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Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes
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298 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1910
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About the author
Jane Addams
197 books83 followersAmerican social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams in 1889 founded Hull house, a care and education center for the poor of Chicago, and in 1931 shared the Nobel Prize for peace.
Her mother died when she was two years old in 1862, and her father and later a stepmother reared her. She graduated from Rockford female seminary in 1881, among the first students to take a course of study equivalent to that of men at other institutions. Her father, whom she admired tremendously, died in that same year, 1881.
Jane Addams attended medical college of woman in Pennsylvania but, probably due to her ill health and chronic back pain, left. She toured Europe from 1883 to 1885 and then lived in Baltimore until 1887 but figure out not what she wanted with her education and skills.
In 1888, on a visit to England with her Rockford classmate Ellen Gates Starr, Jane Addams visited Toynbee Settlement Hall and London's East End. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr planned to start an American equivalent of that settlement house. After their return they chose Hull mansion, a building which had, though originally built at the edge of the city, become surrounded by an immigrant neighborhood and had been used as a warehouse.
Using an experimental model of reform -- trying solutions to see what would work -- and committed to full- and part-time residents to keep in touch with the neighborhood's real needs, Jane Addams built Hull-House into an institution known worldwide. Addams wrote articles, lectured widely and did most of the fund-raising personally and served on many social work, social welfare and settlement house boards and commissions.
Jane Addams also became involved in wider efforts for social reform, including housing and sanitation issues, factory inspection, rights of immigrants, women and children, pacifism and the 8-hour day. She served as a Vice President of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1911-1914.
In 1912, Jane Addams campaigned for the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Teddy Roosevelt. She worked with the Peace Party, helped found and served as president (1919-1935) of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
In 1931 Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, but her health was too fragile to attend the European ceremonies to accept the prize. She was the second woman to be awarded that honor.
By Jone Johnson Lewis, About.com
Her mother died when she was two years old in 1862, and her father and later a stepmother reared her. She graduated from Rockford female seminary in 1881, among the first students to take a course of study equivalent to that of men at other institutions. Her father, whom she admired tremendously, died in that same year, 1881.
Jane Addams attended medical college of woman in Pennsylvania but, probably due to her ill health and chronic back pain, left. She toured Europe from 1883 to 1885 and then lived in Baltimore until 1887 but figure out not what she wanted with her education and skills.
In 1888, on a visit to England with her Rockford classmate Ellen Gates Starr, Jane Addams visited Toynbee Settlement Hall and London's East End. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr planned to start an American equivalent of that settlement house. After their return they chose Hull mansion, a building which had, though originally built at the edge of the city, become surrounded by an immigrant neighborhood and had been used as a warehouse.
Using an experimental model of reform -- trying solutions to see what would work -- and committed to full- and part-time residents to keep in touch with the neighborhood's real needs, Jane Addams built Hull-House into an institution known worldwide. Addams wrote articles, lectured widely and did most of the fund-raising personally and served on many social work, social welfare and settlement house boards and commissions.
Jane Addams also became involved in wider efforts for social reform, including housing and sanitation issues, factory inspection, rights of immigrants, women and children, pacifism and the 8-hour day. She served as a Vice President of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1911-1914.
In 1912, Jane Addams campaigned for the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Teddy Roosevelt. She worked with the Peace Party, helped found and served as president (1919-1935) of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
In 1931 Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, but her health was too fragile to attend the European ceremonies to accept the prize. She was the second woman to be awarded that honor.
By Jone Johnson Lewis, About.com
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April 29, 2014
After reading "Atlas Shrugged" I spent a year in the circle-jerk libertarian mindset. Then I picked up this book and it slapped me silly and told me I was an idiot and completely ignorant of the way the world worked. If I had to pick out one book that made me a better person, it's this one.
February 5, 2016
This book has been read and reviewed a lot, so this won't really be a review so much as a short reflection. I came to Jane Addams late, after first encountering her sort of peripherally through the guy all educators are introduced to, John Dewey, one of her best friends, who wrote Democracy and Education and Experience and Education and close to 90 other books. One of the greatest thinkers of all time, with great ideas. But I am quite sure he would not have been able to write as he does without Addams.
Dewey, like William James, was a pragmatist philosopher, which is to say they were opposed to typical abstract analytical philosophy. Their approach was more. . . pragmatic or utilitarian. What possible effects in the real world do your believing one thing over another have? What good is it to think that way? So what? A show me anti-philosophy, more a method of thinking of ideas than philosophy, really.
But James and Dewey are, for all of their useful approaches and ideas, not that engaging as writers. They write as philosophers. Addams is a storyteller, a social worker, with no time for abstract discussions. Dewey and James talked and Addams walked, or she walked the talk. She DID pragmatism and they watched her do it and refined their ideas through her actions. She refined her ideas herself through her work there at Chicago's Halsted Street Hull House Settlement. She came in with ideas, realized she didn't know what she was doing, began to listen to everyone there in this community and shaped the settlement in terms of a conversation, not her own preconceived notions of social change.
And Twenty Years at Hull House, one of her several books, is a memoir of the first twenty years of her work with many other people. Addams won international acclaim and the Nobel Peace Prize and she deserved all the honors she got, but she could not have done it without Marxist labor activist Florence Kelley and so many others who shaped and reshaped her views. They did it together. She was disrespected by the academics and the just foreign disciplines like sociology, and the University of Chicago in particular because she was a WOMAN and a storyteller in a time (that is also true today) when story was seen as less than rigorous and scientific. We need Addams more than ever.
My students in this most recent class were astonished by her story and feel in love with her and what she has to say today about social action and reform and justice for the poor, for immigrants. This happens every time I teach her work. Highly recommended for anyone doing work in similar areas.
Dewey, like William James, was a pragmatist philosopher, which is to say they were opposed to typical abstract analytical philosophy. Their approach was more. . . pragmatic or utilitarian. What possible effects in the real world do your believing one thing over another have? What good is it to think that way? So what? A show me anti-philosophy, more a method of thinking of ideas than philosophy, really.
But James and Dewey are, for all of their useful approaches and ideas, not that engaging as writers. They write as philosophers. Addams is a storyteller, a social worker, with no time for abstract discussions. Dewey and James talked and Addams walked, or she walked the talk. She DID pragmatism and they watched her do it and refined their ideas through her actions. She refined her ideas herself through her work there at Chicago's Halsted Street Hull House Settlement. She came in with ideas, realized she didn't know what she was doing, began to listen to everyone there in this community and shaped the settlement in terms of a conversation, not her own preconceived notions of social change.
And Twenty Years at Hull House, one of her several books, is a memoir of the first twenty years of her work with many other people. Addams won international acclaim and the Nobel Peace Prize and she deserved all the honors she got, but she could not have done it without Marxist labor activist Florence Kelley and so many others who shaped and reshaped her views. They did it together. She was disrespected by the academics and the just foreign disciplines like sociology, and the University of Chicago in particular because she was a WOMAN and a storyteller in a time (that is also true today) when story was seen as less than rigorous and scientific. We need Addams more than ever.
My students in this most recent class were astonished by her story and feel in love with her and what she has to say today about social action and reform and justice for the poor, for immigrants. This happens every time I teach her work. Highly recommended for anyone doing work in similar areas.
April 26, 2017
I first learned of Jane Addams and Hull House when I read the biography of Frances Perkins (FDR’s Labor Secretary and the first woman to serve on the Cabinet) because she got her start in social work as a Hull House resident. The philosophy of the place was to house and serve the poor, but its founder Jane Addams and residents like Frances Perkins lived there, too, without class distinction. Many of the beneficiaries were immigrants and were therefore educated by the American-born residents, but the American born residents, and certainly Jane Addams, were open to learning from the immigrants, too. It was an egalitarian approach, and Addams wrote eloquently about the problems of class privilege, particularly for young women. They were educated on noble and democratic values and spared from much menial labor, but without it, they were losing touch not just with life for the less privileged but with essential parts of themselves. And if they went on, as Frances Perkins did, to become managers of social services, they had already become accustomed to seeing the problems and their solutions from the bottom up and not the top down.
Another Goodreads reviewer said that he used to be a libertarian, but then he read Addams’ descriptions of working conditions in the days before the child labor laws and the eight-hour workday, and that “slapped him silly” and set him straight. This book will definitely have that effect on you, even if you don’t lean libertarian. You will also be tremendously impressed by Jane Addams for what she accomplished. She was both supremely kind yet completely down-to-earth. In the course of the book, she visits Leo Tolstoy at his collective farm in Russia. He influenced not just her, but Gandhi, the kibbutz movement, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, which is a heck of a track record, but he came across as self-righteous when he chastised her for having too much fabric on her shirt sleeves. I can’t imagine Jane Addams ever doing that to anybody.
