Analysis Of Hilda Polacheck's 'I Came A Stranger'

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
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 the city takes the matter in hand and orders all vegetables, meat and fish to be sold only in adequate and sanitary rooms will this condition be entirely overcome” This was written by Polacheck after seeing the filthy conditions of chicago markets and seeing many of her peers and neighbors fall ill or even