how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

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Jane Addams

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 28, 2019 | Original: April 16, 2010

Jane Addams, 1906. Artist George de Forest Brush. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a peace activist and a leader of the settlement house movement in America. As one of the most distinguished of the first generation of college-educated women, she rejected marriage and motherhood in favor of a lifetime commitment to the poor and social reform. Inspired by English reformers who intentionally resided in lower-class slums, Addams, along with a college friend, Ellen Starr, moved in 1889 into an old mansion in an immigrant neighborhood of Chicago. Hull-House remained Addams’s home for the rest of her life and became the center of an experiment in philanthropy, political action and social science research.

Jane Addams: Early Life & Education

Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois on September 6, 1860 to Sarah Adams (Weber) and John Huy Adams. She was the eighth of nine children and was born with a spinal defect that hampered her early physical growth before it was rectified by surgery. Her father was a friend of Abraham Lincoln ’s who served in the Civil War and remained active in politics, though he was a miller by trade.

Young Addams graduated as valedictorian of Rockford Female Seminary at age 17 in 1881. (She formally received her Bachelor’s degree when the seminary became the Rockford College for Women the following year.) Her study of medicine was interrupted by ill health, and it wasn’t until a trip to Europe at age 27 with friend Ellen G. Starr that she visited a settlement house and realized her life’s mission of creating a settlement home in Chicago.

Jane Addams and Hull House

In 1889, Addams and Starr leased the home of Charles Hull in Chicago. The two moved in and began their work of setting up Hull-House with the following mission: “to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.”

Addams responded to the needs of the community by establishing a nursery, dispensary, kindergarten, playground, gymnasium and cooperative housing for young working women. As an experiment in group living, Hull-House attracted male and female reformers dedicated to social service. Addams always insisted that she learned as much from the neighborhood’s residents as she taught them.

Jane Addams Political Life

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. She was appointed to Chicago’s Board of Education in 1905 and helped found the Chicago school of Civics and Philanthropy before becoming the first female president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections.

Addams 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.

Addams publicized Hull-House and the causes she believed in by lecturing and writing. In her autobiography, 20 Years at Hull-House (1910), she argued that society should both respect the values and traditions of immigrants and help the newcomers adjust to American institutions. A new social ethic was needed, she said, to stem social conflict and address the problems of urban life and industrial capitalism. Although tolerant of other ideas and social philosophies, Addams believed in Christian morality and the virtue of learning by doing.

Jane Addams Anti-War Views

Because Addams was convinced that war sapped the reform impulse, encouraged political repression and benefited only munitions makers, she opposed World War I . She unsuccessfully tried to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to call a conference to mediate a negotiated end to hostilities.

During the war she spoke throughout the country in favor of increased food production to aid the starving in Europe. After the armistice she helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, serving as president from 1919 until her death in 1935.

Vilified during World War I for her opposition to American involvement, a decade later, Addams had become a national heroine and Chicago’s leading citizen. In 1931, her long involvement in international efforts to end war was recognized when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Jane Addams Death

Addams had a heart attack in 1926 and remained unwell for the rest of her life. She died of cancer on May 21, 1935. Thousands of people attended her funeral in the courtyard of Hull-House. She is buried in her family’s plot in Cedarville Cemetery in Cedarvillle, Illionis.

Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams ( 1973); Daniel Levine, Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (1973).

how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

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History of Hull House and some of its famous residents

Hull House Museum 

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Hull House was founded in 1889 and the association ceased operations in 2012. The museum honoring Hull House is still in operation, preserving history and heritage of Hull House and its related Association.

Also called : Hull-House

Hull House was a settlement house founded by  Jane Addams  and  Ellen Gates Starr  in 1889 in Chicago, Illinois. It was one of the first settlement houses in the United States. The building, originally a home owned by a family named Hull, was being used as a warehouse when Jane Addams and Ellen Starr acquired it. The building is a Chicago landmark as of 1974.

At its height, "Hull House" was actually a collection of buildings; only two survive today, with the rest being displaced to build the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. It is today the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, part of the College of Architecture and the Arts of that university.

When the buildings and land were sold to the university, the Hull House Association dispersed into multiple locations around Chicago. The Hull House Association closed in 2012 due to financial difficulties with a changing economy and federal program requirements; the museum, unconnected to the Association, remains in operation.