The one flaw in this book is the stiff prose style. Jane Addams was no Jane Austen. So while this isn’t a very long book, it can be a slow read. This particular edition was especially bad because there were no tabs, so new paragraphs kind of snuck up on me. Call me a nitpicker, but that bogged me down. Even still, I recommend the book just for what Jane Addams accomplished at Hull House. This country, if not the world at large, needs more Hull Houses.
Another Goodreads reviewer said that he used to be a libertarian, but then he read Addams’ descriptions of working conditions in the days before the child labor laws and the eight-hour workday, and that “slapped him silly” and set him straight. This book will definitely have that effect on you, even if you don’t lean libertarian. You will also be tremendously impressed by Jane Addams for what she accomplished. She was both supremely kind yet completely down-to-earth. In the course of the book, she visits Leo Tolstoy at his collective farm in Russia. He influenced not just her, but Gandhi, the kibbutz movement, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, which is a heck of a track record, but he came across as self-righteous when he chastised her for having too much fabric on her shirt sleeves. I can’t imagine Jane Addams ever doing that to anybody.
The one flaw in this book is the stiff prose style. Jane Addams was no Jane Austen. So while this isn’t a very long book, it can be a slow read. This particular edition was especially bad because there were no tabs, so new paragraphs kind of snuck up on me. Call me a nitpicker, but that bogged me down. Even still, I recommend the book just for what Jane Addams accomplished at Hull House. This country, if not the world at large, needs more Hull Houses.
November 1, 2024
It blows my mind how some people do so much with the time they are given, contributing to the people around them in ways that enhance their lives and wellbeing, moving the needle in social policy and forging action and engagement of others to participate. Addams was one such, and this book is a testament in many ways that her energy, attention, curiosity, courage, and moral depth blended issues of the whole big wide world and made a positive difference in Chicago, the piece of the world where she could pour her energy and love.
Really amazing. Nobel laureate, Peace, 1931.
Really amazing. Nobel laureate, Peace, 1931.
July 2, 2010
The first part of this book is simply beautiful. In it Addams provides a strange and insightful look at what it was like to grow up the daughter of a well-off miller in rural Cedarville, Illinois in the 19th century. Surprisingly for a Victorian-era social reformer, she's eminently relatable and self-reflective. She describes in detail things like a nightmare she had as a young girl where everyone in the world was dead except her, and the world depended upon her solitary work as a blacksmith to start it up again. She is able to recognize in this the early delusions of grandeur so common to children, and a sense of her own impotence she carried into the women's seminary and beyond. She discusses how her later educational tours of Europe furthered her charitable and democratic sensibilities (along with her hope for a non-religious "cathedral of humanity" to unite all mankind), and yet she also realizes that this excessive education was only part of what Tolstoy called "the snare of preparation," that chilling sense that infinite training only impedes real life and action. Addams saw that she (and the other over-educated and underemployed women of her generation) needed real vigorous action, especially in public life, to feel like worthwhile members of society. So, she starts the Hull Street Settlement House. Overall, it is the best psychological description of what motivated a Progressive reformer, or just a charitable life, that I've ever read.
Unfortunately, the other half of the book tends to ramble. She certainly has loads of interesting stories, from the time Hull House challenged its corrupt local aldermen in the Chicago city elections, to the time they set up a "Museum of Labor" to teach immigrant children about their parents' crafts in the Old World, to the time she visited that Mecca of reformers, Tolstoy's farm at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia (he eats a porridge of gruel with them after coming in from working on the farm with his peasants. He is less than personable). But most of these stories have a predictable pattern; they are finished in two pages and then move on to an almost completely unrelated one. Some, like her attempts to pass a law forbidding pharmacies from selling cocaine to minors, are interesting, others, less so.
I highly recommend reading the first half, and the second you can take or leave. It's 50% a classic.
Unfortunately, the other half of the book tends to ramble. She certainly has loads of interesting stories, from the time Hull House challenged its corrupt local aldermen in the Chicago city elections, to the time they set up a "Museum of Labor" to teach immigrant children about their parents' crafts in the Old World, to the time she visited that Mecca of reformers, Tolstoy's farm at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia (he eats a porridge of gruel with them after coming in from working on the farm with his peasants. He is less than personable). But most of these stories have a predictable pattern; they are finished in two pages and then move on to an almost completely unrelated one. Some, like her attempts to pass a law forbidding pharmacies from selling cocaine to minors, are interesting, others, less so.
I highly recommend reading the first half, and the second you can take or leave. It's 50% a classic.
January 25, 2015
While I rate the book a three, I rate Jane Addams herself a five. She was born privileged and after graduating from college and spending time in Europe she felt herself to be useless; all this book knowledge but not doing anything actually of use in the world. She always did want to live among and help the poor and this is what she eventually does. She buys a big house in one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago and sets out to be of use. This book chronicles the first twenty years of the settlement house she founds, Hull-House.
They start out with a kindergarten and tackle problems from there.
She explains
"It is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social intercourse that all men feel."
In this way Jane Addams and her staff at the settlement house set out to see that a social infrastructure is put into place to accomplish these things. Sometimes she is taken for a radical because she is calling for reformation in labor law, business practice, education, and enforcement of existing laws. She is viewed with distrust by some businessmen and men in political power.
She says this,
"There is a certain common-sense foundation for this distrust, for too often the reformer is the rebel who defies things as they are, because of the restraints which they impose upon his individual desires rather than because of the general defects of the system. When such a rebel poses for a reformer, his short-comings are heralded to the world, and his downfall is cherished as an awful warning to those who refuse to worship "the god of things as they are". ... "In discussion of these themes, Hull-House was of course quite as much under the suspicion of one side as the other. I remember one night when I addressed a club of secularists,... a rough-looking man called out, "You are all right now, but mark my words, when you are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like this." The defense of free speech was s sensitive point with me, and I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either of them. To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into applause, and the discussion turned upon the need of resisting tyranny wherever found, if democratic institutions were to endure."
The most amusing part of the book in my opinion was her visit to Tolstoy at his farm in Russia. He was gruff and unfriendly, commented on the extravagance of her dress, called her an absentee landlord, ate black bread and gruel for dinner while his guests ate European food. He asks her "Do you think you will help the people more by adding yourself to the crowded city than you would be tilling your own soil?" Jane is somewhat distraught and determines to spend two hours every morning at Hull House baking bread into order to do 'bread labor'. It is only when she returns to Hull-House and sees all that needs her attention does she come out of her Tolstoy induced bread-labor fixation and get on with all the social reforms and cultural programs etc. that Hull-House is involved in. The existence of Hull-House and its good works are her job, the baker at Hull-House bakes the bread, and all is as it should be.
Jane Addams deserves more study and acknowledgement than she receives. I don't recall learning about Settlement Houses nor about Jane Addams in school. So many social changes were brought about because of her tireless efforts.
The last quarter of this book is hard to read as it reads more like a dry list of accomplishments rather than a living story which is why I rated the book a three.
They start out with a kindergarten and tackle problems from there.
She explains
"It is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social intercourse that all men feel."
In this way Jane Addams and her staff at the settlement house set out to see that a social infrastructure is put into place to accomplish these things. Sometimes she is taken for a radical because she is calling for reformation in labor law, business practice, education, and enforcement of existing laws. She is viewed with distrust by some businessmen and men in political power.
She says this,
"There is a certain common-sense foundation for this distrust, for too often the reformer is the rebel who defies things as they are, because of the restraints which they impose upon his individual desires rather than because of the general defects of the system. When such a rebel poses for a reformer, his short-comings are heralded to the world, and his downfall is cherished as an awful warning to those who refuse to worship "the god of things as they are". ... "In discussion of these themes, Hull-House was of course quite as much under the suspicion of one side as the other. I remember one night when I addressed a club of secularists,... a rough-looking man called out, "You are all right now, but mark my words, when you are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like this." The defense of free speech was s sensitive point with me, and I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either of them. To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into applause, and the discussion turned upon the need of resisting tyranny wherever found, if democratic institutions were to endure."
The most amusing part of the book in my opinion was her visit to Tolstoy at his farm in Russia. He was gruff and unfriendly, commented on the extravagance of her dress, called her an absentee landlord, ate black bread and gruel for dinner while his guests ate European food. He asks her "Do you think you will help the people more by adding yourself to the crowded city than you would be tilling your own soil?" Jane is somewhat distraught and determines to spend two hours every morning at Hull House baking bread into order to do 'bread labor'. It is only when she returns to Hull-House and sees all that needs her attention does she come out of her Tolstoy induced bread-labor fixation and get on with all the social reforms and cultural programs etc. that Hull-House is involved in. The existence of Hull-House and its good works are her job, the baker at Hull-House bakes the bread, and all is as it should be.
