ABSTRACT
Dorothea Lange’s preoccupation with observing brought her to a career, though like many young adults she wandered before she claimed her path. Her father’s absence, her mother’s demanding work schedule, and her grandmother’s death in 1914 left Lange free to experiment. College-educated women such as Addams ultimately built the settlement house movement of the late nineteenth century. Perceiving a great failure to meet the needs of the dynamic cities so crowded with immigrant poor, these women decided to pitch in. Lange must have felt constrained as she first took the safer route and acquiesced to her family’s wishes, attending the teachers college. Like nursing, social work, and librarianship, teaching mirrored women’s assumed nurturing role within the family, and little challenged the gender order. Photography seemed to require less training than drawing, painting, or sculpture. And it required little in start-up costs, only enough funds for a camera and a darkroom.
