Table Of Content
The eighth of nine children born to an affluent state senator and businessman, Addams lived a life of privilege. Her father had many important friends, including President Abraham Lincoln. Jane Addams co-founded one of the first settlements in the United States, the Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, in 1889, and was named a co-winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. Addams also served as the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work, established the National Federation of Settlements and served as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Hull House was a settlement house founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 in Chicago, Illinois. The building, originally a home owned by a family named Hull, was being used as a warehouse when Jane Addams and Ellen Starr acquired it.
Jane Addams: Early Life & Education
Cordell Hull shut down after Tennessee Republican leaders were sent an unknown 'white powder' - WPLN
Cordell Hull shut down after Tennessee Republican leaders were sent an unknown 'white powder'.
Posted: Thu, 22 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
After raising enough funds to rent part of the Hull Mansion, Addams and Starr set out to aid the needy immigrants in the Halsted Street area. Hull House opened as a kindergarten but soon expanded to include a day nursery and an infancy care centre. Eventually its educational facilities provided secondary and college-level extension classes as well as evening classes on civil rights and civic duties. Through increased donations more buildings were purchased, and Hull House became a complex, containing a gymnasium, social and cooperative clubs, shops, housing for children, and playgrounds. Hull-House exists today as a social service agency, with locations around the city of Chicago.
Sign up for Inside History
Hull House was the second settlement house to open in the United States, and of the hundreds of similar settlements opened around the country at the time, it was by far the most famous, most influential, and most innovative. Hull House offered residences, as well as a place where immigrants and neighbors could commune, learn, share and acquire the tools that would help them put down roots in their new country. Pick them up during your next visit to the museum or download them below. Jane Addams ran a club for teenage boys and Ellen Starr provided lessons in cooking and sewing for local girls. University teachers, students and social reformers in Chicago were also recruited to provide free lectures on a wide variety of different topics. This all changed in 1914 with the start of World War I. Her dream of increasing internationalism and declining militarism was shattered.
Jane Addams
It circulated the world as a "poster child" of sorts for the Hull House social experiment. On April 5, 1987, over a half century later, the Chicago Sun-Times refuted the contention that the Hull House Boys were of Irish ancestry. In doing so, the Sun-Times article listed the names of each of the young boys.[31] All twenty boys were first-generation Italian-Americans, all with vowels at the end of their names. "They grew up to be lawyers and mechanics, sewer workers and dump truck drivers, a candy shop owner, a boxer and a mob boss."
Hull-House and the ‘Garbage Ladies’ of Chicago
While traveling in Europe, Addams visited Toynbee Hall, a pioneer settlement founded by Canon Samuel A. Barnett in London’s impoverished East End. Finding there a group of university undergraduate residents sharing companionship and working for social reform, she and Starr decided to establish such a settlement in a comparable district in Chicago. Many scholars stress Addams’s relevance, reminding us that we are still debating poverty, patriarchy, racism, immigration, assimilation, and class divisions. In an era of sexual openness, preoccupied with gender and identity, Addams’s personal life is scrutinized, her female friendships celebrated.
Aware of her celebrity, she collected a scrapbook of hundreds of articles extolling her influence. Allen Davis, a sympathetic but critical biographer, writes that Addams was “ambitious,” and “eager for publicity”—an admirable human being, but not just the self-sacrificing saint the public craved. “From the first word to the last,” her niece remembered, “she held the complete attention of her audience.” A woman of conviction, Addams was also a politician and compromiser. Generous, she had spent her inheritance on Hull-House and its many activities. By the mid 1890s and for the rest of her life, she lived off income from her writing and public speaking. Self-possessed, she moved easily among the wealthy and famous, perhaps a result of being born into the upper class of Cedarville.
Newer Ideals of Peace
In addition to publishing 11 books and countless articles on Hull House’s state of affairs and political objectives, Addams also maintained a demanding international lecture schedule which helped to promote and advance similar social movements worldwide. Never repenting her pacifism, Addams spent the last half of her life denouncing war in impassioned speeches and in subtle, convincing articles that gained in relevance as the Great War increasingly seemed futile. Whether her opposition to militarism would have remained steadfast with the challenge of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin will never be known. To the public and most historians, however, she is more revered and remembered as a social reformer than as a critic of war. Americans celebrated business, not reform, corporations, not settlement houses.