Jane Addams deserves more study and acknowledgement than she receives. I don't recall learning about Settlement Houses nor about Jane Addams in school. So many social changes were brought about because of her tireless efforts.
The last quarter of this book is hard to read as it reads more like a dry list of accomplishments rather than a living story which is why I rated the book a three.
August 27, 2010
As with all of my very favorite books, it's difficult for me to put into words what "Twenty Years at Hull-House" meant to me.
Although I am not generally a big annotator, I was kicking myself for checking this out of the library and not having bought my own copy so that I couldn't underline, write notes, etc. At the same time, I couldn't keep myself from reading it until I bought a copy. All in all this was not too upsetting, because I definitely intend to read this book again in the future, probably more than once.
The clearest thing that I can say is that Jane Addams is the first historical figure I have ever encountered who I really consider to be a role model. There are plenty of historical figures who I admire, respect, or even look up to, but what makes JA different for me is that I see in her the best possible version of my own type of character. She is someone who I feel I can truly aspire to be like because to be like her wouldn't require any fundamental changes to my values, beliefs, or circumstances; only to make the most of them. When I read her writing, on nearly every subject, I find myself both agreeing and feeling like she is expanding my understanding, sort of like talking to a good friend.
I would strongly encourage anyone to read this book. It's actually old enough that it's in the public domain and available for free online (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/wome...), but I'll warn you that you might wish you had a margin to take notes in. I'd also encourage reading the entry on her in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, which was the first place where I really encountered her (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/add...).
She speaks much more eloquently for herself, but I'll give a little description of what I find so compelling here. She lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and founded a "settlement" called Hull-House in the immigrant slums of Chicago. It's not easy to give a concise definition of a settlement, because part of what's important is that it be multifarious and always open to experimentation, but at its most basic the idea is that it is a place where people from privileged backgrounds live in an underprivileged neighborhood, hopefully to the benefit of both. Hull-House was a center for all sorts of social, intellectual, and artistic programs, really an innovator in many things that have today the government has taken on.
I like JA for her pragmatism. She spends a fair amount of time in the book talking about Tolstoy, who took a much more extreme position on poverty (and walked the walk), but ends up finding herself parting ways with him. I also like her for her commitment to applied work. In some ways this may have been forced on her by cultural circumstances (being a woman in the early twentieth century), but I also think it's an important part of her character. As the SEP article shows, she was an accomplished philosopher in her own right, as creative a thinker as her friend John Dewey (for example). In my opinion she walked the perfect line between intellectual and practitioner.
Aside from my deep admiration for JA herself, I also took away from this book an interesting perspective on American history. Much of her writing on social issues seemed almost shockingly modern to me in its concerns--for instance the passages on public education. She also spends a significant amount of time writing about Abraham Lincoln, who was a major intellectual and character influence on her, and this section drew for me a sense of continuity from Lincoln and abolitionism through the Progressive era that I had never seen or thought about before.
Although I am not generally a big annotator, I was kicking myself for checking this out of the library and not having bought my own copy so that I couldn't underline, write notes, etc. At the same time, I couldn't keep myself from reading it until I bought a copy. All in all this was not too upsetting, because I definitely intend to read this book again in the future, probably more than once.
The clearest thing that I can say is that Jane Addams is the first historical figure I have ever encountered who I really consider to be a role model. There are plenty of historical figures who I admire, respect, or even look up to, but what makes JA different for me is that I see in her the best possible version of my own type of character. She is someone who I feel I can truly aspire to be like because to be like her wouldn't require any fundamental changes to my values, beliefs, or circumstances; only to make the most of them. When I read her writing, on nearly every subject, I find myself both agreeing and feeling like she is expanding my understanding, sort of like talking to a good friend.
I would strongly encourage anyone to read this book. It's actually old enough that it's in the public domain and available for free online (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/wome...), but I'll warn you that you might wish you had a margin to take notes in. I'd also encourage reading the entry on her in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, which was the first place where I really encountered her (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/add...).
She speaks much more eloquently for herself, but I'll give a little description of what I find so compelling here. She lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and founded a "settlement" called Hull-House in the immigrant slums of Chicago. It's not easy to give a concise definition of a settlement, because part of what's important is that it be multifarious and always open to experimentation, but at its most basic the idea is that it is a place where people from privileged backgrounds live in an underprivileged neighborhood, hopefully to the benefit of both. Hull-House was a center for all sorts of social, intellectual, and artistic programs, really an innovator in many things that have today the government has taken on.
I like JA for her pragmatism. She spends a fair amount of time in the book talking about Tolstoy, who took a much more extreme position on poverty (and walked the walk), but ends up finding herself parting ways with him. I also like her for her commitment to applied work. In some ways this may have been forced on her by cultural circumstances (being a woman in the early twentieth century), but I also think it's an important part of her character. As the SEP article shows, she was an accomplished philosopher in her own right, as creative a thinker as her friend John Dewey (for example). In my opinion she walked the perfect line between intellectual and practitioner.
Aside from my deep admiration for JA herself, I also took away from this book an interesting perspective on American history. Much of her writing on social issues seemed almost shockingly modern to me in its concerns--for instance the passages on public education. She also spends a significant amount of time writing about Abraham Lincoln, who was a major intellectual and character influence on her, and this section drew for me a sense of continuity from Lincoln and abolitionism through the Progressive era that I had never seen or thought about before.
March 16, 2012
I truly believe that I should be given some sort of prize for reading this book. It was an incredible bore and many times I found myself half way down the page when, to my chagrin, I would realize I'd been thinking about what I'd make for dinner and I'd have to start all over again at the top. Other times I just plunged ahead. There were a few amusing bits such as when Miss Addams gloats over her achievement of getting Chicago drug stores to stop selling cocaine to children.
May 8, 2015
Some scattered thoughts: I don't often have a desire to meet authors, even of my favorite books, because I can't imagine what we'd talk about really. But Jane Addams is somehow a different matter - her graciousness shines through her writing and her concerns for each individual among the urban masses, her eye for their potential, whether nourished in wealth or stunted in poverty or vice versa, and her creativity in seeking if not solution, at least amelioration, to struggle or wound.... She was a remarkable woman. In her words I see continued, though not continuously naive, hope along with an intention to keep walking forward in her work, no matter what new challenge arose. In her work there is such a close acquaintanceship with the people she seeks to serve in community. So much of what she wrote I've seen spoken and written of in current development circles and in new monasticism writings as "new" or at least not seen for a few centuries - a good reminder of the words of Ecclesiastes, but also an encouragement that, even if not new, there is sometimes something to be said for tried and true. This book is what it claims to be - not theory but an account of various kinds of efforts springing from Hull House, its residents and environs. It is not jaw dropping, and is often ordinary, and yet through that it leaves behind its inspiration.
--------------------
Some passages that struck me in various ways. I'm leaving out that her 6th chapter in its entirety is a fascinating reprint of a speech she gave toward the beginning of her time at Hull-House.
Chapter 12: Tolstoyism
Chapter 13: Activities and Investigations
in this last one and in several other examples that she gives of similar obtuseness among landlords (to be fair she also gives examples of landlords who were unaware of serious problems in the buildings they owned and, once made aware, sought more than one creative solution to the problems), she never ceases to speak of them as human beings and, indeed, as neighbors - foolish neighbors with serious problems on their doorstep, but neighbors nonetheless - her tone remains charitable.
--------------------
Some passages that struck me in various ways. I'm leaving out that her 6th chapter in its entirety is a fascinating reprint of a speech she gave toward the beginning of her time at Hull-House.
Chapter 12: Tolstoyism
We had letters of introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer Maude of Moscow, since well known as the translators of Resurrection and other of Tolstoy's later works, who at that moment were on the eve of leaving Russia in order to form an agricultural colony in South England where they might support themselves by the labor of their hands. We gladly accepted Mr. Maude's offer to take us to Yasnaya Plyana and to introduce us to Count Tolstoy, and never did a disciple journey toward his master with more enthusiasm than did our guide. When, however, Mr. Maude actually presented Miss Smith and myself to Count Tolstoy, knowing well his master's attitude toward philanthropy, he endeavored to make Hull-House appear much more noble and unique than I should have ventured to do.
