Jane Addams

Excerpt from Twenty Years at Hull-House

Originally published by the Macmillan Company, 1912

A Chicago woman writes of her experiences as owner of a house primarily designed to help immigrants

"Her mother's whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances … and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea … and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore."

C hicago by 1890 had become the great "melting pot" of the Midwest. People from many different nationalities found themselves mixed together, living in grimy industrial neighborhoods during a period of rapid expansion of factories and meat-processing plants. Immigrants came from Russia, Germany, Italy, Bohemia (later called the Czech Republic), and Greece. They crowded in an urban, or city, environment far removed from the rural, or country, villages from which they had emigrated to live in the United States. For many immigrant families, moving to the United States meant not only moving to a new country but also moving from the countryside to a city, and from an agricultural society to an industrial one.

Jane Addams (1860–1935), an upper-middle-class woman from Cedarville, Illinois, bought a house in Chicago, named Hull-House after a previous owner, and opened its doors to working people, both native-born Americans and immigrants, to help them adjust to their radically new surroundings. Addams had visited a settlement house called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, where many poor people struggled to adjust to the new industrial age. In settlement houses such as Toynbee, university students and other upper-class, educated people "settled," or came to live in the houses, to help improve the lives of the underprivileged people in the neighborhood. Addams's memoir of the first two decades running Hull-House as a settlement house in Chicago provides a glimpse of the impact felt by immigrants trying to adjust to a completely different way of life.

In Chapter 11 of her book Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams observed that a cultural gap had opened between immigrant parents and their own children. Watching immigrant women using ancient handcrafted techniques for making "thread," or yarn, Addams realized that the women's children did not appreciate the skills their mothers brought with them to their new country—skills that were an essential part of life in the villages of European countries that had not experienced the Industrial Revolution, the decades-long process by which large factories replaced smaller home-based workshops in manufacturing. In what Addams called a "desire to reveal the humbler immigrant parents to their own children," Addams established a small "Labor Museum" in Hull-House. The "museum" was not a large building devoted to the subject. Instead, the museum consisted of a small display of traditional tools and methods familiar to immigrants but utterly foreign to their children living in Chicago around the turn of the twentieth century.

The display demonstrated how large-scale immigration to the United States in the period from 1880 to 1920 occurred at the same time as the technological progression of simple tools and the rapid growth of American industry. On a personal level, immigrant mothers enjoyed coming to Hull-House to see the exhibits that displayed the skills and methods they had practiced in their home countries. Unknowingly, immigrant women had brought these skills with them to America as part of a way of life that had been rendered virtually useless, not just by the voyage across the Atlantic to Chicago but also by the voyage across an era from an agricultural society to an industrial one. The museum allowed immigrant parents to show their children that these tools and skills provided the basis for the new industrial machines.

Addams also noticed how life had changed for immigrant teenagers. Young people, traditionally closely controlled trolled by their parents, were torn between the temptations of their new American society and their desire to obey their parents, who were often clinging to long-established practices of raising children. The tension between the new world and the old world sometimes led young men and women not only into trouble with parents but into trouble with the law. Addams viewed their misdeeds not as a sign of "bad" behavior but as the result of unreasonable expectations in the midst of confusing and highly difficult living circumstances.

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

• In many societies, women play the central role in binding together families. This was certainly the case among immigrants from southern and eastern Europe living in Chicago at the time Twenty Years at Hull-House was written. The woman's role in the family was made vastly more difficult in the new setting. Many immigrant women did not know how to function in an urban environment, much less one in which they did not speak the language well. Their clothing and headscarves set them apart, too.
• For many women, even the smallest details of life, such as baking bread, were different. For example, Addams told the story of an Italian woman who had baked her bread in a community oven. Because her daughter had had cooking lessons in school, the bewildered mother would learn how to use the oven at home from her child. There were many cases of such a role reversal: in America, it was the English-speaking, more streetwise children who had to show immigrant parents how things worked in their new world.

