The Devil Baby at Hull-House
For about six weeks in the spring of 1913, Chicagoans arrived at Hull-House in a steady stream asking to see a devil baby kept in the attic, with pointed ears, hooves, and a tail. Jane Addams told all of them there was no such child. They kept coming, some by the busload from Milwaukee, and in October 1916 she published what the visit had taught her about the women who came.
Field Guide Entry
Six weeks
The rumor arrived without a source. People came to the door of the settlement house on Halsted Street, asked to be shown the devil baby, and would not accept that the house did not have one. Addams put the number at thousands over roughly six weeks. Staff answered the door and answered the telephone and repeated the same thing, and the crowds went on arriving.
The versions
Addams wrote that the story came in at least two forms, and the form depended on who was telling it. In the Italian version a devout girl marries an unbeliever, who tears a holy picture off the wall and says he would rather have a devil in the house than that thing, and gets one. In the Jewish version a man with six daughters tells his pregnant wife he would rather have a devil than a seventh girl.
Both versions punish a man for what he said, and both put the consequence on the child. That is the part Addams found interesting, and it is why she stopped treating the crowd as a nuisance.
What she did with it
She wrote it up as The Devil Baby at Hull-House, published in The Atlantic in October 1916, and reworked it in her book The Long Road of Woman's Memory the same year. The essay is about the old immigrant women who came to see the child: what they had survived, what the story let them say about it, and how little use anyone had for them otherwise.
She never found who started it. The house had no devil baby. The essay survives, and so does the building.
Visiting Information
Admission is free. The museum opens Tuesday through Friday from 10am to 4:50pm and Saturday from 10am to 3pm, and closes Sunday and Monday. Public tours run on Tuesdays and Fridays at 2pm, and joining one gets you the rooms with context rather than without.
Two buildings survive of the 13 that made up the settlement complex, the 1856 house and the dining hall, and the rest of the block belongs to the University of Illinois Chicago. The house is small, an hour covers it, and the exhibitions change.
Street parking around the campus is metered and awkward on weekdays. The Blue Line at UIC-Halsted is a short walk.
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