Jane Addams

Excerpts from Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes

Published in 1910

"Civilization is a method of living and an attitude of equal respect for all people."

Jane Addams (1860–1935) is regarded as the first social worker (someone who helps people with a variety of social problems, such as poverty) in the United States. As a young woman she graduated from Rockford College and afterwards decided to pursue a career. Going to college and having a career were both unusual events for women in her era. In the late 1800s, young women were expected to get married and stay at home, but this did not appeal to Addams.

In 1889 she and a college friend, Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940), founded what came to be called Hull-House. Addams rented an old mansion at the corner of Polk and Halsted Streets in Chicago, a neighborhood filled with recent immigrants from Italy, Russia, Poland, Ireland, Germany, Greece, and Bohemia (a region of today's Czech Republic). She moved her own furniture into the house, and made it available to neighborhood residents, particularly young working-class women.

It was the first so-called settlement house, a place where workers new to the city could find a safe, clean place to stay and to gather. Chicago in the 1880s was in some respects a hostile environment for young women coming from Europe who did not speak English and had little money. Hull-House became a place where they could find day care and a kindergarten for their children, an employment bureau to help them find jobs, as well as a library and classes in art and music.

It also represented an alternative approach to dealing with the social problems, such as unemployment or poverty, created by the rise of large factories filled with machinery, the process known as the Industrial Revolution. Rather than taking a political approach—by campaigning for candidates friendly to working people, for example—Jane Addams took the more personal approach of extending help directly to workers. Hull-House was the core of a reform movement whose participants worked to achieve a long string of improvements, including special courts for juveniles, laws protecting women and children from abuses in factories, and laws regulating the hours and conditions under which children worked. It also established self-help organizations like the Immigrants Protective League, which showed poor workers from other cultures how to help themselves.

Things to remember while reading excerpts from Twenty Years at Hull-House:

• When Jane Addams and Ellen Starr founded Hull-House, most poor working-class people had few, if any, places to turn for help (with the exception of religious-based charities). Addams was among the first to see that the needs of immigrants extended beyond money and food; they needed help in getting used to a new culture in the United States, help in taking care of babies and small children, and help in becoming educated. Long before business tycoon Andrew Carnegie (see entry) helped pay for building public libraries, Addams established a small public library at Hull-House.
• Addams did not conduct her work without criticism. Her telling of the story of Hull-House includes some gentle jabs at people who mocked her work. For example, she tells of a plan to establish a public bathhouse, where workers could bathe since the homes of many workers lacked indoor plumbing. Some critics, after seeing in some tenements that bathtubs were being used to hold coal (commonly used in stoves to heat houses in the 1880s), concluded that immigrants did not want to bathe. Addams demonstrated that such remarks did not take into account the lack of hot, running water, and ignored the fact that immigrants wanted and needed to bathe just like everyone else.
• Although Addams's main thrust was not politics, she discovered that Hull-House could be useful in organizing local political campaigns aimed at such improvements as, for example, getting streets paved in Chicago's poorer neighborhoods. These small-scale efforts helped demonstrate the power of cooperative action, and made immigrants feel part of American society.

Excerpts from Twenty Years at Hull-House: From Chapter 5, "First Days at Hull-House"

The next January found Miss Starr and myself in Chicago, searching for a neighborhood in which we might put our plans into execution. In our eagerness to win friends for the new undertaking, we utilized every opportunity to set forth the meaning of the Settlement as it had been embodied atToynbee Hall , although in those days we made no appeal for money, meaning to start with our own slender resources. From the very first the plan received courteous attention, and the discussion, while often skeptical, was always friendly. Professor Swing wrote a commendatory column in the Evening Journal, and our early speeches were reported quite out of proportionto their worth. I recall a spirited evening at the home of Mrs. Wilmarth, which was attended by that renowned scholar,Thomas Davidson , and by a young Englishman who was a member of the then newFabian society and to whom a peculiar glamour was attached because he had scoured knives all summer in a camp of high-minded philosophers in theAdirondacks . Our new little plan met with criticism, not to say disapproval, from Mr. Davidson, who, as nearly as I can remember, called it "one of those unnatural attempts to understand life through cooperative living."