• Jane Addams realized that setting up a little "Labor Museum" in Hull-House was part of an educational experience for immigrant children, enabling them to relate to their cultural roots. In this excerpt from Addams's book, she refers to "Dr. Dewey." At the time Addams was running Hull-House, John Dewey (1859–1952) was appointed to be the head of a new department of philosophy, psychology, and education at the University of Chicago. Dewey believed that people should learn by experience, not just by repetitive, mechanical memorization of facts. His ideas have long been controversial since they challenged the predominant method of instruction in use at the time, and still prevalent in the twenty-first century. Dewey became friends with Addams and other social reformers at Hull-House and was one of the educators recruited by Addams to give lectures there. He frequently visited Hull-House, praised it as a model for what schools should be like, and became a trustee, or administrator, of the house for seven years.
• At the beginning of this excerpt, Addams refers to seeing "an old Italian woman, her distaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by the simple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe." In just a sentence, Addams evoked the essence of leaving home and coming to a new country for many women in the late nineteenth century. A distaff is a stick, or rod, used as part of the process of turning sheep's wool into yarn that can later be woven into material. A "simple stick spindle" is a hand-held tool used by women to spin the fibers of wool, a technique that existed for hundreds of years before modern industrial machinery in factories took over the task. Seeing an immigrant woman patiently spinning yarn using an ancient technique called to mind for Addams a sense of the woman's homesickness. The woman's longing was not just for the sunny climate of southern Italy, as opposed to the often cloudy, windy, and cold climate of Chicago, but also for a bygone time when life followed a familiar pattern. The word "distaff" refers not only to a tool for spinning, but it had also come to mean the more general concept of a "woman's work." The familiar, essential role of women in rural life had been abandoned by immigrants in the bustle of industrial Chicago. In carrying out her lifelong habit, the elderly woman encountered by Addams conveyed the sense of loss—of a familiar place, of familiar habits, and even of a familiar role in her family—that many immigrant women must have felt living in their adopted country.
• The sense of loss felt by immigrants was not limited to women. Addams tells the story of a man who used to be a skilled goldsmith, capable of making beautiful jewelry, who could only find work in a factory in Chicago. The loss of being able to do the work he loved drove him to heavy drinking and eventually to kill himself. The struggle to live—to earn money for food and shelter—robbed some immigrants of their joy in work and the joy of life itself.

Excerpt from Twenty Years at Hull-House

Chapter XI: Immigrants and Their Children

An overmastering desire to reveal the humbler immigrant parents to their own children lay at the base of what has come to be called the Hull-House Labor Museum. This was first suggested to my mind one early spring day when I saw an old Italian woman, her distaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by the simple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe. I was walking down Polk Street, perturbed in spirit, because it seemed so difficult to come into genuine relations with the Italian women and because they themselves so often lost their hold upon their Americanized children. It seemed to me that Hull-House ought to be ableto devise some educational enterprise which should build a bridge between European and American experiences in such wise as to give them both more meaning and a sense of relation. I meditated that perhaps the power to see life as a whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of a large city than anywhere else, and that the lack of this power is the most fruitful source of misunderstanding between European immigrants and their children, as it is between them and their American neighbors; and why should that chasm between fathers and sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be made so unnecessarily cruel and impassable to these bewildered immigrants? Suddenly I looked up and saw the old woman with her distaff, sitting in the sun on the steps of a tenement house. She might have served as a model for one of Michael Angelo's Fates , but her face brightened as I passed and, holding up her spindle for me to see, she called out that when she had spun a little more yarn, she would knit a pair of stockings for her goddaughter. The occupation of the old woman gave me the clue that was needed. Could we not interest the young people working in the neighborhood factories in these older forms of industry, so that, through their own parents and grandparents, they would find a dramatic representation of the inherited resources of their daily occupation. If these young people could actually see that the complicated machinery of the factory had been evolved from simple tools, they might at least make a beginning toward that education which Dr. Dewey defines as a "continuing reconstruction of experience." They might also lay a foundation for reverence of the past which Goethe declares to be the basis of all sound progress….

Distaff: A staff, or rod, for holding the wool in spinning; also implies the larger topic of a woman's work, since spinning was traditionally done by women.

Spindle: A round stick with tapered ends used to form and twist the yarn in hand spinning.

Perturbed: Irritated.

Enterprise: Program.

Chasm: Gap; also used as a metaphor for a distance separating two people or two generations.

Tenement house: An apartment house, usually poorly constructed and offering crowded, but inexpensive, quarters for poor immigrants.

Michel Angelo's Fates: A depiction of women by Italian sculptor and painter Michelangelo (1475–1564).

Dr. Dewey: John Dewey (1859–1952), a leading philosopher, psychologist, and educator from the University of Chicago and a friend of Addams.

Goethe: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a leading German novelist and playwright.