Tolstoy, standing by clad in his peasant garb, listened gravely but, glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my traveling gown which unfortunately at that season were monstrous in size, he took hold of an edge and pulling out one sleeve to an interminable breadth, said quite simply that "there was enough stuff on one arm to make a frock for a little girl," and asked me directly if I did not find "such a dress" a "barrier to the people." I was too disconcerted to make a very clear explanation, although I tried to say that monstrous as my sleeves were they did not compare in size with those of the working girls in Chicago and that nothing would more effectively separate me from "the people" than a cotton blouse following the simple lines of the human form; even if I had wished to imitate him and "dress as a peasant," it would have been hard to choose which peasant among the thirty-six nationalities we had recently counted in our ward. Fortunately the countess came to my rescue with a recital of her former attempts to clothe hypothetical little girls in yards of material cut from a train and other superfluous parts of her best gown until she had been driven to a firm stand which she advised me to take at once. But neither Countess Tolstoy nor any other friend was on hand to help me out of my predicament later, when I was asked who "fed" me, and how did I obtain "shelter"? Upon my reply that a farm a hundred miles from Chicago supplied me with the necessities of life, I fairly anticipated the next scathing question: "So you are an absentee landlord? Do you think you will help the people more by adding yourself to the crowded city than you would by tilling your own soil?" This new sense of discomfort over a failure to till my own soil was increased when Tolstoy's second daughter appeared at the five-o'clock tea table set under the trees, coming straight from the harvest field where she had been working with a group of peasants since five o'clock in the morning, not pretending to work but really taking the place of a peasant woman who had hurt her foot. She was plainly much exhausted, but neither expected nor received sympathy from the members of a family who were quite accustomed to see each other carry out their convictions in spite of discomfort and fatigue. The martyrdom of discomfort, however, was obviously much easier to bear than that to which, even to the eyes of the casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule which is the most difficult form of martyrdom.
That summer evening as we sat in the garden with a group of visitors from Germany, from England, and America, who had traveled to the remote Russian village that they might learn of this man, one could not forbear the constant inquiry to one's self, as to why he was so regarded as sage and saint that this party of people should be repeated each day of the year. It seemed to me then that we were all attracted by this sermon of the deed, because Tolstoy had made the one supreme personal effort, one might almost say the one frantic personal effort, to put himself into right relations with the humblest people, with the men who tilled his soil, blacked his boots, and cleaned his stables. Doubtless the heaviest burden of our contemporaries is a consciousness of a divergence between our democratic theory on the one hand, that working people have aright to the intellectual resources of society, and the actual fact on the other hand, that thousands of them are so overburdened with toil that there is no leisure nor energy left for the cultivation of the mind. We constantly suffered from the strain and indecision of believing this theory and acting as if we did not believe it, and this man who years before had tried "to get off the backs of the peasants," who had at least simplified his life and worked with his hands, had come to be a prototype to many of his generation.... So far...from considering his time too valuable to be spent in labor in the field or in making shoes, our great host was too eager to know life to be willing to give up this companionship of mutual labor. One instinctively found reasons why it was easier for a Russian than for the rest of us to reach this conclusion; the Russian peasants have a proverb which says: "Labor is the house that love lives in," by which they mean that no two people nor group of people can come into affectionate relations with each other unless they carry on together a mutual task, and when the Russian peasant talks of labor he means labor on the soil, or, to use the phrase of the great peasant, Bondereff, "bread labor." Those monastic orders founded upon agricultural labor, those philosophical experiments like Brook Farm and many another have attempted to reduce to action this same truth. Tolstoy himself has written many times his own convictions and attempts in this direction, perhaps never more tellingly than in the description of Levin's morning spent in the harvest field, when he lost his sense of grievance and isolation and felt a strange new brother hood for the peasants, in proportion as the rhythmic motion of his scythe became one with theirs....
With that inner sense of mortification with which one finds one's self at difference with he great authority, I recalled the conviction of the early Hull-House residents; that whatever of good the Settlement had to offer should be put into positive terms, that we might live with opposition to no man, with recognition of the good in every man, even the most wretched. We had often departed from this principle, but had it not in every case been a confession of weakness, and had we not always found antagonism a foolish and unwarrantable expenditure of energy?
The conversation at dinner and afterward, although conducted with animation and sincerity for the moment stirred vague misgiving within me. Was Tolstoy more logical than life warrants? Could the wrongs of life be reduced to the terms of unrequited labor and all be made right if each person performed the amount necessary to satisfy his own wants? Was it not always easy to put up a strong case if one took the naturalistic view of life? But what about the historic view, the inevitable shadings and modifications which life itself brings to its own interpretation?... (191-6)
I remember that through the sight of those toiling peasants [in the fields in Germany, seen on the trip back to western Europe], I made a curious connection between the bread labor advocated by Tolstoy and the comfort the harvest fields are said to have once brought to Luther when, much perturbed by many theological difficulties, he suddenly forgot them all in a gush of gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming, "How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again!" At least the toiling poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they walked in the path of labor. In the exercise of that curious power possessed by the theorist to inhibit all experiences which do not enhance his doctrine, I did not permit myself to recall that which I knew so well - that exigent and unremitting labor grants the poor no leisure even in the supreme moments of human suffering and that "all griefs are lighter with bread." (196)
Chapter 13: Activities and Investigations
It was at the end of the second year that we received a visit from the warden of Toynbee Hall and his wife, as they were returning to England from a journey around the world. They had lived in East London for many years, and had been identified with the public movements for its betterment. They were much shocked that, in a new country with conditions still plastic and hopeful, so little attention had been paid to experiments and methods of amelioration which had already been tried; and they looked in vain through our library for blue books and governmental reports which recorded painstaking study into the conditions of English cities.
They were the first of a long line of English visitors to express the conviction that many things in Chicago were untoward not through paucity of public spirit but through a lack of political machinery adapted to modern city life. This was not all of the situation but perhaps no casual visitor could be expected to see that these matters of detail seemed unimportant to a city in the first flush of youth, impatient of correction and convinced that all would be well with its future. The most obvious faults were those connected with the congested housing of the immigrant populations, nine tenths of them from the country, who carried on all sorts of traditional activities int he crowded tenements. That a group of Greeks should be permitted to slaughter sheep in a basement, that Italian women should be allowed to sort over rags collected from the city dumps, not only within the city limits but in a court swarming with little children, that immigrant bakers should continue unmolested to bake bread for their neighbors in unspeakably filthy spaces under the pavement, appeared incredible to visitors accustomed to careful city regulations. (207-9)
The mere consistent enforcement of existing laws and efforts to their advance often placed Hull-House, at least temporarily, into strained relations with its neighbors. I recall a continuous warfare against local landlords who would move wrecks of old houses as a nucleus for new ones in order to evade the provisions of the building code, and a certain Italian neighbor who was filled with bitterness because his new rear tenement was discovered to be illegal. It seemed impossible to make him understand that the health of the tenants was in any wise as important as his undisturbed rents. (209)
in this last one and in several other examples that she gives of similar obtuseness among landlords (to be fair she also gives examples of landlords who were unaware of serious problems in the buildings they owned and, once made aware, sought more than one creative solution to the problems), she never ceases to speak of them as human beings and, indeed, as neighbors - foolish neighbors with serious problems on their doorstep, but neighbors nonetheless - her tone remains charitable.
It is these subtle evils of wretched and inadequate housing which are often most disastrous. In the summer of 1902 during an epidemic of typhoid fever in which our ward, although containing but one thirty-sixth of the population of the city, registered one sixth of the total number of deaths, two of the Hull-House residents made an investigation of the methods of plumbing in the houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of fever cases. They discovered among the people who had been exposed to the infection a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of years, in a comfortable little house of her own. Although the Italian immigrants were closing in all around her, she was not willing to sell her property and to move away until she had finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and could never be drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of tenement-house sanitation. Her two daughters were sent to an eastern college. One June when one of them had graduated and the other still had two years before she took her degree, they came tot he spotless little house and to their selfsacrificing mother for the summer holiday. They both fell ill with typhoid fever and one daughter died because the mother's utmost efforts could not keep the infection out of her own house. The entire disaster affords, perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of the individual conscience which would isolate a family from the rest of the community and its interests. (210-1)
In the earlier years of the American Settlements, the residents were sometimes impatient with the accepted methods of charitable administration and hoped, through residence in an industrial neighborhood, to discover more cooperative and advanced methods of dealing with the problems of poverty which are so dependent upon industrial maladjustment. But during twenty years, the Settlements have seen the charitable people, through their very knowledge of the poor, constantly approach nearer to those methods formerly designated as radical. The residents, so far from holding aloof from organized charity, find testimony, certainly in the National Conferences, that out of the most persistent and intelligent efforts to alleviate poverty will in all probability arise the most significant suggestions for eradicating poverty. In the hearing before a congressional committee for the establishment of a Children's Bureau, residents in American Settlements joined their fellow philanthropists in urging the need of this indispensable instrument for collecting and disseminating information which would make possible concerted intelligent action on behalf of children.(216)
Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel reading that we have lost the power of seeing certain aspects of life with any sense of reality because we are continually looking for the possible romance. The description might apply to the earlier years of the American settlement, but certainly the later years are filled with discoveries in actual life as romantic as they are unexpected. If I may illustrate one of these romantic discoveries from my own experience, I would cite the indications of an internationalism as sturdy and virile as it is unprecedented which I have seen in our cosmopolitan neighborhood: when a South Italian Catholic is forced by the very exigencies of the situation to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing another nationality and another religion, both of which cut into all his most cherished prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his provincialism, for if an old enemy working by his side has turned into a friend, almost anything may happen. When, therefore, I became identified with the peace movement both in its International and National Conventions, I hoped that this internationalism engendered in the immigrant quarters of American cities might be recognized as an effective instrument in the cause of peace. I first set it forth with some misgiving before the Convention held in Boston in 1904 and it is always a pleasure to recall the hearty assent given to it by Professor William James.(216-7)
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June 11, 2020
Read in honor of the centennial of the US Women's Suffrage. In The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, Elaine F. Weiss points out that women's professional work made possible their work of seeking and winning the vote.
