The Bethesda Home: A Case Study of Older Adults, Charity, and Resistance in Progressive Era Chicago

Abstract:In 1908, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a series of reports about the Bethesda Home for the Aged, detailing the events leading up to the institution’s bankruptcy and closure. Most notably, the newspaper focused attention on the role of the women at the home in resisting this upheaval and their relocation. For historians, this series of newspaper reports offers a rare—if fraught—glimpse into the lives of older women in one of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries’ most poorly documented institutional spaces. These women’s anger—as well as their perceived vulnerabilities and relationship to care work—reveal the ways in which discourses of gender and power helped to figure old age and institutional life at the intersections of charity and privatization during this historical moment in Chicago.