We found in the immediate neighborhood at least four varieties of these most primitive methods of spinning and three distinct variations of the same spindle in connection with wheels. It was possible to put these seven into historic sequence and order and to connect the whole with the present method of factory spinning. The same thing was done for weaving, and on every Saturday evening a little exhibit was made of these various forms of labor in the textile industry. Within one room a Syrian woman, a Greek, an Italian, a Russian, and an Irishwoman enabled even the most casual observer to see that there is no break in orderly evolution if we look at history from the industrial standpoint; that industry develops similarly and peacefully year by year among the workers of each nation, heedless of differences in language, religion, and political experiences….

Wheels: Spinning wheels; another method of spinning thread.

Orderly evolution: Development.

I recall a number of Russian women working in a sewing room near Hull-House, who heard one Christmas week that the Housewas going to give a party to which they might come. They arrived one afternoon, when, unfortunately, there was no party on hand and, although the residents did their best to entertain them with impromptu music and refreshments, it was quite evident that they were greatly disappointed. Finally it was suggested that they be shown the Labor Museum—where gradually the thirty sodden , sluggish tired women were transformed. They knew how to use the spindles and were delighted to find the Russian spinning frame. Many of them had never seen the spinning wheel, which has not penetrated to certain parts of Russia, and they regarded it as a new and wonderful invention. They turned up their dresses to show their homespun petticoats; they tried the looms; they explained the difficulty of the old patterns; in short, from having been stupidly entertained, they themselves did the entertaining. Because of a direct appeal to former experiences, the immigrant visitors were able for the moment to instruct their American hostesses in an old and honored craft, as was indeed becoming to their age and experience….

Sodden: Wet.

There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman's primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was "the best stick-spindle spinner in America." When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction , I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice , they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.

Primitive: Original or primary.

Uncouth: Crude or uncultivated.

Deduction: Conclusion.

Precipice: Cliff.

Dilated: Added details.

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother's whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities —to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church-and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

Sanctities: The quality of being holy.

Poignant: Painfully affecting the feelings.

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired….

These women and a few men, who come to the museum to utilize their European skill in pottery, metal, and wood, demonstrate that immigrant colonies might yield to our American life something very valuable, if their resources were intelligently studied and developed. I recall an Italian, who had decorated the doorposts of his tenement with a beautiful pattern he had previously used in carving the reredos of a Neapolitan church [in Naples], who was "fired" by his landlord on the ground of destroying property. His feelings were hurt, not so much that he had been put out of his house, as that his work had been so disregarded; and he said that when people traveled in Italy they liked to look at wood carvings but that in America "they only made money out of you."

Reredos (RARE-a-dose): An ornamental wood or stone screen or partition behind the altar in a church.

Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is followed by more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little girl attended classes at Hull-House, in one of his periodic drunken spells had literally almost choked her to death, and later had committed suicide when in delirium tremens. His poor wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House after the disaster until a new tenement could be arranged for her, one day showed me a gold ring which her husband had made for their betrothal. It exhibited the most exquisite workmanship, and she said that although in the old country he had been a goldsmith, in America he had for twenty years shoveled coal in a furnace room of a large manufacturing plant; that whenever

Bohemian: A person from a region of Europe called Bohemia, situated in what is now called the Czech Republic.

Delirium tremens: A violent and life-threatening reaction to excessive use of alcohol, characterized by mental confusion and shaking of the body.

Betrothal: Engagement.

she saw one of his "restless fits," which preceded his drunken periods, "coming on," if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuade him to stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed without disaster, but that "nothing else would do it." This story threw a flood of light upon the dead man's struggle and on the stupid maladjustment which had broken him down. Why had we never been told? Why had our interest in the remarkable musical ability of his child blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of the father? We had forgotten that a long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.

Solaced: Comforted.

There are many examples of touching fidelity to immigrant parents on the part of their grown children; a young man who day after day attends ceremonies which no longer express his religious convictions and who makes his vain effort to interest his Russian Jewish father in social problems; a daughter who might earn much more money as a stenographer could she work from Monday morning tillSaturday night, but who quietly and docilely makes neckties for low wages because she can thus abstain from work Saturdays to please her father; these young people, like poor Maggie Tulliver , through many painful experiences have reached the conclusion that pity, memory, and faithfulness are natural ties with paramount claims.

Fidelity: Faithfulness; loyalty.

Stenographer: Bookkeeper; typist.

Docilely: Willingly; gently.

Abstain from: Avoid.