Jane Addamsand Ellen Gates Starr own and operate Hill House. After 20 years of operation, Addams tells of the experience of operating this settlement house in in the inner city of Chicago. Addams and Starr borrow this idea from others who started the settlement movement in England, borrow ideas from Tolstoy. In fact the operators of Hull House visit England to deepen their understanding of the movement and visit the Tolstoys to add socialist aspects to their own Hull House. Addams admits that they the operators made mistakes. Of course they did. They went forth first, learning both what to do and what to avoid. The successes were many from cooking and sewing classes, to social clubs to college extension courses, and more, Addams and Starr made Chicago a better city. And they led the way for many organizations and services we take for granted from adult education courses to state social services to the YWCA and more.
Jane Addamsand Ellen Gates Starr own and operate Hill House. After 20 years of operation, Addams tells of the experience of operating this settlement house in in the inner city of Chicago. Addams and Starr borrow this idea from others who started the settlement movement in England, borrow ideas from Tolstoy. In fact the operators of Hull House visit England to deepen their understanding of the movement and visit the Tolstoys to add socialist aspects to their own Hull House. Addams admits that they the operators made mistakes. Of course they did. They went forth first, learning both what to do and what to avoid. The successes were many from cooking and sewing classes, to social clubs to college extension courses, and more, Addams and Starr made Chicago a better city. And they led the way for many organizations and services we take for granted from adult education courses to state social services to the YWCA and more.
May 31, 2016
"In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life" (44).
September 5, 2015
Fascinating to read the history of the nation's most prominent settlement house from the point of view of its activist founder. Jane Addams' vision is astounding -- and though she was able to accomplish this because she came from a wealthy, educated family, it wasn't "charity." She listened to the people she served and created programs that would enable them to lead more healthy and dignified lives -- from classes in sanitation, electricity and Shakespeare to English lessons and healthy meals. Three-quarters of a century before the Peace Corps, she realized that you couldn't just bop into a poor neighborhood, and bop out again -- you had to live there, live the life and experience what your community experienced day in and day out. Though she is writing about Russian and Polish Jews, Greeks, Italians, Bohemians and Latvians at the turn of the last century, the conditions, the poverty, the alienation, and the persistent desire for a better life for the children could be the narrative of Central Americans today. [Skipped some sections because they were very particular to local political/legislative battles in Chicago at the time.]
May 29, 2018
3.5 stars (liked it)
Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago co-founded by 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jane Addams, where she worked for 20 years. Based on an endearing admiration for her father, a great respect for the Father of the U.S., Abraham Lincoln, and many other sources of influence (literature, lectures, art, travel, etc.), Addams' inspiration to become known as the "mother" of the field of social work was sparked to life. This book encompasses her background, her philosophy, an overview of social service, and her approach to running Hull House . She made it her mission to make a positive lasting impact in the lives of the less fortunate and conveys her determination and process in this informative and inspirational book.
Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago co-founded by 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jane Addams, where she worked for 20 years. Based on an endearing admiration for her father, a great respect for the Father of the U.S., Abraham Lincoln, and many other sources of influence (literature, lectures, art, travel, etc.), Addams' inspiration to become known as the "mother" of the field of social work was sparked to life. This book encompasses her background, her philosophy, an overview of social service, and her approach to running Hull House . She made it her mission to make a positive lasting impact in the lives of the less fortunate and conveys her determination and process in this informative and inspirational book.
November 7, 2016
I wanted to read this, but I'm pretty glad it's over. I was interested in the information, but the prose is awful dense. It was just a slog to get to the meat, and I'm not sure I learned as much as I'd hoped. Interesting time to be reading it though.
October 20, 2018
This book was first published in 1910, so it is remarkable how relevant and radical it still seems today. Be prepared for some old-fashioned language, but for the most part the book is a very enjoyable read. The author wrote quite a bit, and I'm certainly going to check out the "Second Twenty Years at Hull House," and perhaps her other books as well. But next up is a biography, "Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy," by Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Addams was a very remarkable person, not only because of her role in founding Hull House: She also founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. As the author says, "she devoted her life to caring for the oppressed, and fighting for the rights of workers, women, and children." Other residents of Hull House essentially founded the fields of public health (Dr. Alice Hamilton) and social work. So this is an important story, and well worth your time.
Addams was a very remarkable person, not only because of her role in founding Hull House: She also founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. As the author says, "she devoted her life to caring for the oppressed, and fighting for the rights of workers, women, and children." Other residents of Hull House essentially founded the fields of public health (Dr. Alice Hamilton) and social work. So this is an important story, and well worth your time.
June 15, 2012
Jane Addams looks back on 20 years at Hull House a settlement house in Chicago that she founded to ameliorate the effects of industrialization and immigration. These houses were set up in different cities throughout the country by people who were either rich or had access to money and wanted to dedicate their lives to charity. Addams championed the downtrodden, victimized and oppressed who were taken advantage of by unscrupulous bosses, people and even criminals. Conditions faced by immigrants included horrible living and working conditions, poor and sometimes poisoned foods, girls led into prostitution, no access to education, children who did not have places to play except a dirty alley, extremely low wages that offered no way to get out of poverty, long work hours and the list goes on.
The book is hard to read at times and is more scholarly than story but it is told by Addams herself as she recalls what she tried to accomplish. She was viewed as a radical by some although I get the feeling that she really didn't think of herself as a radical. I could see how one might think of her given the time period when women did not lead out and were not supposed to express their opinions in public. Others viewed her as a saint when they were given help at a crucial time in their life.
I especially enjoyed the parts of our she attempted to bring beautiful things into a section of the city that was dirty and broken down. Addams fought for sanitation efforts by the city and organized residents to clean up streets. She had a park built for children and at Hull House she organized art shows where immigrants could display their work but also with museums she brought art to the residents. Musical programs were held at the house as were lectures and classes to help in whatever areas the residents needed be it cooking, childcare, or philosophy. Addams did not have an agenda other than to help the poor and realized that the way she would find fulfillment may not be the same as another and did not judge others. In the process she found that often she was blessed. One of the most touching moments for me was when describing how young people were often ashamed of their parents who did not change their old country ways although they were now in America. Addams set up demonstrations of how things were done in the old country such as spinning when she realized that this was done differently depending on where you came from and what tools were accesible. As this young girl saw the admiration of others as they watched her work and realized that her mother was a person of skill and did not know the depth of her being, she changed and treated her mother better and a relationship was born.
I don't agree with everything of the Progressive Era and personally think that the intial movement was founded on pure motives but that government should not be involved to the extent they are. There is much that each individual can do to help others. Some programs are necessary but it is from this time period and specific activists that government programs were born that have gotten out of control in their scope and aims.
The book is hard to read at times and is more scholarly than story but it is told by Addams herself as she recalls what she tried to accomplish. She was viewed as a radical by some although I get the feeling that she really didn't think of herself as a radical. I could see how one might think of her given the time period when women did not lead out and were not supposed to express their opinions in public. Others viewed her as a saint when they were given help at a crucial time in their life.