Knight disagrees, citing Addams’s unsentimental realism and reminding us that she was very familiar with death and suffering. Students at the Hull-House music school, founded in 1893 by composer and music educator Eleanor Sophie Smith, studied voice as well as an instrument. Smith organized weekly concerts and included songs from the students' homelands in the repertoire. Balanced historians remind us that the squalor of the Nineteenth Ward did not represent all of America. Incomes were rising, trade was increasing, and productivity was surpassing that of Europe.
What were Jane Addams’s accomplishments?
In her autobiography, 20 Years at Hull-House (1910), she argued that society should both respect the values and traditions of immigrants and help the newcomers adjust to American institutions. A new social ethic was needed, she said, to stem social conflict and address the problems of urban life and industrial capitalism. Although tolerant of other ideas and social philosophies, Addams believed in Christian morality and the virtue of learning by doing. Young Addams graduated as valedictorian of Rockford Female Seminary at age 17 in 1881. In January 1961 plans to clear the area for a University of Illinois campus were announced by the city of Chicago. Legal protests by a community group organized to preserve Hull House and the neighbourhood were unsuccessful.
Hull House, one of the first social settlements in North America. It was founded in Chicago in 1889 when Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr rented an abandoned residence at 800 South Halsted Street that had been built by Charles G. Hull in 1856. Twelve large buildings were added from year to year until Hull House covered half a city block and included a nearby playground and a large camp in Wisconsin. Explore historical materials related to social reform and social welfare through the Image Portal. By 1907, Addams had acquired thirteen buildings surrounding Hull's mansion, making Hull House the largest settlement house within North America. Jane Addams ran Hull House as head resident until her death in 1935.
Consequently, sociology was embraced by business and science, with male faculty assuming predominant roles. By 1920, at the University of Chicago, all female professors were transferred from the Sociology Department to the Department of Social Services. All our texts and many of our images appear under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-SA). The Schindler House is laid out as two interlinking "L" shaped apartments (referred to as the Schindler and Chase apartments). Each apartment was designed for a separate family, consisting of 2 studios, connected by a utility room. The utility room was meant to serve the functions of a kitchen, laundry, sewing room, and storage.
The residents were often well-educated women (or men) who would, in their work at the settlement house, advance opportunities for the working class people of the neighborhood. A few years following graduation, Addams took an inspirational trip to England with close friend Ellen Gates Starr, which introduced her to the social philosophy of John Ruskin and to a London settlement house, Toynbee Hall. Toynbee Hall served one of London’s poorest neighborhoods, offering recreation and educational programs. Her experience inspired her to open a settlement house in Chicago. Hull House continued to serve the community surrounding the Halsted location until it was displaced by the urban branch campus of the University of Illinois in the 1960s.
In 1893, Governor Peter Altgeld appointed her Chief Factory Inspector for the state of Illinois, her work contributing to an eight-hour workday for women. Today, interest in Jane Addams is keen, and her reputation is in ascent. Scholars have published three volumes of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, with more volumes to follow.
Engage with Hull-House’s rich history of theater arts, innovated by Progressive Educators Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd, and explore improvisation exercises as a device for storytelling and collaboration in your classroom. No longer just a saint and social worker, scholars now praise Addams as an intellectual and theorist. Her 11 books, hundreds of articles and reviews, and thousands of letters offer academics abundant material for commentary and debate. Some see her as a pioneering sociologist, a contributor to John Dewey’s educational thought and to William James’s pragmatic theory.
Massive, wind-driven blaze destroys seaside home on South Shore - Boston 25 News
Massive, wind-driven blaze destroys seaside home on South Shore.
Posted: Tue, 16 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
As a scholar of heroism and a former teacher of secondary-school students, I am always looking for exemplary lives. Jane absorbed Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero Worship and revered Jo in Little Women. I think of Jane Addams as a hero—a woman of extraordinary achievement, courage, and greatness of soul. I see a role model for today’s youth caught up in a celebrity entertainment culture like the youthful immigrants of the early twentieth century who haunted saloons and movie houses described in Addams’s book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Elected head of the newly formed Women’s Peace Party in 1915, Addams traveled to The Hague in the spring of 1915 to preside over an international conference made up of delegates from both warring and neutral nations. With some of the delegates, she then traveled to the warring nations, meeting foreign ministers, visiting wounded soldiers and grieving mothers, and absorbing the carnage ruining Europe.
In 1963 the trustees of Hull House sold its properties and adopted plans for decentralized operations in other parts of the city. The original Hull mansion and the adjoining dining hall were spared demolition and became a museum. The organization, operating as the Hull House Association, continued to provide various services until 2012, when it closed due to financial difficulties. Eventually, Hull House attracted visitors from all over the world and received international recognition.
No comments:
Post a Comment