Maggie Tulliver: A character in the 1860 novel Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, who serves as an example of how women were often expected to make personal sacrifices to sustain appearances for their families.

This faithfulness, however, is sometimes ruthlessly imposed upon by immigrant parents who, eager for money and accustomed to the patriarchal authority of peasant households, hold their children in a stern bondage which requires a surrender of all their wages and concedes no time or money for pleasures.

Patriarchal: Fatherly.

There are many convincing illustrations that this parental harshness often results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of seventeen came to Hull-House one day to ask a contribution of fifty cents "towards a flower piece for the funeral of an old Hull-House club boy." A few questions made it clear that the object was fictitious, whereupon the boy broke down and half-defiantly stated that he wanted to buy two twenty-five cent tickets, one for his girl and one for himself, to a dance of the Benevolent Social Twos [a social club]; that he hadn't a penny of his own although he had worked in a brass foundry for three years and had been advanced twice, because he always had to give his pay envelope unopened to his father; "just look at the clothes he buys me" was his concluding remark.

Juvenile delinquency: Minor crimes committed by children.

Perhaps the girls are held even more rigidly. In a recent investigation of two hundred working girls it was found that only five per cent had the use of their own money and that sixty-two per cent turned in all they earned, literally every penny, to their mothers. It was through this little investigation that we first knew Marcella, a pretty young German girl who helped her widowed mother year after year to care for a large family of younger children. She was content for the most part although her mother's old-country notions of dress gave her but an infinitesimal amount of her own wages to spend on her clothes, and she was quite sophisticated as to proper dressing because she sold silk in a neighborhood department store. Her mother approved of the young man who was showing her various attentions and agreed that Marcella should accept his invitation to a ball, but would allow her not a penny toward a new gown to replace one impossibly plain and shabby. Marcella spent a sleepless night and wept bitterly, although she well knew that the doctor's bill for the children's scarlet fever was not yet paid. The next day as she was cutting off three yards of shining pink silk, the thought came to her that it would make her a fine new waist to wear to the ball. Shewistfully saw it wrapped in paper and carelessly stuffed into the muff of the purchaser, when suddenly the parcel fell upon the floor. No one was looking and quick as a flash the girl picked it up and pushed it into her blouse. The theft was discovered by the relentless department store detective who, for "the sake of example," insisted upon taking the case into court. The poor mother wept bitter tears over this downfall of her "frommes Mädchen" [pious daughter] and no one had the heart to tell her of her own blindness.

Infinitesimal: Extremely small.

Scarlet fever: A childhood disease common in the nineteenth century.

Muff: A cylinder of material or fur open at both ends for hands to be inserted for warmth; used in place of gloves.

I know a Polish boy whose earnings were all given to his father who gruffly refused all requests for pocket money. One Christmas his little sisters, having been told by their mother that they were too poor to have any Christmas presents, appealed to the big brother as to one who was earning money of his own. Flattered by the implication, but at the same time quite impecunious , the night before Christmas he nonchalantly walked through a neighboring department store and stole a manicure set for one little sister and a string of beads for the other. He was caught at the door by the house detective as one of those children whom each local department store arrests in the weeks before Christmas at the daily rate of eight to twenty. The youngest of these offenders are seldom taken into court but are either sent home with a warning or turned over to the officers of the Juvenile Protective Association. Most of these premature law breakers are in search of Americanized clothing and others are only looking for playthings. They are all distracted by the profusion and variety of the display, and their moral sense is confused by the general air of openhandedness.

Impecunious: Penniless.

Nonchalantly: Casually.

Manicure set: Scissors and files used to care for fingernails.

Profusion: Abundance.

These disastrous efforts are not unlike those of many younger children who are constantly arrested for petty thieving because they are too eager to take home food or fuel which will relieve the distress and need they so constantly hear discussed. The coal on the wagons, the vegetables displayed in front of the grocery shops, the very wooden blocks in the loosened street paving are a challenge to their powers to help out at home. A Bohemian boy who was out on parole from the old detention home of the Juvenile Court itself, brought back five stolen chickens to the matron for Sunday dinner, saying that he knew the Committee were "having a hard time to fill up so many kids and perhaps these fowl [chickens] would help out." The honest immigrant parents, totally ignorant of American laws and municipal regulations, often send a child to pick up coal on the railroad tracks or to stand at three o'clock in the morning before the side door of a restaurant which gives away broken [unused] food, or to collect grain for the chickens at the base of elevators andstanding cars. The latter custom accounts for the large number of boys arrested for breaking the seals on grain freight cars. It is easy for a child thus trained to accept the proposition of a junk dealer to bring him bars of iron stored in freight yards. Four boys quite recently had thus carried away and sold to one man two tons of iron.

