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Addams believed that the remedy for sprawling cities and dehumanizing factories was cooperation among classes and ethnic groups. To achieve this “socialized democracy,” she believed America required an active, benevolent government and wise regulation. Conservatives (then as now) believed that entrepreneurs and capitalism produce abundance, that competition motivates workers, that social classes were inevitable, and that trade unions and government interfered with freedom.
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The house is built on a flat concrete slab, which is both the foundation and the final floor. The walls are concrete tilt up slabs, poured into forms on top of the foundation. Anthony Edwards continues to be a handful for the Suns, who now sit on the edge of a devastating playoff exit. Sociologist Christopher Lasch pushed back against Davis, calling Addams “a thinker of originality and daring.” Lasch is joined by other scholars, such as Louise K. Knight, who praises Addams’s synthesizing, strong, logical mind. Other critics claim Addams was overly optimistic, lacking a “tragic view” of life.
About Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
In our less reticent age, skeptical of affectionate female friendships, there is speculation among historians about their relationship. Addams was friendly with and consulted by progressive presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who supported regulating corporations, protecting consumers, improving the environment, and legitimizing unions. Not always serious and priggish, Jane could also be irreverent, even naughty. In her autobiography, she confesses that she and some classmates at the seminary read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey and even went so far as to imitate the author. Hoping to understand De Quincey’s dreams more deeply, Jane and her friends drugged themselves with opium during a long holiday.
Who Was Jane Addams?
Addams and Starr decided to start a kindergarten and provide a room where the mothers could sit and talk. Within three weeks the kindergarten had enrolled twenty-four children with 70 more on the waiting list. As an organization, Hull House provided kindergarten and daycare facilities for working mothers, citizenship classes for recent immigrants, and served as a meeting house for local trade union groups. Hull House also housed an art gallery, extensive library and small performance theater.
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Recognizing certain similarities within the United States, Addams and Starr were at once inspired to launch a similar program within urban Chicago. Upon their return to the United States, Addams and Starr established America’s first settlement organization, naming it Hull House after the abandoned Hull Mansion which they acquired on Halsted Street. Motivated to physically improve the putrid conditions of her neighborhood, Jane Addams (pictured here in 1896) arranged to have a garbage incinerator installed at Hull-House and was appointed inspector of garbage in 1895. Addams and her colleagues at Hull-House were not the only critics of poverty during the Gilded Age and the Progressive era. Henry George’s 1879 denunciation of class division, Progress and Poverty, sold millions of copies worldwide. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel, Looking Backward, imagined Boston in the year 2000 where a benevolent government provided universal prosperity and equality.
SOCIAL IMPACT
Hull-House became a symbol of progressivism, the reform movement that flourished between 1890 and 1920 as it tried to better a country battered by industrialization, the explosive growth of cities, and the sudden arrival of millions of immigrants, mostly poor. Addams remained head resident of Hull House until her death in 1935. Hull House continued to be active on Halsted Street until the 1960s, when it was displaced by the University of Illinois' new urban campus.
The Groundbreaking Women of Hull House - WTTW
The Groundbreaking Women of Hull House.
Posted: Wed, 08 Mar 2017 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Hull-House is now stewarded by the University of Illinois at Chicago as the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and in 1963 the original dining hall was relocated next to the original Hull Home mansion on the UIC campus. (The other 11 buildings were, unfortunately, demolished.) A 1967 restoration also removed a third-floor addition that Addams had added. The museum aims to preserve Addams’ legacy, as well as the physical environment that fostered it. Having quickly found that the needs of the neighborhood could not be met unless city and state laws were reformed, Addams challenged both boss rule in the immigrant neighborhood of Hull-House and indifference to the needs of the poor in the state legislature.
Years of Justice: Jane Addams and Chicago's Hull-House
Hull House also set out to ameliorate various effects of poverty throughout Chicago, establishing a public dispensary to provide nutritious food for the sick, a child daycare center, and public baths for Chicago’s underprivileged population. Addams went from the revered creator of Hull-House, an esteemed public intellectual, to the naïve pacifist and traitor to her country. In her last years, she became the respected humanitarian who foresaw the folly of World War I and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Sick for much of the war, isolated and shunned, Addams escaped self-pity by joining with Herbert Hoover in the humanitarian issue of food, urging Americans to conserve food and to send the surplus to starving Europeans.
