Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 93-110.
Abstract
Grace Abbott (1878-1939) is, perhaps, the greatest champion of children's rights in American history. She was a woman of intriguing contradictions: a life-long Republican Party member and a life-long liberal activist; a native of the Nebraska frontier who spent much of her life in the poorest immigrant quarters of urban Chicago; an unmarried woman who was nicknamed "the mother of America's forty-three million children."
Grace Abbott was a public figure who was both much adored and bitterly, sometimes vehemently, attacked. She was a born and bred pioneer: the first woman nominated for a Presidential cabinet post {secretary of labor for Herbert Hoover) and the first person sent to represent the U.S. at a committee of the League of Nations.
Grace Abbott's courageous struggles-to protect the rights of immigrants, to increase the role of women in government, and to improve the lives of all children-are filled with adventurous tales of the remarkable human ability to seek out suffering, and to do something about it. She was a bold, defiant woman who changed our country more profoundly than have many Presidents.
U.S. Representative Edward Keating summed up the feelings of innumerable Americans when he stood on the floor of the Congress in 1939 and said, quite simply: "To me there was something about Grace Abbott which always suggested Joan of Arc."
The impressive achievements of Grace Abbott's adult life beg on the question: how did she come to be such an extraordinary woman? The answer is, perhaps, to be found in her unusual and beautiful experiences as a child on the Great Plains.
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln