twenty years at hull house

but she was very close to George Haldeman, who was almost exactly

the same age; he is the unnamed playmate in the first chapter of

Twenty Years at HuTHouse. When they grew up, he wanted to marry

her, and Anna Haldeman encouraged the match as strongly as she had

discouraged that between Alice and Harry. George enrolled as a medical student at the Johns Hopkins University hut succumbed to a severe

mental illness from which he never recovered. Anna Addams in certain moods attributed his collapse to Janes rejection of him. Jane

Addamss older brother, James Weber Addams, also went mad, and for

years Jane devoted time and money to looking after his business and

his family.

The pathology of the Addams/Haldeman family was perhaps not so

unusual in the late nineteenth century as it would he today. But the

family's various woes presented a strong claim upon an unmarried

daughter fo move into the role of a maiden aunt selflessly ministering

to her family's needs. Jane Addams firmly rejected this role, while generously giving help when it was needed. But the complexities of the

family perhaps illuminate, more than she is willing to say, her view of

Hull-House, which she organized in some ways as a sort of alternative

family.

The years of schoolgirl idealism at Rockford Female Seminary, later

Rockford College, described in chapter 3 of Twenty Years at Hull- House, were followed by a prolonged personal crisis which she alludesto only elliptically and enigmatically. She completed her work at

Rockford in the spring of 1881 and intended to enroll at Smith College in the fall. She almost immediately collapsed with a number of

rather vaguely defined mental and physical ills, including depression

and severe hack pains. Her distress was increased when President

James Garfield was assassinated on July 2 hy Charles Julius Guiteau,

the stepbrother of Flora Guiteau, Jane's closest friend at home. Much

of the summer was spent in trying to help and comfort Flora. And

then in August she was struck the blow of the sudden death of her

father from a ruptured appendix. Addams refused to succumb to her

grief but instead traveled to Philadelphia, where she enrolled in the

Women's Medical College. A few months later, she again collapsed

and had to withdraw. She first took a course of treatment at the Hospital of Orthopedic and Nervous Diseases operated hy the brilliant and

controversial Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and then traveled to Iowa, where