Hull House
In 1889 Addams and her college friend and paramour Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago. The run-down mansion had been built by Charles Hull in 1856 and needed repairs and upgrading. Addams at first paid for all of the capital expenses (repairing the roof of the porch, repainting the rooms, buying furniture) and most of the operating costs. However gifts from individuals supported the House beginning in its first year and Addams was able to reduce the proportion of her contributions, although the annual budget grew rapidly. Some wealthy women became long-term donors to the House, including Helen Culver, who managed her first cousin Charles Hull's estate, and who eventually allowed the contributors to use the house rent-free. Other contributors were Louise DeKoven Bowen, Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, and others.
Addams and Starr were the first two occupants of the house, which would later become the residence of about 25 women. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by some 2,000 people. Hull House was a center for research, empirical analysis, study, and debate, as well as a pragmatic center for living in and establishing good relations with the neighborhood. Among the aims of Hull House was to give privileged, educated young people contact with the real life of the majority of the population. Residents of Hull House conducted investigations on housing, midwifery, fatigue, tuberculosis, typhoid, garbage collection, cocaine, and truancy. The core Hull House residents were well-educated women bound together by their commitment to labour unions, the National Consumers League and the suffrage movement. Dr. Harriett Alleyne Rice joined Hull House to provide medical treatment for poor families. Its facilities included a night school for adults, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group and a theater, apartments, a library, meeting rooms for discussion, clubs, an employment bureau, and a lunchroom. Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In addition to making available social services and cultural events for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, Hull House became a 13-building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp (known as Bowen Country Club).
One aspect of the Hull House that was very important to Jane Addams was the Art Program. The art program at Hull House allowed Addams to challenge the system of industrialized education, which "fitted" the individual to a specific job or position. She wanted the house to provide a space, time and tools to encourage people to think independently. She saw art as the key to unlocking the diversity of the city through collective interaction, mutual self-discovery, recreation and the imagination. Art was integral to her vision of community, disrupting fixed ideas and stimulating the diversity and interaction on which a healthy society depends, based on a continual rewriting of cultural identities through variation and interculturalism.
With funding from Edward Butler, Addams opened an art exhibition and studio space as one of the first additions to Hull House. On the first floor of the new addition there was a branch of the Chicago Public Library, and the second was the Butler Art Gallery, which featured recreations of famous artwork as well as the work of local artists. Studio space within the art gallery provided both Hull House residents and the entire community with the opportunity to take art classes or to come in and hone their craft whenever they liked. As Hull House grew, and the relationship with the neighborhood deepened, that opportunity became less of a comfort to the poor and more of an outlet of expression and exchange of different cultures and diverse communities. Art and culture was becoming a bigger and more important part of the lives of immigrants within the 19th ward, and soon children caught on to the trend. These working-class children were offered instruction in all forms and levels of art. Places such as the Butler Art Gallery or the Bowen Country Club often hosted these classes, but more informal lessons would often be taught outdoors. Addams, with the help of Ellen Gates Starr, founded the Chicago Public School Art Society (CPSAS) in response to the positive reaction the art classes for children caused. The CPSAS provided public schools with reproductions of world-renowned pieces of art, hired artists to teach children how to create art, and also took the students on field trips to Chicago's many art museums.
The Hull House neighborhood was a mix of European ethnic groups that had immigrated to Chicago around the start of the 20th century. That mix was the ground where Hull House's inner social and philanthropic elitists tested their theories and challenged the establishment. The ethnic mix is recorded by the Bethlehem-Howard Neighborhood Center: "Germans and Jews resided south of that inner core (south of Twelfth Street) ... The Greek delta formed by Harrison, Halsted Street, and Blue Island Streets served as a buffer to the Irish residing to the north and the French Canadians to the northwest." Italians resided within the inner core of the Hull House Neighborhood ... from the river on the east end, on out to the western ends of what came to be known as Little Italy. Greeks and Jews, along with the remnants of other immigrant groups, began their exodus from the neighborhood in the early 20th century. Only Italians continued as an intact and thriving community through the Great Depression, World War II, and well beyond the ultimate d three "ethical principles" for social settlements: "to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy, that is, egalitarian, or democratic, social relations across class lines." Thus Hull House offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world, including William Lyon Mackenzie King, a graduate student from Harvard University who later became prime minister of Canada. In the 1890s Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents of the house made it a world center of social reform activity. Hull House used the latest methodology (pioneering in statistical mapping) to study overcrowding, truancy, typhoid fever, cocaine, children's reading, newsboys, infant mortality, and midwifery. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city and statewide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women. Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. In 1912, she helped start the new Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt.
