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Jane Addams and Hull House were pioneers of social reform in the United States. Addams’ efforts, both through Hull House and independently, laid groundwork for women’s rights, children’s rights, workers’ rights, and education still felt today. Settlement houses were established on the principles of Christian Socialism and the Social Gospel, which held the belief that the application of social sciences could address the challenges faced by urban residents in industrialized societies. Consequently, she mobilized teams to investigate social problems in the vicinity of Hull-House. Hull-House gradually expanded to include about a dozen other buildings used for classes and clubs, a nursery school, the only public library in the neighborhood, a playground and one of the first gymnasiums in the country.
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The majority of its original buildings were demolished, but the Hull residence itself was preserved as a monument to Jane Addams. Addams had a heart attack in 1926 and remained unwell for the rest of her life. Thousands of people attended her funeral in the courtyard of Hull-House. She is buried in her family’s plot in Cedarville Cemetery in Cedarvillle, Illionis.
Jane Addams: A Hero for Our Time
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He also suggested she sell her real estate and work in the Hull-House bakery. Julia Lathrop, whom Addams had met at the Rockford Female Seminary, organized a discussion group, the Plato Club. Recognizing a more urgent need—children in jail—Lathrop helped found the country’s first juvenile court.
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Others study her oratory, writing style, and changing religious beliefs. Addams gave up her dream of becoming a doctor, took her father’s generous inheritance, and, with friends and her stepmother, traveled twice to Europe in pursuit of self-cultivation and purpose. But art museums and opera did not give her peace or satisfy her slumbering social conscience.
The building and museum
Simultaneously she reached out to the immigrants of the Nineteenth Ward and practiced the brotherhood she preached. Alice Hamilton fulfilled Jane Addams’s dream by graduating, in 1893, from the University of Michigan’s medical school. Living on and off at Hull-House in the 1890s, Hamilton attempted to identify causes of typhoid and tuberculosis in the surrounding community, became an expert on lead poisoning, and went on to have an exceptional career in public health. Florence Kelley, an avowed socialist, and her three children fled from her abusive husband to Hull-House. Upset with the long hours of working women, Kelley took legislators on tours of sweatshops.
A Few of the Men Who Were Residents of Hull House for at Least Some Time
She was appointed to Chicago’s Board of Education in 1905 and helped found the Chicago school of Civics and Philanthropy before becoming the first female president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. Addams responded to the needs of the community by establishing a nursery, dispensary, kindergarten, playground, gymnasium and cooperative housing for young working women. As an experiment in group living, Hull-House attracted male and female reformers dedicated to social service. Addams always insisted that she learned as much from the neighborhood’s residents as she taught them. Hull House was truly a safe haven, where immigrants could find a sense of community.
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She worked for protective legislation for children and women and advocated for labour reforms. She strove for justice for immigrants and African Americans, and she favoured women’s suffrage. During the two decades following its establishment, Hull House attracted various female figures including Grace and Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Florence Kelley, Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, and Alzina Stevens.
Hull House neighborhood
In the preface of Hull-House Maps and Papers, she mentioned that the residents of the settlement house typically didn't engage in sociological inquiries, which she distinguished from investigations into labor abuses or factory conditions. She expressed her opposition to viewing the neighborhood as a laboratory, emphasizing that Hull-House aimed to assist the neighbors rather than study them.[26] However, she ended up becoming a sociologist. Faderman describes Jane as "probably the first to take the work of female social scientists seriously."[27] She was one of the founding members of the American Sociological Association, established in 1905.
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Jane revered her father, characterizing him as “a man who held converse with great minds.” He introduced her to books, such as Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero Worship, and insisted on the best education for his children. As part of her commitment to finding an end to war, Addams served as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom from to 1929. For her efforts, she shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, an educator and presidential advisor.
In 1910 she became the first woman president of the National Conference of Social Work, and in 1912 she played an active part in the Progressive Party’s presidential campaign for Theodore Roosevelt. At The Hague in 1915 she served as chairman of the International Congress of Women, following which was established the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also involved in the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920.
She went on to establish the National Federation of Settlements the following year, holding that organization's top post for more than two decades thereafter. In 1963, the construction of the University of Illinois' Chicago campus forced Hull House to move its headquarters, and, unfortunately, most of the organization's original buildings were demolished as a result. However, the Hull residence was transformed into a monument honoring Addams that remains standing today. When the buildings and land were sold to the university, the Hull House Association dispersed into multiple locations around Chicago. The Hull House Association closed in 2012 due to financial difficulties with a changing economy and federal program requirements; the museum, unconnected to the Association, remains in operation. The establishment of the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois in 1963 forced the Hull House Association to relocate its headquarters.
Recognizing certain similarities within the United States, Addams and Starr were at once inspired to launch a similar program within urban Chicago. Upon their return to the United States, Addams and Starr established America’s first settlement organization, naming it Hull House after the abandoned Hull Mansion which they acquired on Halsted Street. Motivated to physically improve the putrid conditions of her neighborhood, Jane Addams (pictured here in 1896) arranged to have a garbage incinerator installed at Hull-House and was appointed inspector of garbage in 1895. Addams and her colleagues at Hull-House were not the only critics of poverty during the Gilded Age and the Progressive era. Henry George’s 1879 denunciation of class division, Progress and Poverty, sold millions of copies worldwide. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel, Looking Backward, imagined Boston in the year 2000 where a benevolent government provided universal prosperity and equality.
Kelley was recruited by the state’s new governor, John Peter Altgeld, as the chief factory inspector, and two other women involved in the research, Alzina Stevens and Mary Kenney, also became inspectors. A movement followed in which more than one hundred similar organizations were established nationwide by 1900. By 1911, Chicago itself was home to more than 35 settlement organizations.
Eventually the settlement included 13 buildings and a playground, as well as a camp near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Many prominent social workers and reformers—Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and Grace and Edith Abbott—came to live at Hull House, as did others who continued to make their living in business or the arts while helping Addams in settlement activities. Hull-House Residents made countless strides toward public health reform in Chicago’s 19th Ward, from establishing the city’s first public baths to introducing the first child labor legislation in the state. Using this guide, create and illustrate a zine around a public health issue in your own community. In 1890, Julia Lathrop joined Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr at Hull-House. All three women had been students at Rockford Female Seminary together in the 1880s.
In our less reticent age, skeptical of affectionate female friendships, there is speculation among historians about their relationship. Addams was friendly with and consulted by progressive presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who supported regulating corporations, protecting consumers, improving the environment, and legitimizing unions. Not always serious and priggish, Jane could also be irreverent, even naughty. In her autobiography, she confesses that she and some classmates at the seminary read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey and even went so far as to imitate the author. Hoping to understand De Quincey’s dreams more deeply, Jane and her friends drugged themselves with opium during a long holiday.
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