The Settlement House Project

The settlement house was modeled on that of Toynbee Hall in London, where the residents were men; Addams intended it to be a community of women residents, though some men were also residents over the years. The residents were often well-educated women (or men) who would, in their work at the settlement house, advance opportunities for the working class people of the neighborhood.

The neighborhood around Hull House was ethnically diverse; a study by the residents of the demographics helped lay the groundwork for scientific sociology. Classes often resonated with the cultural background of the neighbors; John Dewey (the educational philosopher) taught a class on Greek philosophy there to Greek immigrant men, with the aim of what we might call today building self-esteem. Hull House brought theatrical works to the neighborhood, in a theater on the site.

Hull House also established a kindergarten for children of working mothers, the first public playground, and first public gymnasium, and worked on many issues of social reform, including juvenile courts, immigrant issues, women's rights, public health and safety, and child labor reform.

Hull House Residents

Some women who were notable residents of Hull House:

  • Jane Addams: founder and main resident of Hull House from its founding to her death.
  • Ellen Gates Starr: partner in founding Hull House, she was less active as time went on and moved to a convent to care for her after she was paralyzed in 1929.
  • Sophonisba Breckinridge: considered one of the main founders of social work, she was a university professor and administrator at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.
  • Alice Hamilton, a physician who taught at the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University while living at Hull House. She became an expert on industrial medicine and health.
  • Florence Kelley : head of the National Consumers’ League for 34 years, she worked for protective labor legislation for women and for laws against child labor.
  • Julia Lathrop: an advocate for various social reforms, she headed the U.S. Children’s Bureau from 1912 – 1921.
  • Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, a labor organizer, built connections between Hull House and the labor movement. She helped found the Women's Trade Union League.
  • Mary McDowell : she helped found the  Women's Trade Union League  (WTUL), and helped establish a settlement house near Chicago’s stockyards.
  • Frances Perkins : a reformer working on labor issues, she was appointed in 1932 as Secretary of Labor by President Roosevelt, the first woman in a US cabinet position.
  • Edith Abbott: a pioneer in social work and social service administration, she taught and was dean at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration.
  • Grace Abbott : younger sister of Edith Abbott, she worked with the Immigrants’ Protective League in Chicago, and served in Washington with the Children’s Bureau, first as head of the Industrial Department enforcing child labor laws and contracts, and then as director (1917 – 1919 and 1921 – 1934).
  • Ethel Percy Andrus: a long-time educator and principal in Los Angeles, where she was known for progressive education ideas, after retirement she founded the National Retired Teachers Association and the American Association of Retired Persons.
  • Neva Boyd: she educated nursery and kindergarten teachers, believing in the importance of play and children’s natural curiosity as the basis of learning.
  • Carmelita Chase Hinton: an educator known especially for her work at Putney School; she organized for peace in the 1950s and 1960s.

Others Connected With Hull House

  • Lucy Flower: a supporter of Hull House and connected to many of the women residents, she worked for children's rights, including the establishment of a juvenile court system, and founded the first nursing school west of Pennsylvania, the Illinois Training School for Nurses.
  • Ida B. Wells-Barnett worked with Jane Addams and others of Hull House, particularly on racial problems in the Chicago public schools.

A Few of the Men Who Were Residents of Hull House for at Least Some Time

  • Robert Morss Lovett: a reformer and English professor at the University of Chicago
  • Willard Motley: an African American novelist
  • Gerard Swope: an engineer who was a top manager at General Electric, and who during the New Deal’s recovery from the Depression was pro-federal programs and pro-unionization.

Official Website

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  • Alice Freeman Palmer, Wellesley College President
  • Biography of Crystal Eastman, Feminist, Civil Libertarian, Pacifist
  • An Historic Brew of Architecture in Seattle

Urban History

how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

The Hull House’s Impact on the Community

how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

Wikipedia.com; the Hull House illustrated on a postcard.

The Hull House was founded in 1889 by Jane Addams as an establishment for the large immigrant population of the nineteenth ward to utilize as a place of education. [1] The nineteenth ward was filled with immigrants from Eastern Europe and were discriminated against due to their heritages. Addams and the Hull House wanted to create a safe space for the residents of the ward to participate in education and local clubs and organizations.  The Hull House was the first of its kind in America, but Addams drew inspiration from the settlement house she visited in London: Toynbee Hall. Toynbee Hall was created as a place for middle class activists to research and analyze poverty in a specific area of London. The same premise was applied to Chicago with Addams’ project.

