Austin, Ruth Inez - 1990

Ruth Inez Austin

“I was arrested for assault in New York during the garment workers' strike. But the judge released me when he learned about my crime. I hit a policeman with my muff.”

That was close to 80 years ago, and Ruth Austin was living up to a family tradition of social activism. Her parents' house in upstate New York had been a station on the Underground Railroad, and her family was part of the large underground movement helping Black people escape from slavery into Canada.

Before she started swinging her muff, she already had directed her activism toward the needs of immigrants by working for the Immigrants Protection League and as a special investigator with the Consumers League. At the time of the garment workers' strike she was teaching at Lenox Hill, a settlement house for immigrants on the upper east of New York City.

She was an activist and an early feminist. Because language textbooks for foreigners were almost exclusively formulated for men, she wrote Lessons English for Foreign Women, published in 1913. Although some chapters, like "A Day's Work in a Cigar Factory," concede a woman's place in pre-World War I America, the book shows so much compassion for the immigrant woman's situation and makes such a generous use of poetry by women for women, to supplement the lessons, that it could well be regarded as a feminist classic.

Her early biography sparkles with accomplishments, even though she suffered a severe physical handicap. Her hearing was so seriously impaired that a specialist told her when she was a girl that she should plan for a quiet life on the family farm. She must not have heard him.

“A handicap is awful but you can outlive it," she says at 102, she still watches lips as she listens and, with two hearing aids, seems to catch everything that is said—and some things that aren't.

Most of her career in social work was at Gads Hill in southwest Chicago, where she started in
1914 and continued through 1947. She still is on the Board of Directors. Gads Hill was a large educational and recreational neighborhood center in industrial Chicago and served immigrants from a wide assortment of ethnic backgrounds. This was AJ Capone's territory at a time when, as she says, “he had everything," including the respect of many immigrants whose well-being he defended. In the eyes of Capone's men, Ruth Austin must have been doing the right thing, for they evidently once offered her some retroactive protection. "I was knocked down and my purse was stolen. The next day they [the assailants] were found floating in the river.”

Ruth Austin is an unsung American heroine. It was Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago who received most of the public attention and acclaim, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, but Ruth Austin's impact on Chicago immigrant life is in many ways comparable. An instigator of the theory that recreation is one of the best forms of therapy for the handicapped, she is recognized by serious students in the field today. "Play as medium," she says modestly.

Ruth Austin lives alone in a ninth-story apartment in Portland, Oregon. Even though the longtime woman friend who moved here with her has died, her apartment does not sag with the dreariness of a lonely person. "Oh, I have had a gorgeous life," she says.

Ruth Austin's only regrets are in what has been lost in the kind of community work to which she dedicated her life: "Old settlement workers have been engulfed by caseworkers. The old intimacy has been lost. If you asked a boy what he knew about Jane Addams, he would say, 'She likes pie.' There was that kind of intimacy.”

Ruth Austin says she owes her longevity to wide reading, curiosity, and an involvement with life. Her more than 50 years of social service dance, smile, and act their story through the ethnic artwork on her walls. The art reflects several ethnic traditions of the people she served.

~ One Hundred Over 100, Moments with One Hundred North American Centenarians by Jim Heymen, Photographs by Paul Boyer, Copyright 1990, Fulcrum Publishing, 350 Indiana Street, Golden, Colorado, pages 6 & 7.

You can visit the memorial page for Ruth Inez Austin.