I especially enjoyed the parts of our she attempted to bring beautiful things into a section of the city that was dirty and broken down. Addams fought for sanitation efforts by the city and organized residents to clean up streets. She had a park built for children and at Hull House she organized art shows where immigrants could display their work but also with museums she brought art to the residents. Musical programs were held at the house as were lectures and classes to help in whatever areas the residents needed be it cooking, childcare, or philosophy. Addams did not have an agenda other than to help the poor and realized that the way she would find fulfillment may not be the same as another and did not judge others. In the process she found that often she was blessed. One of the most touching moments for me was when describing how young people were often ashamed of their parents who did not change their old country ways although they were now in America. Addams set up demonstrations of how things were done in the old country such as spinning when she realized that this was done differently depending on where you came from and what tools were accesible. As this young girl saw the admiration of others as they watched her work and realized that her mother was a person of skill and did not know the depth of her being, she changed and treated her mother better and a relationship was born.
I don't agree with everything of the Progressive Era and personally think that the intial movement was founded on pure motives but that government should not be involved to the extent they are. There is much that each individual can do to help others. Some programs are necessary but it is from this time period and specific activists that government programs were born that have gotten out of control in their scope and aims.
July 5, 2012
A book that is as relevant today as the era it chronicles.
It is a Herculean effort fraught with all manner of frustrations to alleviate human suffering in times of economic deprivation.
Just to supply many thousands of people with the bottom rung of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is difficult, but to educate, enrich the mind and elevate the spirit during times of economic hardship is insuperable.
Throughout the history of the industrialized world humans are caught in a whirlpool of misery while tending the machines that make our goods and process our food. Sometimes it is a time of feast with the machines running full bore tended to by frazzled humans. At other times the machines are idle and humans are out of work. Either way, there are numerous social problems attendant to each scenario.
As the 1800's gave way to the 1900's, Jane Addams established Hull House in Chicago to assist the largely rural immigrant labor pool who came to this country and had trouble adjusting to urban living and employment in the factories. She created a haven of art, books, education and viable social programs to make their difficult lives a bit more tolerable. Jane and a dedicated staff of "old souls" became the voice for those who could not speak English or who were just too tired from back breaking work. Among the reforms she is credited with enacting was the 8 hour workday and child labor reform. Children as young as 4 were working in sweat shops.
While conditions today are not as bad, there are too many people living from paycheck to paycheck, too many living below the poverty line, too many unemployed and too many without adequate medical and dental care. Jane speaks to us from over a hundred years ago and shows that one oasis in an industrial jungle can make a huge impact. We have to wonder how much better things could be if every community had a Hull House.
A fascinating read that also delves into the problems social workers face overcoming cultural differences, the difficulty trying to motivate people to stand up on their own hind feet and fight and to carry on, and to influence politicians to enact laws to protect workers while the politicians jobs depend on keeping the factory owners happy who have a vested interest in maintaing the status quo.
It is a Herculean effort fraught with all manner of frustrations to alleviate human suffering in times of economic deprivation.
Just to supply many thousands of people with the bottom rung of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is difficult, but to educate, enrich the mind and elevate the spirit during times of economic hardship is insuperable.
Throughout the history of the industrialized world humans are caught in a whirlpool of misery while tending the machines that make our goods and process our food. Sometimes it is a time of feast with the machines running full bore tended to by frazzled humans. At other times the machines are idle and humans are out of work. Either way, there are numerous social problems attendant to each scenario.
As the 1800's gave way to the 1900's, Jane Addams established Hull House in Chicago to assist the largely rural immigrant labor pool who came to this country and had trouble adjusting to urban living and employment in the factories. She created a haven of art, books, education and viable social programs to make their difficult lives a bit more tolerable. Jane and a dedicated staff of "old souls" became the voice for those who could not speak English or who were just too tired from back breaking work. Among the reforms she is credited with enacting was the 8 hour workday and child labor reform. Children as young as 4 were working in sweat shops.
While conditions today are not as bad, there are too many people living from paycheck to paycheck, too many living below the poverty line, too many unemployed and too many without adequate medical and dental care. Jane speaks to us from over a hundred years ago and shows that one oasis in an industrial jungle can make a huge impact. We have to wonder how much better things could be if every community had a Hull House.
A fascinating read that also delves into the problems social workers face overcoming cultural differences, the difficulty trying to motivate people to stand up on their own hind feet and fight and to carry on, and to influence politicians to enact laws to protect workers while the politicians jobs depend on keeping the factory owners happy who have a vested interest in maintaing the status quo.
August 16, 2012
I found an old (1945) copy at a sale. As a public health nurse I have always heard about Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago. Jane Addams with her friend Ellen Starr founded the Hull House in 1989. The purpose was to provide social, public health, and advocacy services to the low income people (mostly immigrants) in the area. Hull House is recognized as the model for social service reform in this country. Accomplishments include improving sanitation (ie:garbage collection and sewage disposal) to improve health and disease. Provided English and vocational classes and recreational opportunities especially for youth. They were instrumental in getting child protection and juvenile justice laws passed to benifit children. They worked with labor unions to out law child labor and create safety measures in the work place. Much of this benefited women in the garment industry. Opportunities for creation and appreciation of art, including theater were made available. Space was made available for socialization and community activities. Some of the book was kind of slow moving and "preaching". However it was definitely worth reading as her dedication and work was life changing for many people living in poverty and squalor. Jane Addams received the Noble peace prize in 1931 for her work.
July 23, 2008
This tiny little book took me months to get through and I could not usually read more than 10 or so pages in 1 sitting. But, it was very worth trudging through. It is dense, but it is so historically packed with info on the history of social services, labor movements, women's rights, immigration, poverty, democracy, grassroots organizing, and Chicago and the mid-west. The "settlement movement" as it is referred to in the book, encompasses the many social services that exist today, but highlights how they started, how needs were identified and how addressed. Seeing these projects start at such an individual level and seeing the compassion and concern that Addams had for her fellow citizens is awe inspiring. As a student of social work and sociology, a college attendee in the midwest, short time Chicago resident and a worker within social services, this was a great read for history info, inspiration, and a reminder of what we can accomplish.
October 13, 2016
Jane Addams as a social worker: five stars
Jane Addams as a writer: three stars
At times meandering and inconsequential, its best moments illuminate why we should engage in social work in the first place.
Jane Addams as a writer: three stars
At times meandering and inconsequential, its best moments illuminate why we should engage in social work in the first place.
December 29, 2016
Boring prose, but the struggles and achievements of Jane Addams are worth reading.
September 5, 2023
Immigrants. Education. Labor. Society. Civic services. Policing. Sound familiar?
These were topics around 1900 as well and in many of the same terms, coming up with many of the same solutions never implemented.
Hull House was founded by Jane Addams in 1889 to help with some of these problems in Chicago. It was part of the Settlement House idea being done in Europe and the United States at that time. It differed from many by being non religious as Jane Addams saw the Chicago immigrant area as being made up of many religions and respected their rights to follow their religions.
Part of the problem, from Addams' viewpoint, was that laws and solutions for the problems faced by immigrants and the poor were conceived by people who had never faced these problems and didn't really understand what they were. That is why Hull House was established in the middle of the immigrant community and many who served there also lived there, meeting the people and trying to help them find ways to improve their lives.
Although Addams started Hull House thinking she would simply deal with local problems, she soon found she had to go outside the area to seek solutions for things like child labor, education reform, garbage collection and more. She was instrumental in getting legislation enacted dealing with many of these, among the first such laws in the country.
The book is in a pedantic style of that time which can make it slow going. It is interesting how the same problems of that time are ones in the news today. Many of the solutions outlined then are the same ones touted now. And they are filed away now as then. It is well worth the time to read, but give it time for thought as well.
These were topics around 1900 as well and in many of the same terms, coming up with many of the same solutions never implemented.
Hull House was founded by Jane Addams in 1889 to help with some of these problems in Chicago. It was part of the Settlement House idea being done in Europe and the United States at that time. It differed from many by being non religious as Jane Addams saw the Chicago immigrant area as being made up of many religions and respected their rights to follow their religions.
Part of the problem, from Addams' viewpoint, was that laws and solutions for the problems faced by immigrants and the poor were conceived by people who had never faced these problems and didn't really understand what they were. That is why Hull House was established in the middle of the immigrant community and many who served there also lived there, meeting the people and trying to help them find ways to improve their lives.
Although Addams started Hull House thinking she would simply deal with local problems, she soon found she had to go outside the area to seek solutions for things like child labor, education reform, garbage collection and more. She was instrumental in getting legislation enacted dealing with many of these, among the first such laws in the country.
The book is in a pedantic style of that time which can make it slow going. It is interesting how the same problems of that time are ones in the news today. Many of the solutions outlined then are the same ones touted now. And they are filed away now as then. It is well worth the time to read, but give it time for thought as well.
August 22, 2020
Perhaps, the fact that I've gone through reading this for two weeks made me unable to feel this book — thanks to the online class 🙃 but this is enormously impressive.
