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Beyond helping people directly by providing needed local programs, the ladies involved in Hull House were active in social reform on the local, state, and national levels. Through their efforts, legislation was enacted regarding child labor, education, worker's compensation, occupational safety, and other significant social issues. Hull House was thus the home not just for individual advancement but also for changes that impacted society as a whole. When Jane Addams, known as the mother of social work in America, founded Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side in 1889, she dreamed of bringing different social classes together in ways that would benefit everyone. With the help of her college friend and sometime lover Ellen Gates Starr, she set up shop in a run-down mansion in 1889.
Jane Addams
The museum honoring Hull House is still in operation, preserving history and heritage of Hull House and its related Association. Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois on September 6, 1860 to Sarah Adams (Weber) and John Huy Adams. She was the eighth of nine children and was born with a spinal defect that hampered her early physical growth before it was rectified by surgery. Her father was a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who served in the Civil War and remained active in politics, though he was a miller by trade.
About Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Hull-House was a microcosm of the larger “settlement movement” that started in England in the early 1880s. Addams created a community of volunteer “university women” who were given the title of “residents” and held classes in history, art, and literature, as well as domestic activities like sewing. Within the first year of Hull-House’s operation, charitable donations started pouring in. Jane Addams lived from 1860 to 1935, from the Civil War to the Great Depression.
Jane Addams Political Life
Her plan was to use the mansion to improve the lives of the urban poor. Named Hull-House after its original owner, Charles Hull, it would become known as America’s first settlement house. With Starr, Addams rented the Charles Hull mansion in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood and Hull House opened its doors on September 18, 1889. Addams and Hull House led the progressive charge in Chicago and in the United States. The work of Hull House resulted in numerous labor union organizations, a labor museum, tenement codes, factory laws, child labor laws, adult education courses, cultural exchange groups, and the collection of neighborhood demographic data.
Womens Rights Activists
She reminded herself that part of Wilson’s plan for “a peace without victory” resulted from the recommendations made at the Hague Conference she had led before the war. Her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, which James admired, emphasizes such phrases as social equality, moral idealism, civic virtue, association, industrial amelioration—all words and ideas she repeated in her subsequent books. These concepts reflect Addams’s worldview and the progressive credo. Though devoted to European culture, Addams was at heart an American democrat who rejected the English class system. Mesmerized by Tolstoy, she visited him in Russia in 1896 and became a lifelong pacifist. Tolstoy, who had hundreds of visitors over the years, seemed unaware of her Chicago fame and chided her fashionable leg o’ mutton sleeves, which he found decadent.
Home of the Week: The decks are stacked in favor of this hilltop Hull estate - Boston.com
Home of the Week: The decks are stacked in favor of this hilltop Hull estate.
Posted: Wed, 09 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Hull House Association closure
Thorstein Veblen eviscerated the idle rich and coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Addams’s closest companion was Mary Rozet Smith, a tall and attractive debutante, trustee of Hull-House, and one of its leading benefactors. Addams referred to their relationship, which lasted 37 years, as a “marriage.” She destroyed many of Smith’s letters.
Discovered disoriented by a young teacher, the girls had their books and white powders confiscated, were administered emetics, and sequestered in their rooms. Jane Addams co-founded one of the first settlements in the United States, the Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, and was named a co-winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. Through Where Women Made History, we are identifying, honoring, and elevating places across the country where women have changed their communities and the world. Post-World War II, there arose a trend to quantify and "scientify" all aspects of what are now recognized as the social sciences.
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Returning to the U.S. in July 1915, she spoke to a peace rally at Carnegie Hall before a largely friendly audience of three thousand people. She ended her speech describing the way liquor was doled out to soldiers before bayonet charges. At age fifty, Addams published her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House.
What is Jane Addams known for?
Born Sept. 6, 1860 in Cedarville, Ill., Jane Addams’ early life was one of privilege and education. The daughter of an affluent, influential family, she graduated Rockford Female Seminary in 1881 an exemplary student and leader.
Maps compiled by residents of Hull-House depicting the wages of a nearby neighborhood. In 1895, Addams had herself appointed garbage inspector, her first paid job. She served on a commission to investigate conditions in the county’s poor house. She helped found the Juvenile Protective Association to keep liquor, tobacco, and indecent postcards out of the hands of minors. Discovering that change required political action, she fought against John Powers—a corrupt alderman uninterested in good government—in three bitterly contested elections while being assailed with hostile and often obscene letters. Map compiled by residents of Hull-House depicting the nationalities of a nearby neighborhood.
During the war she spoke throughout the country in favor of increased food production to aid the starving in Europe. After the armistice she helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, serving as president from 1919 until her death in 1935. She helped establish the Chicago Federation of Settlements, the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers. She was a leader in the Consumers League and served as the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (later known as the National Conference of Social Work). The Museum and its many vibrant programs make connections between the work of Hull-House residents and important contemporary social issues.
Before the conference began, she took a five-day journey, walking through towns devastated by war, passing houses shattered by artillery, and seeing emaciated children everywhere. With Alice Hamilton, she trudged through rain and mud to the cemetery at the Argonne searching for the grave of her favorite nephew, Captain John Linn, who had been killed by shellfire about a month before the armistice. Addams valued immigrants, repudiating restrictions and literacy tests. She believed simultaneously in Americanization and retention of ethnic identity.
Additionally, she lectured on sociology at both the University of Chicago Extension and the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr moved into Hull House on September 18, 1889. They started their program by inviting people living in the area to hear readings from books and to look at slides of paintings. After talking to the visitors from the neighborhood it soon became clear that the women of the area had a desperate need for a place where they could bring their young children.
Hull-House eventually grew into a 13-building complex, laying the foundations for a larger social reform movement in America that still resonates today. In 1887–88 Addams returned to Europe with a Rockford classmate, Ellen Gates Starr. On a visit to the Toynbee Hall settlement house (founded 1884) in the Whitechapel industrial district in London, Addams’s vague leanings toward reform work crystallized. Upon returning to the United States, she and Starr determined to create something like Toynbee Hall. In a working-class immigrant district in Chicago, they acquired a large vacant residence built by Charles Hull in 1856, and, calling it Hull House, they moved into it on September 18, 1889.
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