Toynbee Hall:

A model for Hull-House, established in London in 1884.

Thomas Davidson (1840–1900):

A Scottish-American photographer.

Fabian society:

A British debating society advocating socialism.

Adirondacks:

A mountain chain in New York State.

It was in vain we asserted that the collective living was not an essential part of the plan, that we would alwaysscrupulously pay our own expenses, and that at any moment we might decide to scatter through the neighborhood and to live in separatetenements; he still contended that the fascination for most of those volunteering residence would lie in the collective living aspect of the Settlement. His contention was, of course, essentially sound; there is a constant tendency for the residents to "lose themselves in the cave of their own companionship," as the Toynbee Hall phrase goes, but on the other hand, it is doubtless true that the very companionship, the give and take of colleagues, is what tends to keep the Settlement normal and in touch with "the world of things as they are." I am happy to say that we never resented this nor any other difference of opinion, and that fifteen years later Professor Davidson handsomely acknowledged that the advantages of a group far outweighed the weaknesses he had early pointed out. He was at that later moment sharing with a group of young men, on the East Side of New York, his ripest conclusions in philosophy and was much touched by their intelligent interest and absorbed devotion. I think that time has also justified our earlycontention that the merefoothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. I am not so sure that we succeeded in our endeavors "to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society and to add the social function to democracy." But Hull-House wassoberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other isreciprocal ; and that as the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of expression that has peculiar value.

Scrupulously:

Carefully.

Tenements:

Houses.

Contention:

Belief.

Foothold:

Establishment.

Soberly:

Seriously.

Reciprocal:

Mutual.

In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about with the officers of the compulsory education department, with city missionaries, and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall as a much older set of men than one ordinarily associates with that profession,
or perhaps I was only sent out with the older ones on what they must all have considered aquixotic mission. One Sunday afternoon in the late winter a reporter took me to visit a so-calledanarchist Sunday school, several of which were to be found on the northwest side of the city. The young man in charge was of the German student type, and his face flushed with enthusiasm as he led the children singing one ofKoerner's poems. The newspaperman, who did not understand German, asked me whatabominable stuffthey were singing, but he seemed dissatisfied with my translation of the simple words and darkly intimated that they were "deep ones," and had probably "fooled" me. When I replied that Koerner was an ardent German poet whose songs inspired his countrymen to resist the aggressions of Napoleon, and that his bound poems were found in the most respectable libraries, he looked at me ratheraskance and I then and there had my firstintimation that to treat a Chicago man, who is called an anarchist, as you would treat any other citizen, is to lay yourself open to deep suspicion.

Quixotic:

Impractical, difficult.

Anarchist:

Person who believes in a lack of formal authority/government.

Koerner:

Thomas Koerner, nineteenth-century German poet.

Abominable:

Unpleasant.

Askance:

Skeptically.

Intimation:

Hint.

Another Sunday afternoon in the early spring, on the way to aBohemian mission in the carriage of one of its founders, we passed a fine old house standing well back from the street, surrounded on three sides by a broadpiazza , which was supported by wooden pillars of exceptionally pureCorinthian design and proportion. I was so attracted by the house that I set forth to visit it the very next day, but though I searched for it then and for several days after, I could not find it, and at length I most reluctantly gave up the search.

Bohemian:

A region of what is now the Czech Republic in Europe.

Piazza:

Public square.

Corinthian:

Ancient Roman.

Three weeks later, with the advice of several of the oldest residents of Chicago, including the ex-mayor of the city,Colonel Mason , who had from the first been a warm friend to our plans, we decided upon a location somewhere near the junction of Blue Island Avenue, Halsted Street, and Harrison Street. I was surprised and overjoyed on the very first day of our search for quarters to come upon the hospitable old house, the quest for which I had so recently abandoned. The house was of course rented, the lower part of it used for offices and storerooms in connection with a factory that stood back of it. However, after some difficulties were overcome, it proved to be possible tosublet the second floor and what had been a large drawing-room on the first floor.

