posted by Heidi Smith

on August 31, 2006

I was looking through the Starr Centre pamphlet at HSP, and I was struck by a statement Susan Wharton made in her essay about penny lunches for children. The penny lunch program was originally part of the Starr Centre, but it grew to be very large (in 1895-1896 21,000 lunches were sold), and it soon became independent, as some in the executive committee of the Starr Centre believed it took up a lot of time and energy but did not quite fit into the mission of the Centre (I find that confusing). Anyway, at the end of her essay she writes:

“Think of the free dinner given on Christmas Day. What is the result of the gift of one meal? What is the physical result of putting into the stomach food to which it is unaccustomed, and what right have we to offer what we cannot accept ourselves without lowering our self-respect? The principles underlying gifts are the same for all classes. The penny lunch is in no sense a gift. It is paid for by the pennies which the children are in the habit of bringing to school for sour balls and the like and it aims to educate and accustom the child to more wholesome food that he would have otherwise” (74).

This idea of having children pay for these services is definitely a theme in the work of the Starr Centre. People paid dues for the Coal Club, children saved money for shoes in the Shoe Club, and those in the Carpentry Club had to pay for their lessons. Wharton, in her scrapbook, and elsewhere, was concerned with the state of "charity" and believed the word needed to be rehabilitated to mean something other than the stripping away of dignity that can come with that charity.

This got me thinking about the documentaries made during the Depression, such as You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell, Bourke-White), and the photo Migrant Mother. I am thinking about the way that people are often depicted as without agency in order to for the author(s) to make a case about their dire circumstances. While those who lead the Starr Centre and the College Settlements did speak of the dire living conditions of the poor people they were serving, this idea of trying to make it a partnership between children or adults and the people in the Settlement or at the Starr Centre, and agency that comes with it is (to my mind) more progressive than the reinforced divide between classes which comes with certain Depression Era works which did not demand that readers identify with the subjects in the books, only that they pity them. Wharton seems to empathize with people of other classes when she writes “and what right have we to offer what we cannot accept ourselves without lowering our self-respect?” She still reinforces the distance between classes, but with compassion, not pity.