3.75 ⭐⭐⭐
3.75 ⭐⭐⭐
January 19, 2015
A modest, thoughtful look at Chicago's innovative Hull House Settlement as well as a fascinating glimpse into the personal development and accomplishments of Jane Addams. I wound up really liking and relating to Jane Addams as a person--occasionally, her reflections on her own foibles, naivete, and growth are hilarious. And the political and community work done by Hull-House--the empowerment framework in which it was done, before there was the word 'empowerment'-- was astonishing. I should have read this book a long time ago.
"Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly did not escape them, for it required eight years--from the time I left Rockford in the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened in the autumn of 1889--to formulate my convictions even in the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan for action. During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it" (p. 64).
"My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine into one which took place later when I put before my father the situation in which I found myself at boarding school when under great evangelical pressure, and once again I heard his testimony in favor of 'mental integrity above everything else'" (p. 15).
"To return to my last year at school, it was inevitable that the pressure toward religious profession should increase as graduating day approached. So curious, however, are the paths of moral development that several times during subsequent experiences I have felt that this passive resistance of mine, this clinging to an individual conviction, was the best moral training I received at Rockford College" (p. 56).
On privilege: "In spite of my distrust of 'advantages' I was apparently not yet so cured but that I wanted more of them" (p. 77).
"I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting 'preparation for life,' however ill-prepared I might be. It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase 'the snare of preparation,' which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals " (p. 88).
"The Settlement casts aside none of those things which cultivated men have come to consider reasonable and goodly, but it insists that those belong as well to that great body of people who, because of toilsome and underpaid labor, are unable to procure them for themselves. Added to this is a profound conviction that the common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it, that those 'best results of civilization' upon which depend the finer and freer aspects of living must be incorporated into our common life and have free mobility through all elements of society if we would have our democracy endure" (p. 452).
"Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly did not escape them, for it required eight years--from the time I left Rockford in the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened in the autumn of 1889--to formulate my convictions even in the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan for action. During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it" (p. 64).
"My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine into one which took place later when I put before my father the situation in which I found myself at boarding school when under great evangelical pressure, and once again I heard his testimony in favor of 'mental integrity above everything else'" (p. 15).
"To return to my last year at school, it was inevitable that the pressure toward religious profession should increase as graduating day approached. So curious, however, are the paths of moral development that several times during subsequent experiences I have felt that this passive resistance of mine, this clinging to an individual conviction, was the best moral training I received at Rockford College" (p. 56).
On privilege: "In spite of my distrust of 'advantages' I was apparently not yet so cured but that I wanted more of them" (p. 77).
"I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting 'preparation for life,' however ill-prepared I might be. It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase 'the snare of preparation,' which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals " (p. 88).
"The Settlement casts aside none of those things which cultivated men have come to consider reasonable and goodly, but it insists that those belong as well to that great body of people who, because of toilsome and underpaid labor, are unable to procure them for themselves. Added to this is a profound conviction that the common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it, that those 'best results of civilization' upon which depend the finer and freer aspects of living must be incorporated into our common life and have free mobility through all elements of society if we would have our democracy endure" (p. 452).
August 13, 2013
I am a great admirer of Jane Addams and her work creating the first settlement house in the United States, Hull-House, for Chicago’s urban poor in 1889. I went into reading this book hoping to learn more about the settlement movement and Ms. Addams’s role as America’s first social worker.
Twenty Years at Hull House was written by Jane Addams because several inaccurate biographies had been written and Addams wanted to ”set the record straight.” In the first quarter of the book Addams inundates the reader with the wonders of her childhood and how brilliantly enlightened she was at such a young age due impart by her god-like father. Memoirs/autobiographies should always be read with a grain of salt, but in the case of Twenty Years at Hull House..., and Addams’s reminiscing of her childhood, one needs a shaker of salt. Addams was truly a gifted child and student – at least to Jane Addams.
With that being said the rest of the book centers on Hull-House and the settlement movement which was very informative, especially the plight of immigrants and women in America due to our Industrial Revolution and the callousness of management. A section in the book that I found very interesting was when Addams speaks of the “white slave’ market in Chicago and how Hull-House became a refuge for young girls. Addams wrote without judgment of the girls, but was scathing with her opinion of society’s role in prostitution - a very bold sentiment for the times. Addams describes Hull-House as the “older brother” in the neighborhood making sure that there was someone or something in place to protect those less fortunate and who could not defend themselves.
Another area that Hull House played a critical role was in helping to facilitate the formation of labor unions among the women garment workers in Chicago. Through their efforts women not only started to collectively bargain, but several women went on to become leaders in The American Federation of Labor.
But Hull-House was more than a place where political activism was realized. Hull-House’s main purpose was to provide social and educational opportunities for Chicago’s urban poor. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffee house, a gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a music school, a drama group, and a library – ideas and niceties that were only available to the middle and upper classes.
Overall, Twenty Years at Hull House is a detailed, scholarly look at the settlement movement and the important role it played in helping immigrants assimilate and gain access to the American Dream. John Burns, the English labor leader, pronounced Jane Addams "the only saint America has produced.” I agree.
Twenty Years at Hull House was written by Jane Addams because several inaccurate biographies had been written and Addams wanted to ”set the record straight.” In the first quarter of the book Addams inundates the reader with the wonders of her childhood and how brilliantly enlightened she was at such a young age due impart by her god-like father. Memoirs/autobiographies should always be read with a grain of salt, but in the case of Twenty Years at Hull House..., and Addams’s reminiscing of her childhood, one needs a shaker of salt. Addams was truly a gifted child and student – at least to Jane Addams.
With that being said the rest of the book centers on Hull-House and the settlement movement which was very informative, especially the plight of immigrants and women in America due to our Industrial Revolution and the callousness of management. A section in the book that I found very interesting was when Addams speaks of the “white slave’ market in Chicago and how Hull-House became a refuge for young girls. Addams wrote without judgment of the girls, but was scathing with her opinion of society’s role in prostitution - a very bold sentiment for the times. Addams describes Hull-House as the “older brother” in the neighborhood making sure that there was someone or something in place to protect those less fortunate and who could not defend themselves.
Another area that Hull House played a critical role was in helping to facilitate the formation of labor unions among the women garment workers in Chicago. Through their efforts women not only started to collectively bargain, but several women went on to become leaders in The American Federation of Labor.
But Hull-House was more than a place where political activism was realized. Hull-House’s main purpose was to provide social and educational opportunities for Chicago’s urban poor. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffee house, a gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a music school, a drama group, and a library – ideas and niceties that were only available to the middle and upper classes.
Overall, Twenty Years at Hull House is a detailed, scholarly look at the settlement movement and the important role it played in helping immigrants assimilate and gain access to the American Dream. John Burns, the English labor leader, pronounced Jane Addams "the only saint America has produced.” I agree.
July 27, 2009
The book is not light reading, but is not a difficult read, either. I found the material extremely informative and enlightening, especially since I have spent more than 20 years as a State PTA leader. The events of this book overlap and deal with many of the same issues as why the National PTA was founded...child labor issues, poor public education, the importance of the arts, an understanding of other cultures, etc. Jane Addams has long been one of my socio-political heroines. She put into action her concerns with society...making her a true hero in my estimation!
One intersting thing about the book is to see how much things stay the same the more that we change. Does this situation sound at all vaguely familiar?...The situation is that President McKinley has been assassinated by a foreigner with anarchical leanings. A newspaper man of foreign origins in Chicago had been writing a lot of pieces that were antagonistic to the way government was running and had some anarchist leanings. He, along with many other foreigners were arrested immediately following the assassination. Here is Jane Addams description of the situation:
'Perhaps it was but my hysterical symptom of the universal excitement, but it certainly seemed to me more than I could bear when a group of individualistic friends, who had come to ask for help, said: "You see what comes of your boasted law; the authorities won't even allow an attorney, nor will they accept bail for these men, against whom nothing can be proved, although the veriest criminals are not denied such a right." Challenged by an anarchist, one is always sensitive for the honor of legally constituted society, and I replied that of course then men could have an attorney, that the assassin himself would eventually be furnished with one, that the fact that a man was an anarchist had nothing to do with his rights before the law! I was met with the retort that that might do for a theory, but that the fact still remained that these men had been absolutely isolated, seeing no one but policemen, who constantly frightened them with tales of public clamor and threatened lynching.'
(Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. 1910. New York: Penguin Books Ltd. 279-280.)
It is a sad statement about a government who upholds the Constitution of the United States with its Bill of Rights as the greatest, most imspired document for governing a people (and I firmly believe that it is), and yet fundamental civil liberties can be so disregarded by those in power in out nation. What a shame!