Colonel Mason:

Roswell B. Mason (1805–1892), mayor of Chicago.

Sublet:

Rent.

The house had passed through many changes since it had been built in 1856 for the homestead of one of Chicago's pioneer citizens, Mr. Charles J. Hull, and although battered by itsvicissitudes , was essentially sound. Before it had been occupied by the factory, it had sheltered a second-hand furniture store, and at one time theLittle Sisters of the Poor had used it for a home for the aged. It had a half-skeptical reputation for a haunted attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor that they always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic stairs. Their explanation of this custom was soincoherent that I was sure it was a survival of the belief that a ghost could not cross running water, but perhaps that interpretation was only my eagerness for finding folklore.

Vicissitudes:

Ups and downs.

Little Sisters of the Poor:

A Catholic charity.

Incoherent:

Hard to understand.

The fine old house responded kindly to repairs, its wide hall and open fireplace always insuring it a gracious aspect. Its generous owner, Miss Helen Culver, in the following spring gave us a free leasehold of the entire house. Her kindness has continued through the years until the group of thirteen buildings, which at present comprises our equipment, is built largely upon land which Miss Culver has put at the service of the Settlement which bears Mr. Hull's name. In those days the house stood between anundertaking establishment and a saloon. "Knight, Death and the Devil," the three were called by a Chicago wit, and yet any mock heroics which might be implied by comparing the Settlement to a knight quickly dropped away under the genuine kindness and hearty welcome extended to us by the families living up and down the street.

Undertaking:

Mortuary.

We furnished the house as we would have furnished it were it in another part of the city, with the photographs and otherimpedimenta we had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of familymahogany . While all the new furniture which was bought was enduring in quality, we were careful to keep it in character with the fine old residence. Probably no youngmatron ever placed her own things in her own house with more pleasure than that with which we first furnished Hull-House. We believed that the Settlement may logically bring to its aid all thoseadjuncts which the cultivated man regards as good and suggestive of the best of the life of the past.

Impedimenta:

Knickknacks.

Mahogany:

Wooden furniture.

Matron:

A woman in charge of the household affairs of an institution.

Adjuncts:

Aspects of life.

On the 18th of September, 1889, Miss Starr and I moved into it, with Miss Mary Keyser, who began performing the housework, but who quickly developed into a very important factor in the life of the vicinity as well as that of the household, and whose death five years later was most sincerely mourned by hundreds of our neighbors.

In our enthusiasm over "settling," the first night we forgot not only to lock but to close a side door opening on Polk Street, and we were much pleased in the morning to find that we possessed a fine illustration of the honesty and kindliness of our new neighbors.…

From Chapter 7, "Some Early Undertakings at Hull-House"

At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike in a large shoe factory [in which employees refused to work until demands for better pay or conditions were met], the discussions made it clear that the strikers who had been most easily frightened, and therefore first tocapitulate , were naturally those girls who werepayingboard and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind. After a recital of a case of peculiar hardship one of them exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be fine if we had a boarding club of our own, and then we could stand by each other in a time like this?" After that events moved quickly. We read aloud together Beatrice Potter's little book on "Cooperation," and discussed all the difficulties and fascinations of such an undertaking, and on the first of May, 1891, two comfortable apartments near Hull-House were rented and furnished. The Settlement was responsible for the furniture and paid the first month's rent, but beyond that the members managed the club themselves. The undertaking "marched," as the French say, from the very first, and always on its own feet. Although there were difficulties, none of them provedinsurmountable, which was a matter for great satisfaction in the face of a statement made by the head of theUnited States Department of Labor, who, on a visit to the club when it was but two years old, said that his department had investigated many cooperative undertakings, and that none founded and managed by women had ever succeeded. At the end of the third year the club occupied all of the six apartments which the original building contained, and numbered fifty members.