"Addams' philosophy combined feminist sensibilities with an unwavering commitment to social improvement through cooperative efforts. Although she sympathized with feminists, socialists, and pacifists, Addams refused to be labeled. This refusal was pragmatic rather than ideological."
Hull House stressed the importance of the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants. This philosophy also fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth. Hull House featured multiple programs in art and drama, kindergarten classes, boys' and girls' clubs, language classes, reading groups, college extension courses, along with public baths, a gymnasium, a labor museum and playground, all within a free-speech atmosphere. They were all designed to foster democratic cooperation, collective action and downplay individualism. She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws.
Along with her colleagues from Hull House, in 1901 Jane Addams founded what would become the Juvenile Protective Association. JPA provided the first probation officers for the first Juvenile Court in the United States until this became a government function. From 1907 until the 1940s, JPA engaged in many studies examining such subjects as racism, child labor and exploitation, drug abuse and prostitution in Chicago and their effects on child development. Through the years, their mission has now become improving the social and emotional well-being and functioning of vulnerable children so they can reach their fullest potential at home, in school, and in their communities.
Addams and her colleagues documented the communal geography of typhoid fever and reported that poor workers were bearing the brunt of the illness. She identified the political corruption and business avarice that caused the city bureaucracy to ignore health, sanitation, and building codes. Linking environmental justice and municipal reform, she eventually defeated the bosses and fostered a more equitable distribution of city services and modernized inspection practices. Addams spoke of the "undoubted powers of public recreation to bring together the classes of a community in the keeping them apart." Addams worked with the Chicago Board of Health and served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America.
In 1912, Addams published A New Conscience and Ancient Evil, about prostitution. This book was extremely popular. Addams believed that prostitution was a result of kidnapping only. Her book later inspired Stella Wynne Herron's 1916 short story Shoes, which Lois Weber adapted into a groundbreaking 1916 film of the same name.
Addams and her colleagues originally intended Hull House as a transmission device to bring the values of the college-educated high culture to the masses, including the Efficiency Movement, a major movement in industrial nations in the early 20th century that sought to identify and eliminate waste in the economy and society, and to develop and implement best practices. However, over time, the focus changed from bringing art and culture to the neighborhood (as evidenced in the construction of the Butler Building) to responding to the needs of the community by providing childcare, educational opportunities, and large meeting spaces. Hull House became more than a proving ground for the new generation of college-educated, professional women: it also became part of the community in which it was founded, and its development reveals a shared history.
Addams called on women, especially middle-class women with leisure time and energy as well as rich philanthropists, to exercise their civic duty to become involved in municipal affairs as a matter of "civic housekeeping". Addams thereby enlarged the concept of civic duty to include roles for women beyond motherhood (which involved child rearing). Women's lives revolved around "responsibility, care, and obligation", which represented the source of women's power. This notion provided the foundation for the municipal or civil housekeeping role that Addams defined and gave added weight to the women's suffrage movement that Addams supported. Addams argued that women, as opposed to men, were trained in the delicate matters of human welfare and needed to build upon their traditional roles of housekeeping to be civic housekeepers. Enlarged housekeeping duties involved reform efforts regarding poisonous sewage, impure milk (which often carried tuberculosis), smoke-laden air, and unsafe factory conditions. Addams led the "garbage wars"; in 1894 she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago's 19th Ward. With the help of the Hull House Women's Club, within a year over 1,000 health department violations were reported to city council and garbage collection reduced death and disease.
Addams had long discussions with philosopher John Dewey in which they redefined democracy in terms of pragmatism and civic activism, with an emphasis more on duty and less on rights. The two leading perspectives that distinguished Addams and her coalition from the modernizers more concerned with efficiency were the need to extend to social and economic life the democratic structures and practices that had been limited to the political sphere, as in Addams's programmatic support of trade unions and second, their call for a new social ethic to supplant the individualist outlook as being no longer adequate in modern society.
Addams's construction of womanhood involved daughterhood, sexuality, wifehood, and motherhood. In both of her autobiographical volumes, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), Addams's gender constructions parallel the Progressive-Era ideology she championed. In A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912) she dissected the social pathology of sex slavery, prostitution and other sexual behaviors among working-class women in American industrial centers from 1890 to 1910. Addams's autobiographical persona manifests her ideology and supports her popularized public activist persona as the "Mother of Social Work", in the sense that she represents herself as a celibate matron who served the suffering immigrant masses through Hull House, as if they were her own children. Although not a mother herself, Addams became the "mother to the nation", identified with motherhood in the sense of protective care of her people.