Jane Addams Papers Project; children at the Hull House during Christmas, circa. 1900

Quickly after the establishment was opened, Addams realized that the mothers from the neighborhood could not attend a lot of their lectures and courses because they had young children to take care. Addams saw the need of the community and found a way to address it: daycare services and the beginnings of a kindergarten class were held at the Hull House beginning in 1891 [2] . The courses held at the house ranged from English courses for non-native speakers to lessons on how to care for a baby’s nutrition and the science behind hygiene. Expanding beyond the basic services that daycare provides for mothers, the Hull House also gave a form of privacy to families. Tenement housing forced families to live close to each other and rely heavily on the help of neighbors. Without a daycare service, women were relying on each other to watch their children as they attended errands or work. With the addition of a professionally ran daycare system, immigrant and working class mothers could drop their children off there and go wherever they need to. With the help of the Hull House, the families of the nineteenth ward no longer needed to rely as heavily on one another. This allowed individual families to develop a more private relationship with one another as they no longer had to expose everything that they were doing to their neighbors.

The employees of the Hull House were middle class men and women who could stay in dormitories on the campus. While the house itself was helpful to the immigrant mothers of the direct community, the workers of the house did not confine their activism to campus grounds. Florence Kelley, one of the young ladies who worked at the Hull House, would later fight greatly for the rights of the working class. She fought for child labor laws and was at the forefront for standardizing conditions in factories. Kelley was appointed as the first female inspector of factories and helped the position be spread to all factories in Chicago. [3]

how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

ThoughtCo; Florence Kelley (left), Jane Addams (center), and Julia Lathrop (right).

Edith and Grace Abbott were activists long before they joined the ranks of the Hull House, but their work in Chicago supporting the child labor movement gave way to Grace Abbott being given the title of “Mother of All Uncle Sam’s Children”. [5] The Abbott sisters were also active participants in the causes of women entering the workforce and fighting for better conditions in tenement housings across America. [4]

Jane Addams would also serve the greater community through her activism outside of the Hull House. Publicly funded trash disposal and general waste removal was not implicated throughout cities during this time period. Addams fought for the contracts of a trash removal company for the nineteenth ward but was turned down. She continued to demand some sort of response and was eventually appointed inspector for the ward. [6]

The services of the Hull House eased the lives of many working class mothers and aided in the education of the nineteenth ward. Without the contributions of women like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, many issues in working class neighborhoods would have went unheard. The Hull House served as a balance between the impoverished immigrants and the middle class workers.

[1] Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott , (Illinois: University of Chicago, 1983), 42.

[2]  Albert J. Kennedy and Robert A. Woods, Handbook of Settlements , (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1911), 53.

[3] Florence Kelley, Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation , (London: MacMillian & Co., 1910), 100.

[4]  Costin, 41.

[5]  Edith Abbott and John Sorensen, “The Maternity and Infancy Revolution”, Maternal and Child Health Journal 8, no.3, (2004):107.

[6] Kennedy and Wood, 55.

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Teaching American History

“The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”

  • Domestic Policy
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  • Rights and Liberties
  • Social Reform
  • December 31, 1893

Introduction

Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a founder of modern social work and a prominent activist who sought a wide array of progressive political and social reforms throughout her long career. A co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (1920) and a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), she advocated women’s suffrage, labor, and industrial reform, sanitation, and tenement housing regulation, pacifism, and noninterventionist foreign policy, among many other reforms and policies.

Addams is perhaps best known for her role in founding Hull House, a Chicago social settlement. Beginning in England and spreading to the United States at the turn of the century, the social settlement movement sought to deal with the problems of immigration, industrialization, and urban poverty. Settlement houses brought together educated men and women to help train the poor and new immigrants for work and citizenship, provide childcare for working women, and offer medical care, among other social services. Such settlements not only helped those in need but offered research and training for young social workers and reformers. In this essay, Addams explained and defended the purposes of social settlements. Although Addams offered various iterations of this piece in lecture and essay formats, perhaps the most famous version appeared in her 1910 book, Twenty Years at Hull House .

Source: Philanthropy and Social Progress: Seven Essays by Miss Jane Addams, Robert A. Woods, Father J. O. S. Huntington, Professor Franklin H. Giddings, and Bernard Bosanquet (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893), 1–26, available online at the Hathi Trust Digital Library: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044010648830;view=1up;seq=8 .