Capitulate:

Give in.

Board:

Meals in a rented room.

Insurmountable:

Impossible to overcome.

United States Department of Labor:

Agency of the federal government.

From Chapter 14, "Civic Cooperation"

In our first two summers we had maintained three baths in the basement of our own house for the use of the neighborhood, and they afforded some experience and argument for the erection of the first public bathhouse in Chicago, which was built on a neighboring street and opened under the city Board of Health. The lot upon which it was erected belonged to a friend of Hull-House who offered it to the city without rent, and this enabled the city to erect the first public bath from the smallappropriation of ten thousand dollars. Great fear was expressed by the public authorities that the baths would not be used, and the old story of the bathtubs in model tenements which had been turned into coal bins was often quoted to us. We were supplied, however, with theincontrovertible argument that in our adjacent third square mile there were in 1892 but three bathtubs and that this fact was much complained of by many of the tenement-house dwellers. Ourcontention was justified by the immediate and overflowing use of the public baths, as we had before been sustained in the contention that an immigrant population would respond to opportunities for reading when the Public Library Board had established a branch reading room at Hull-House.

Appropriation:

Public expenditure of funds.

Incontrovertible:

Without doubt.

Contention:

Argument.

We also quickly discovered that nothing brought us so absolutely intocomradeship with our neighbors as mutual and sustained effort such as the paving of a street, the closing of a gambling house, or the restoration of a veteran police sergeant.

Comradeship:

Friendship.

Several of these earlier attempts at civic cooperation were undertaken in connection with the Hull-House Men's Club, which had been organized in the spring of 1893, had beenincorporated under a Statecharter of its own, and had occupied a club room in the gymnasium.

Incorporated:

Established.

Charter:

License.

What happened next …

Many of the goals advocated by Jane Addams eventually were achieved. The practice of social work—extending help to people in need, not only money and food but also counseling and other services—has largely been taken over by government agencies, although private associations like Hull-House continue to play an important role.

Addams's experiments in social reform helped demonstrate the many dimensions of the Industrial Revolution. Although the Industrial Revolution was sparked by technological advances, such as the steam engine and the factory system, it was a "revolution" in the sense that it also profoundly changed the nature of society, giving rise to huge cities where people could not always depend on their individual resources or on family ties to become established.

Did you know …

Jane Addams did not limit her activities to Hull-House. In 1894 she helped establish the National Federation of Settlements. In 1911 she led the Consumers League and was the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. She also was a vice president of the Campfire Girls and active in the National Child Labor Committee, as well as in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. She also found time to campaign actively for women's right to vote.

For more information

Books

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Parks, Deborah A. Jane Addams: Freedom's Innovator. Alexandria, VA: Time Life Education, 1999.

Polacheck, Hilda Satt. I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl. Edited by Dena J. Polacheck Epstein. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Polikoff, Barbara Garland. With One Bold Act: The Story of Jane Addams. Chicago: Boswell Books, 1999.

Wheeler, Leslie. Jane Addams. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Silver Burdett Press, 1990.

Periodicals

Johnson, Geoffrey. "Sisterhood Was Powerful: The Inspiration for Hull House was Jane Addams's. But She Couldn't Have Pulled Off Her Great Social Experiment without a Little Help from a Friend." Chicago 38, (November 1989), p. 192.

Kornblatt, Mark, and Pamela Renner. "'Saint' Jane." Scholastic Update 122, (February 23, 1990), p. 10.

Web Sites

Addams, Jane. "Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes." University of Pennsylvania: A Celebration of Women Writers.http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/addams/hullhouse/hull-house.html (accessed on April 11, 2003).

"Jane Addams." About Women's History. http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_addams.htm (accessed on April 11, 2003).

"Jane Addams—Biography." Nobel E-Museum.http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.html (accessed on April 11, 2003).