Dorothy Liebes | 4. Comeuppances

A part time job at the Esther Hellman Settlement House on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco took up three nights a week during Liebes’s last year at Berkeley. Her job was to “Americanize” recent Eastern European immigrants who accessed the house’s resources. Liebes took the trolley from campus to the Oakland terminal known as “The Mole," ferried across the bay to San Francisco, then hopped another trolley to the Club. The entire trip took an hour each way. The notorious Howard Street gang, three of whom had been lynched by a vigilante mob in Santa Rosa in 1920, roamed the streets Wright traversed to get from the settlement house to the ferry. Her worried mother awaited her return at the trolley stop every night. 

Hellman House

In a pattern that would repeat throughout her lifetime, Liebes learned as much as she taught the women and girls in her classes at Hellman House. Her “comeuppance” came when she tried teaching needlework and embroidery while her students smiled quietly. When they showed her their ceremonial costumes, elaborately worked into picturesque designs, her “ego was cut down to size.”

Similarly, on a trip to Oklahoma in 1942 with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assist native American weavers develop more marketable wares, Liebes was educated by her putative students. She brought home basketmaking materials and deer hides from the craftspeople she worked with, and shared native dyes recipes from Wheelock Academy with her friend, fashion designer Clare Potter, who was “terribly excited by them.”

Wheelock Academy

Clare Potter