Hull House, which was Chicago’s first Settlement, was established in September 1889. It represented no association, but was opened by two women, backed by many friends, in the belief that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. Hull House endeavors to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society. It is an effort to add the social function to democracy. It was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as “the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gave a form of expression that has peculiar value.” [1]

This paper is an attempt to treat of the subjective necessity for Social Settlements, to analyze the motives which underlie a movement based not only upon conviction, but genuine emotion. Hull House of Chicago is used as an illustration, but so far as the analysis is faithful, it obtains wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet for that sentiment of universal brotherhood which the best spirit of our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive.

I have divided the motives which constitute the subjective pressure toward Social Settlements into three great lines: the first contains the desire to make the entire social organism democratic, to extend democracy beyond its political expression; the second is the impulse to share the race life, and to bring as much as possible of social energy and the accumulation of civilization to those portions of the race which have little; the third springs from a certain renaissance of Christianity, a movement toward its early humanitarian aspects.

It is not difficult to see that although America is pledged to the democratic ideal, the view of democracy has been partial, and that its best achievement thus far has been pushed along the line of the franchise. Democracy has made little attempt to assert itself in social affairs. We have refused to move beyond the position of its eighteenth-century leaders, who believed that political equality alone would secure all good to all men. We conscientiously followed the gift of the ballot hard upon the gift of freedom to the Negro, but we are quite unmoved by the fact that he lives among us in a practical social ostracism. We hasten to give the franchise to the immigrant from a sense of justice, from a tradition that he ought to have it, while we dub him with epithets deriding his past life or present occupation, and feel no duty to invite him to our houses. We are forced to acknowledge that it is only in our local and national politics that we try very hard for the ideal so dear to those who were enthusiasts when the century was young. We have almost given it up as our ideal in social intercourse. There are city wards in which many of the votes are sold for drinks and dollars; still there is a remote pretense, at least a fiction current, that a man’s vote is his own. The judgment of the voter is consulted and an opportunity for remedy given. . . .

In politics “bossism” arouses a scandal. [2] It goes on in society constantly and is only beginning to be challenged. Our consciences are becoming tender in regard to the lack of democracy in social affairs. We are perhaps entering upon the second phase of democracy, as the French philosophers entered upon the first, somewhat bewildered by its logical conclusions. The social organism has broken down through large districts of our great cities. Many of the people living there are very poor, the majority of them without leisure or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence. They move often from one wretched lodging to another. They live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, without social organization of any kind. Practically nothing is done to remedy this. The people who might do it, who have the social tact and training, the large houses, and the traditions and custom of hospitality, live in other parts of the city. The club-houses, libraries, galleries, and semipublic conveniences for social life are also blocks away. We find workingmen organized into armies of producers because men of executive ability and business sagacity have found it to their interests thus to organize them. But these workingmen are not organized socially; although living in crowded tenement-houses, they are living without a corresponding social contact. The chaos is as great as it would be were they working in huge factories without foreman or superintendent. Their ideas and resources are cramped. The desire for higher social pleasure is extinct. They have no share in the traditions and social energy which make for progress. Too often their only place of meeting is a saloon, their only host a bartender; a local demagogue forms their public opinion. [3] Men of ability and refinement, of social power and university cultivation, stay away from them. . . .

It is inevitable that those who feel most keenly this insincerity and partial living should be our young people, our so-called educated young people who accomplish little toward the solution of this social problem, and who bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common labor by which they live and which is a great source of moral and physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of coordination between thought and action. I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal. These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes.

These hopes may be loosely formulated thus: that if in a democratic country nothing can he permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

These hopes are responsible for results in various directions, preeminently in the extension of educational advantages. We find that all educational matters are more democratic in their political than in their social aspects. The public schools in the poorest and most crowded wards of the city are inadequate to the number of children, and many of the teachers are ill-prepared and overworked; but in each ward there is an effort to secure public education. The schoolhouse itself stands as a pledge that the city recognizes and endeavors to fulfill the duty of educating its children. But what becomes of these children when they are no longer in public schools? Many of them never come under the influence of a professional teacher nor a cultivated friend after they are twelve. Society at large does little for their intellectual development. . . .

. . . It is needless to say that a Settlement is a protest against a restricted view of education, and makes it possible for every educated man or woman with a teaching faculty to find out those who are ready to be taught. The social and educational activities of a Settlement are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the existence of the settlement itself.

