Table Of Content
The neighborhood around Hull House was ethnically diverse; a study by the residents of the demographics helped lay the groundwork for scientific sociology. Classes often resonated with the cultural background of the neighbors; John Dewey (the educational philosopher) taught a class on Greek philosophy there to Greek immigrant men, with the aim of what we might call today building self-esteem. Hull House brought theatrical works to the neighborhood, in a theater on the site.
What is Jane Addams known for?
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.
Jane Addams: Early Life & Education
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.
The building and museum
Investigators return to scene of massive blaze in Hull that destroyed home - Boston News, Weather, Sports - Boston News, Weather, Sports WHDH 7News
Investigators return to scene of massive blaze in Hull that destroyed home - Boston News, Weather, Sports.
Posted: Tue, 16 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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.
Buildings
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.
Hull House, Chicago, IL
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.
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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.
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.
Working-class women, such as Kenney and Stevens, who had developed an interest in social reform as a result of their trade union work, played an important role in the education of the middle-class residents at Hull-House. As Kenney was later to say, they “…gave my life new meaning and hope”. Addams believed that effective social reform required the more- and less-fortunate to get to know one another and also required research into the causes of poverty.
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.
Addams opposed the war, remained a pacifist, and became a pariah. She believed in self-discovery, self-discipline, and self-improvement. Her nephew and first biographer, James Weber Linn, pointed to her keen sense of humor. Not a prude, she believed in sex education, but criticized the hedonism of the 1920s and its fascination with Sigmund Freud. Cosmopolitan, she made 12 journeys abroad, despite her intermittent ill health.
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.
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