{"product_id":"2940014908474","title":"The Long Road of Woman's Memory","description":"An excerpt from the:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eINTRODUCTION\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor many years at Hull-House I have at intervals detected in certain old people, when they spoke of their past experiences, a tendency to an idealization, almost to a romanticism suggestive of the ardent dreams and groundless ambitions we have all observed in the young when they recklessly lay their plans for the future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI have, moreover, been frequently impressed by the fact that these romantic revelations were made by old people who had really suffered much hardship and sorrow, and that the transmutation of their experiences was not the result of ignoring actuality, but was apparently due to a power inherent in memory itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was therefore a great pleasure when I found this aspect of memory delightfully portrayed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his life of Euripides. He writes that the aged poet, when he was officially made one of the old men of Athens, declared that he could transmute into song traditional tales of sorrow and wrongdoing because, being long past, they had already become part mystery and part music: \" Memory, that Memory who is the Mother of the Muses, having done her work upon them.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere was an explanation which I might have anticipated; it was the Muses again at their old tricks, — the very mother of them this time, — thrusting their ghostly fingers into the delicate fabric of human experience to the extreme end of life. I had known before that the Muses foregathered with the Spirit of Youth and I had even made a feeble attempt to portray that companionship, but I was stupid indeed not to see that they are equally at home with the aged whose prosaic lives sadly need such interference.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven with this clue in my hands, so preoccupied are we all with our own practical affairs, I probably should never have followed it, had it not been for the visit of a mythical Devil Baby who so completely filled Hull-House with old women coming to see him, that for a period of six weeks I could perforce do little but give them my attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen this excitement had subsided and I had written down the corroboration afforded by their eager recitals in the first two chapters of this book, I might have supposed myself to be rid of the matter, incidentally having been taught once more that, while I may receive valuable suggestions from classic literature, when I really want to learn about life, I must depend upon my neighbors, for, as William James insists, the most instructive human documents lie along the beaten pathway.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe subject, however, was not so easily disposed of, for certain elderly women among these selfsame neighbors disconcertingly took quite another line from that indicated by Euripides. To my amazement, their reminiscences revealed an additional function of memory, so aggressive and withal so modern, that it was quite impossible, living as I was in a Settlement with sociological tendencies, to ignore it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was gradually forced upon my attention that these reminiscences of the aged, even while softening the harsh realities of the past, exercise a vital power of selection which often necessitates an onset against the very traditions and conventions commonly believed to find their stronghold in the minds of elderly people. Such reminiscences suggested an analogy to the dreams of youth which, while covering the future with a shifting rose-colored mist, contain within themselves the inchoate substance from which the tough-fibred forces of coming social struggles are composed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the light of this later knowledge, I was impelled to write the next two chapters of this book, basing them upon conversations held with various women of my acquaintance whose experience in family relationships or in the labor market had so forced their conduct to a variation from the accepted type that there emerged an indication of a selective groping toward another standard. They inevitably suggested that a sufficient number of similar variations might even, in Memory's leisurely fashion of upbuilding tradition, in the end establish a new norm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome of these women, under the domination of that mysterious autobiographical impulse which makes it more difficult to conceal the truth than to avow it, purged their souls in all sincerity and unconsciously made plain the part borne in their hard lives by monstrous social injustices.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese conversations proved to be so illustrative of my second thesis that it seemed scarcely necessary to do more than record them. The deduction was obvious that mutual reminiscences perform a valuable function in determining analogous conduct for large bodies of people who have no other basis for like-mindedness....","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47181614252272,"sku":"2940014908474","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014908474_p0.jpg?v=1763617310","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014908474","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}