I didn’t ask what was the right thing to do

Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: I didn’t ask what was the right thing to do. Teach an illiterate girl, and her father, and her mother, the miracle of reading. And they taught the rest of the family, even the deaf grandmother. How could that be anything but a good?

In 1894, Ellen Gates Starr helped found the Chicago Public School Art Society to provide art to the public sclhools. Urban children with no exposure to nature, Starr argued, especially needed the solace of good artwork and its spur to the imagination. Starr hoped that exposure to beauty and heroism through art would stir the atnbitions and emotions of young chidren. ( ART) [Credit/source: Hull-House (IL) (Images of America), Peggy Glowacki]