One intersting thing about the book is to see how much things stay the same the more that we change. Does this situation sound at all vaguely familiar?...The situation is that President McKinley has been assassinated by a foreigner with anarchical leanings. A newspaper man of foreign origins in Chicago had been writing a lot of pieces that were antagonistic to the way government was running and had some anarchist leanings. He, along with many other foreigners were arrested immediately following the assassination. Here is Jane Addams description of the situation:
'Perhaps it was but my hysterical symptom of the universal excitement, but it certainly seemed to me more than I could bear when a group of individualistic friends, who had come to ask for help, said: "You see what comes of your boasted law; the authorities won't even allow an attorney, nor will they accept bail for these men, against whom nothing can be proved, although the veriest criminals are not denied such a right." Challenged by an anarchist, one is always sensitive for the honor of legally constituted society, and I replied that of course then men could have an attorney, that the assassin himself would eventually be furnished with one, that the fact that a man was an anarchist had nothing to do with his rights before the law! I was met with the retort that that might do for a theory, but that the fact still remained that these men had been absolutely isolated, seeing no one but policemen, who constantly frightened them with tales of public clamor and threatened lynching.'
(Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. 1910. New York: Penguin Books Ltd. 279-280.)
It is a sad statement about a government who upholds the Constitution of the United States with its Bill of Rights as the greatest, most imspired document for governing a people (and I firmly believe that it is), and yet fundamental civil liberties can be so disregarded by those in power in out nation. What a shame!
July 28, 2016
I read Twenty Years at Hull-House due to my interest in the literature of the American Progressive era and in preparation for visiting the Hull-House Museum in Chicago, which I did today after finishing up the book on the train ride over. It was a lovely and informative visit, although I was quite sad that almost every building in the original Hull-House development was destroyed in 1963 to make way for the University of Illinois at Chicago student center. (A seventy-year-old historic community complex designed for immigrants and the poor to live, work, gain an education, learn hygiene, study the arts, and organize labor was destroyed so that rich kids could have a bowling alley next to their Dunkin' Donuts? Incredible.)
Anyway, back to the book: Addams' writing is not the most gripping. She begins by giving a few chapters of her own autobiography, which sort of just fizzles out as she gets to her European travels that inspired Hull House. She doesn't take us through a chronology of Hull House, but instead gives us loosely organized chapters on certain topics, jumping from story-to-story rather haphazardly. There are a few memorable moments: when a young second-generation girl learns to respect her immigrant mother when her mother is able to practice her weaving craft at Hull House, or when Addams travels to Russia to meet Tolstoy, and the literary giant shames her by asking her why she's dressed so well and why she doesn't farm for her own food. (Kind of a dick move, Count Leo!) That was probably my favorite chapter because I also happened to be reading Anna Karenina this week, so it was nice to see a peek behind the curtain to get a small glimpse of the man who wrote it.
I went through periods of high interest and boredom while reading Addams' book -- sometimes on the same page! She is no doubt an important figure for social justice in the United States, but I think Twenty Years is probably best read in select excerpts.
Anyway, back to the book: Addams' writing is not the most gripping. She begins by giving a few chapters of her own autobiography, which sort of just fizzles out as she gets to her European travels that inspired Hull House. She doesn't take us through a chronology of Hull House, but instead gives us loosely organized chapters on certain topics, jumping from story-to-story rather haphazardly. There are a few memorable moments: when a young second-generation girl learns to respect her immigrant mother when her mother is able to practice her weaving craft at Hull House, or when Addams travels to Russia to meet Tolstoy, and the literary giant shames her by asking her why she's dressed so well and why she doesn't farm for her own food. (Kind of a dick move, Count Leo!) That was probably my favorite chapter because I also happened to be reading Anna Karenina this week, so it was nice to see a peek behind the curtain to get a small glimpse of the man who wrote it.
I went through periods of high interest and boredom while reading Addams' book -- sometimes on the same page! She is no doubt an important figure for social justice in the United States, but I think Twenty Years is probably best read in select excerpts.
August 22, 2011
More than just a chronicle of the first two decades of Hull-House, the experimental social improvement site Jane Addams established in the late 19th century in one of Chicago's many impoverished immigrant quarters, this book is a spirited defense of pluralistic and democratic ideals. It is a plea for world citizens to hold their nations accountable when they run astray of democracy. And unfortunately, though under-served urban neighborhoods are increasingly populated by African Americans and Latinos rather than the Eastern European immigrants Addams befriended, many of her observations about poverty, corruption and the foul state of American education ring just as true today as they did when she first published her book -- over a hundred years ago.
This is the third consecutive book I have read about an individual whose fierce resolve and steely individualism led him/her to achieve unlikely but great personal success (the other two, for the record, are Queen Elizabeth I and Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne). Jane Addams is, as another reviewer notes, what should be called a role model, an example to the rest of us of how we must uphold our moral convictions even under dire pressure to abandon them and what we may accomplish -- not just for ourselves but for the world -- when we value fellowship and hard work over personal advancement and leisure.
If I have one complaint about Twenty Years at Hull-House, it's that it's taken me twenty-eight years to pick it up. Jane Addams is a prolific writer, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and an all-around American saint. She should be anthologized in every middle and high school and certainly a household name. This is the kind of book that alters the course of one's life.
This is the third consecutive book I have read about an individual whose fierce resolve and steely individualism led him/her to achieve unlikely but great personal success (the other two, for the record, are Queen Elizabeth I and Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne). Jane Addams is, as another reviewer notes, what should be called a role model, an example to the rest of us of how we must uphold our moral convictions even under dire pressure to abandon them and what we may accomplish -- not just for ourselves but for the world -- when we value fellowship and hard work over personal advancement and leisure.
If I have one complaint about Twenty Years at Hull-House, it's that it's taken me twenty-eight years to pick it up. Jane Addams is a prolific writer, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and an all-around American saint. She should be anthologized in every middle and high school and certainly a household name. This is the kind of book that alters the course of one's life.
May 27, 2018
This is the original book that Addams wrote back in 1910 to explain her life’s work – the creation of the first settlement house in America bringing the rich and poor together for the greater good. Addams is an early American social worker, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and visionary leader. I am interested in how her work was received and supported by early 20th century politicians.
The book is slow going at first, due to her cumbersome academic language, which both thrills and daunts me. I wish people still used this syntax: “Such a young person persistently believes that behind all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be tragic and terrible, but it never for an instant occurs to him that it may be contemptible or squalid or self-seeking.” Yep. That was me. (Never occurred to me it until I was Director of Utah Human Services!)
Addams is well-educated and inspired by a driven father, so she travels the world visiting settlement houses in other countries before choosing to start her efforts in 1889 Chicago. She writes about each dimension of the work, from poverty to labor laws to immigrants and their children. It is so impressive how much she accomplishes in twenty years, some of it applicable today. “I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to invite blundering.” I am motivated all over again to do what I can, where I can, and not be surprised “if perchance one of them be found an angel.”
The book is slow going at first, due to her cumbersome academic language, which both thrills and daunts me. I wish people still used this syntax: “Such a young person persistently believes that behind all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be tragic and terrible, but it never for an instant occurs to him that it may be contemptible or squalid or self-seeking.” Yep. That was me. (Never occurred to me it until I was Director of Utah Human Services!)
Addams is well-educated and inspired by a driven father, so she travels the world visiting settlement houses in other countries before choosing to start her efforts in 1889 Chicago. She writes about each dimension of the work, from poverty to labor laws to immigrants and their children. It is so impressive how much she accomplishes in twenty years, some of it applicable today. “I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to invite blundering.” I am motivated all over again to do what I can, where I can, and not be surprised “if perchance one of them be found an angel.”
September 5, 2011
Well, since Nick read this book about a year ago, and was deeply influenced by Jane Addams's thinking, TYAHH has been on my short list for awhile. Because Addams has become so important to Nick, he's talked about her with me a lot; as a result, reading TYAHH for the first time felt like a familiar experience. Perhaps I'd be giving an additional star if my reading were a mind-blowing first encounter with JA; however, that's not to say that I didn't enjoy the book. My favorite chapters were the ones where JA discusses how Hull House, the settlement she founded to serve the slums of Chicago, functioned as an all-purpose community center, offering classes, recreation, and community - Ray Oldenburg's "third place" meets the 92nd Street Y. I was also fascinated by the child advocacy issues JA became occupied with - she describes in detail the oppressive conditions of early twentieth century factory work that basically threatened the notion of childhood, and makes a strong case for preserving the innocence of the child and the value of leisure and play in the lives of children. The latter point was especially compelling to me, as I've been encountering it a lot recently in the readings I've been doing for work on play-based early learning.
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