She supported trade unions and strikes but rejected anarchists and the militant Industrial Workers of the World. Skeptical of socialism, she repeatedly criticized the excesses of capitalism. Always, Jane Addams was an unwavering suffragist, connecting the vote to improving the lives of the families in the Nineteenth Ward.
Kelley was recruited by the state’s new governor, John Peter Altgeld, as the chief factory inspector, and two other women involved in the research, Alzina Stevens and Mary Kenney, also became inspectors. A movement followed in which more than one hundred similar organizations were established nationwide by 1900. By 1911, Chicago itself was home to more than 35 settlement organizations.
Jane Addams and Hull House were pioneers of social reform in the United States. Addams’ efforts, both through Hull House and independently, laid groundwork for women’s rights, children’s rights, workers’ rights, and education still felt today. Settlement houses were established on the principles of Christian Socialism and the Social Gospel, which held the belief that the application of social sciences could address the challenges faced by urban residents in industrialized societies. Consequently, she mobilized teams to investigate social problems in the vicinity of Hull-House. Hull-House gradually expanded to include about a dozen other buildings used for classes and clubs, a nursery school, the only public library in the neighborhood, a playground and one of the first gymnasiums in the country.
Simultaneously she reached out to the immigrants of the Nineteenth Ward and practiced the brotherhood she preached. Alice Hamilton fulfilled Jane Addams’s dream by graduating, in 1893, from the University of Michigan’s medical school. Living on and off at Hull-House in the 1890s, Hamilton attempted to identify causes of typhoid and tuberculosis in the surrounding community, became an expert on lead poisoning, and went on to have an exceptional career in public health. Florence Kelley, an avowed socialist, and her three children fled from her abusive husband to Hull-House. Upset with the long hours of working women, Kelley took legislators on tours of sweatshops.
Hull House, established in Chicago, Illinois in 1889, was one of the first settlement houses in the United States. Co-founded by volunteers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Hull House eventually became one of America’s largest settlement houses with thirteen buildings to house facilities. Addams and other Hull-House residents sponsored legislation to abolish child labor, establish juvenile courts, limit the hours of working women, recognize labor unions, make school attendance compulsory and ensure safe working conditions in factories. The Progressive party adopted many of these reforms as part of its platform in 1912. At the party’s national convention, Addams seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for president and campaigned actively on his behalf. She advocated for women’s suffrage because she believed that women’s votes would provide the margin necessary to pass social legislation she favored.
During that era, a familiar dichotomy emerged, resonating with contemporary readers. Male members of the University of Chicago Sociology Department tended to maintain a distance from their subjects. They operated from their offices within the university, using coordination for their studies. Women sociologists were often viewed by their male counterparts as mere data collectors. While men regarded the data they gathered and the insights they derived as the ultimate goal, women viewed them as indicators of issues needing resolution. Florence Kelley and several other women based at Hull-House carried out research into the sweating trade in Chicago and this led to the passing of the pioneering Illinois Factory Act (1893).
From Hull House to Second City: How Chicago immigrants helped change theater - NPR Illinois
From Hull House to Second City: How Chicago immigrants helped change theater.
Posted: Mon, 19 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Her account was personal, modest, and candid, blending her accomplishments and progressive philosophy with poignant portraits of immigrants in the Nineteenth Ward. It quickly went through six printings and was translated in German, French, and Japanese. An optimistic book, it is regularly excerpted in contemporary books for young adults and children as well as in literature anthologies and history texts. By 1910, Jane Addams had become a household name, a beloved national figure, the recipient of honorary degrees.
The complex expanded to include thirteen buildings and supported clubs and activities such as a Labor Museum, the Jane Club for single working women, meeting places for trade union groups, and a wide array of cultural events. A historic picture, "Meet the Hull House Kids," was taken on a summer day in 1924 by Wallace K. Kirkland Sr., Hull House Director. The twenty Hull House Kids were erroneously described as young boys, of Irish ancestry, posing in the Dante School yard on Forquer Street (now Arthington Street).
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