ABSTRACT

Adelaide Hahn’s best friend was her mother. The two women shared many traits, as mother and daughter often do. One was courage. Mrs. Hahn had, as they said in earlier days, the courage of her convictions. Although public displays were ‘distasteful to her,’ she risked attack from young ‘hoodlums’ when conducting suffrage street rallies. And this woman whose ‘curious distrust of her own powers’ made her a reluctant public speaker nevertheless appeared before boards and committees considering the causes to which she was devoted. In the months before she died, for example, she spoke at the New York Board of Estimate with ‘an ardent plea against curtailment of the budget for the municipal colleges’ and then went to Washington, D.C., to testify before a Senate Committee on the subject of removing the tax on margarine, ‘actuated by her never-failing desire to help the under-privileged, for whom, as she often said, the choice was not between margarine and butter, but between margarine and no spread at all’ (Alumnae News 49:7.3).