping with the settlement house movement, eclectic Denison House provided not only aid, amusements, classes in English and citizenship, and medical care for Boston’s immigrants, but also classes in English Literature, Italian art, elocution, Shakespeare, and embroidery, and in the early years of the labor union movement, it provided the space for union meetings.
Amelia was of the second generation of women in the United States whose desire for a career, tempered by a sense of privilege and social obligation, would lead them to social work, just as she was of the second generation of women to attend college. In going into settlement house work she was, as she undoubtedly knew, following in almost the exact footsteps of Jane Addams, who had also first enrolled in medical school and then elected to pursue a more dynamic social role. As she would find out, she was choosing one of the vocations most popular among seven sister college graduates.
The nameless interviewer at WEIU sent Amelia to be interviewed by Marion Perkins, chief executive of Denison House (head worker, as the position was called). Marion, intrigued by her poise and charm, hired Amelia even though she had no background in social work. As she would later write, Amelia walked into her office one day looking for a job, “and a part-time one would do, for she was giving courses in English under the University Extension.... She had had no real experience in social work . . . but she wanted to try it, and before I knew it I had engaged her for half-time work at Denison House.... I liked her personality and confidence in herself so much that I gave her a position ... without asking her much about her training.”
Thus Amelia, sent by an organization set up and staffed by extraordinary women, came to a place conceived, founded, and run by other extraordinary women. She was on her way—launched—although it would be a while before she knew it.
Denison House was located in the south end, on Tyler Street. It started out in a three-and-a-half-story, twenty-foot-wide red brick house at number 93; within a few years it outgrew its home and spilled into the house adjoining. By the 1920s Denison House consisted of five of the red brick row houses joined together with a common entrance at number 93. The settlement house complex stood out from its neighbors on either side because it had whiter steps, cleaner walls, and in the summer, window boxes on the second-story windows; nevertheless it was in keeping with the other mixed-use houses on the busy narrow street. Historically an immigrant haven attracting whatever population flow that world upheavals sent into Boston, the area had once served a primarily Irish constituency. Then the Irish had moved on to be replaced by the Syrians. By the 1920s the Chinese were moving in. From the beginning of the Chinese wave, Tyler Street was its center. When the popular “mayor” of Chinatown, Moy Dow, died one hot August day in 1927, the funeral was held on Tyler Street. As the funeral procession, consisting of automobiles, police, Chinese and American funeral bands, and mourners, went down Tyler Street, it took up the entire breadth and length of the street. There was a Chinese restaurant on one side of Denison House, a Syrian restaurant on the other. Other neighbors on Tyler Street were a Chinese importing house, and the Syrian Roman Catholic church; around the corner was a Tong.
Marion Perkins put Amelia in charge of adult education—which meant teaching English and citizenship to the foreign-born in the neighborhood. The classes, which met in the evening, drew one hundred men and women to the English course alone. Almost immediately, responding to the perceived needs of the Syrian women whose children were in the prekindergarten at Denison House, Amelia organized the Syrian Mothers’ Club.
Marion, almost as new at her job as Amelia (she had started that May), saw in her new assistant a kindred dynamic spirit. Over the years the free, open give-and-take between clients and staff—the hallmark of the settlement house in its early years—had succumbed to the exigencies of organizational hierarchy. Marion Perkins sought to bring it back. She formed a council consisting of staff members and children to inaugurate the new policy: “The House is no longer a power outside, granting favors or withholding them. It is a part of each one, and he is not a beneficiary, but a member.” Then, seeing how superbly Amelia interacted with the children, she put her in charge of the girls’ program.
One of Amelia’s tasks was to ferry children who needed outside specialized medical help back and forth from the hospit
al. Often as she put some child into her sporty car for a trip to the hospital, she first had to explain to the fearful immigrant mother that hospitals were not dreadful places. The parents were as grateful for her patience as were their children.
Wrote one Syrian mother, who baked Amelia meat pies by way of thanks for taking her daughter to Massachusetts General Hospital, “I can still see her, tucking those little meat pies inside her leather jacket. Then she’d be walking down the street and pull one out and nibble on it, that yellow hair all curly and windblown.” She drove another Syrian child, a boy blinded by the explosion of a kerosene heater, out to the Perkins Institute for the Blind three times a week for classes in Braille. This remarkable institution, which had trained Annie Sullivan and then recommended Sullivan as teacher for Helen Keller, prided itself on the normalcy of its environment and the diversity of its classes, all of which every year resulted in a “surprising number” of young people who succeeded in making good. Amelia, with her background of teaching trigonometry to blind men—certainly not an easy assignment—was so impressed by the Institute that she thereupon spent several hours a week there as a reader.
Within a year Amelia was working full time at Denison House, and was in charge of the kindergarten, of the girls from five to fourteen, and of so many other activities that they jokingly called her the “official secretary.” Her groups were well organized, it was noted, and the children happy. The janitor, who had been there for years and seen good and bad social workers, thought Amelia excellent because the children liked her so. “She never had any favorites, never picked a child out for special attention, and that’s what the children consider fair.” Under her guidance and in response to the increasing number of Chinese (there were now more than a hundred Chinese families in the neighborhood), two new Chinese girls’ clubs, one called the Octopus Club, were flourishing at the settlement house. There were also new home classes in English for the Chinese mothers, who had been living isolated lives in their Boston tenements.