Matron: Supervisor of the detention center.

Four-fifths of the children brought into the Juvenile Court in Chicago are the children of foreigners. The Germans are the greatest offenders, Polish next. Do their children suffer from the excess of virtue in those parents so eager to own a house and lot? One often sees a grasping parent in the court, utterly broken down when the Americanized youth who has been brought to grief clings as piteously to his peasant father as if he were still a frightened little boy in the steerage.

Steerage: A section of inferior accommodations in a passenger ship for passengers paying the lowest fares.

Many of these children have come to grief through their premature fling into city life, having thrown off parental control as they have impatiently discarded foreign ways. Boys of ten and twelve will refuse to sleep at home, preferring the freedom of an old brewery vault or an empty warehouse to the obedience required by their parents, and for days these boys will live on the milk and bread which they steal from the back porches after the early morning delivery. Such children complain that there is "no fun" at home. One little chap who was given a vacant lot to cultivate by the City Garden Association insisted upon raising only popcorn and tried to present the entire crop to Hull-House "to be used for the parties," with the stipulation that he would have "to be invited every single time." Then there are little groups of dissipated young men who pride themselves upon their ability to live without working and who despise all the honest and sober ways of their immigrant parents. They are at once a menace and a center of demoralization. Certainly the bewildered parents, unable to speak English and ignorant of the city, whose children have disappeared for days or weeks, have often come to Hull-House … as if they had discovered a new type of suffering, devoid of the healing in familiar sorrows. It is as if they did not know how to search for the children without the assistance of the children themselves. Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of such cases is their revelation of the premature dependence of the older and wiser upon the young and foolish, which is in itself often responsible for the situation because it has given the children an undue sense of their own importance and a false security that they can take care of themselves.

Brewery vault: A storage facility in a beer factory.

Dissipated: Extravagant in the pursuit of pleasure, especially in pursuit of drinking.

Revelation: Sudden awareness.

On the other hand, an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking at the public school will help her mother to connect the entirefamily with American food and household habits. That the mother has never baked bread in Italy—only mixed it in her own house and then taken it out to the village oven—makes all the more valuable her daughter's understanding of the complicated cooking stove….

What happened next …

Jane Addams was a pioneer in a profession that came to be called social work. Her efforts to help people struggling to cope with life in Chicago were not limited to immigrants; programs of Hull-House were open to all nationalities. Over the next century, social work became a highly respected profession, often sponsored by state governments to address the social problems of modern industrial society.

The dramatic flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe largely stopped after 1921, when new federal laws imposed restrictions on what had previously been a largely unregulated flow of poor rural people into the United States. The children and grandchildren of immigrants gradually became used to American customs, a process called "becoming Americanized."

People from other countries were not the only "immigrants" coming to northern industrial cities like Chicago. During World War II (1939–45), when many U.S. factory workers left to serve in the Army, rural residents of the South, many of them African Americans, migrated to northern cities to fill factory jobs. Their experiences were very similar to the experiences of immigrants from European rural societies fifty years earlier.

Did you know …

• In 1931, Jane Addams became the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Her efforts to improve social conditions were not limited to the industrial slums of Chicago. She also campaigned for women's right to vote, for government regulation of the conditions under which people worked, and for unemployment insurance (payments to people who lose their jobs).
• Addams was a "hands-on" reformer. Hull-House was not only the site of programs to benefit poor immigrants and other workers; it was also Addams's house, where she both lived and worked.
• Her work was widely admired during her lifetime. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; served 1901–9) once described Addams as "the most useful citizen in America."

For More Information

Books

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss." New York: Knopf, 1992.

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

Hovde, Jane. Jane Addams. New York: Facts on File, 1989.

Periodicals

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

Levinsohn, Florence Hamlish. "A Tribute to a Life of Caring; Halsted Street's Living Memorial to Jane Addams." Chicago (November 1986): p. 304.

Web Sites

Holli, Melvin G. "Hull House and the Immigrants." Illinois Periodicals Online.http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/iht1010323.html (accessed on February 25, 2004).

Jane Addams Hull House.http://www.hullhouse.org (accessed on February 25, 2004).