In her autobiography I Came a Stranger Hilda Polacheck reveals the conflicting role of women in the late 19th / early 20th century as workers, caregivers, and social activists in a conflicting age of progress, hardship and missed expectations. Coming from a very traditional Jewish family in Poland it seems that Hilda Polacheck was destined to be a full time mother and wife never having immersed herself in the American society where women were becoming more and more relevant. The death of her father changes all of this forcing herself her mother and her siblings to fight for survival. This fight is what not only transformed Hilda Polacheck into the woman we remember her as today, but into an American as well.
At age thirteen and even much…show more content… Much of the hardship women faced was because of the expectations set for them by men and failing to meet those expectations due to problems also caused by men. Susan W. Fitzgerald puts it best in her 1908 essay; Women in The Home. In this piece Fitzgerald puts forward the common furtstaion of the urban women as they were expected to clean the house, keep the children healthy, fed them, clothe them, and develop their sense of morraily. But in an urban society as America had become at this time women faced difficulty with these expectation male society had placed on them because the filth of cities was impossible to clean up, because in the ghetto markets clean food was hard to find, because the air and water were full of diseases, and because the city was full of evil. All of these issues made it impossible to meet expectations set by men as without the iurgh to vote women didn't even have a voice in decisions they affect them more than anyone. Both Polachek and her mother face this hardship living in Chicago after becoming the sole parent of a family and having to sustain that family on the lower wages paid to women for brutal work. Polachek event illustrates her frustration with the problems of the city as a teen ager with her essay The Ghetto Market specifically in her second paragraph “Not until…show more content… After her husband Bill dies Polacheck is forced back to chicago to find cheap housing and a job here as a mother she does her best but cant meet the expectations he hold herself to ven with the understanding and forgiving nature of her children. Even with the difficulties in the later life of her mothering year Polacheck is still able to make her own progress though raising a healthy family of 4 while remaining engaged with Hull House the arts and her activism interests. Unlike many activists Polacheck was able to witness and experience much of the hardship created by the issues of hunger poverty violence diseases inequality and the lack of human rights in urban America Through her many years in the ghettos of Chicago. Polacheck also makes tremendous progress following in the footsteps of her mentor Jane Adams following the philosophy of “There is probably no love greater than the love of a mother for her child, but that doesn't mean that a child must not mean that a child must not be corrected from time to time, and so it is with love of country it is our duty to point out the wrongs inflicted on American people.” what's most important here is meaning love of country and patriotism while trying to make that same country better if Polachek could not follow this ideology she could have ended up like nany of the progressive era who