I find it somewhat difficult to formulate the second line of motives which I believe to constitute the trend of the subjective pressure toward the Settlement. There is something primordial about these motives, but I am perhaps over-bold in designating them as a great desire to share the race life. We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one’s self away from that half of the race life is to shut one’s self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity which we have been born heir to and to use but half our faculties. We have all had longings for a fuller life which should include the use of these faculties. These longings are the physical complement of the “Intimations of Immortality” on which no ode has yet been written. [4] To portray these would be the work of a poet, and it is hazardous for any but a poet to attempt it. . . .

“There is nothing after disease, indigence, and a sense of guilt so fatal to health and to life itself as the want of a proper outlet for active faculties.” [5] I have seen young girls suffer and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years after they leave school. In our attempt then to give a girl pleasure and freedom from care we succeed, for the most part, in making her pitifully miserable. She finds “life” so different from what she expected it to be. She is besotted with innocent little ambitions, and does not understand this apparent waste of herself, this elaborate preparation, if no work is provided for her. There is a heritage of noble obligation which young people accept and long to perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish to right wrong and alleviate suffering, haunts them daily. Society smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself. . . .

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They bear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness bangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that, if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. [6] These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel and economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that make us different. They say that all men are united by needs and sympathies far more permanent and radical than anything that temporarily divides them and sets them in opposition to each other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic expression is due to the decay in ethics, that art when shut away from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is self-destructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness of youth that if they expect success from them in business, or politics, or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run, they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is only the stronger young people, however, who formulate this. Many of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others, not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees, not that they are especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many are buried beneath mere mental accumulation with lowered vitality and discontent. . . . Our young people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action, and respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity.

The third division of motives which I believe make toward the Settlement is the result of a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity. The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself. We have no proof from the records themselves that the early Roman Christians, who strained their simple art to the point of grotesqueness in their eagerness to record a “good news” on the walls of the catacombs, considered this “good news” a religion. Jesus had no set of truths labeled “Religious.” On the contrary, his doctrine was that all truth is one, that the appropriation of it is freedom. His teaching had no dogma to mark it off from truth and action in general. He himself called it a revelation—a life. These early Roman Christians received the Gospel message, a command to love all men, with a certain joyous simplicity. The image of the Good Shepherd is blithe and gay beyond the gentlest shepherd of Greek mythology; the hart no longer pants, but rushes to the water brooks. [7] The Christians looked for the continuous revelation, but believed what Jesus said, that this revelation to be held and made manifest must be put into terms of action; that action is the only medium man has for receiving and appropriating truth. “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.” [8]

That Christianity has to be revealed and embodied in the line of social progress is a corollary to the simple proposition that man’s action is found in his social relationships in the way in which he connects with his fellows, that his motives for action are the zeal and affection with which he regards his fellows. By this simple process was created a deep enthusiasm for humanity, which regarded man as at once the organ and object of revelation; and by this process came about that wonderful fellowship, that true democracy of the early Church, that so captivates the imagination. The early Christians were preeminently nonresistant. They believed in love as a cosmic force. There was no iconoclasm during the minor peace of the Church. They did not yet denounce, nor tear down temples, nor preach the end of the world. They grew to a mighty number, but it never occurred to them, either in their weakness or their strength, to regard other men for an instant as their foes or as aliens. The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the most astounding Rome had ever seen. They were eager to sacrifice themselves for the weak, for children and the aged. They identified themselves with slaves and did not avoid the plague. They longed to share the common lot that they might receive the constant revelation. It was a new treasure which the early Christians added to the sum of all treasures, a joy hitherto unknown in the world the joy of finding the Christ which lieth in each man, but which no man can unfold save in fellowship. A happiness ranging from the heroic to the pastoral enveloped them. They were to possess a revelation as long as life had new meaning to unfold, new action to propose.

I believe that there is a distinct turning among many young men and women toward this simple acceptance of Christ’s message. They resent the assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas which belong to the religious consciousness, whatever that may be, that it is a thing to be proclaimed and instituted apart from the social life of the community. They insist that it shall seek a simple and natural expression in the social organism itself. The Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom, but preeminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, but in society itself. . .

. . . [T]his renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism, is going on in America, in Chicago, if you please, without leaders who write or philosophize, without much speaking, but with a bent to express in social service, in terms of action, the spirit of Christ. . . .

The Settlement, then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. . . . The only thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand. . . . Its residents must be emptied of all conceit of opinion and all self-assertion, and ready to arouse and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood. They must be content to live quietly side by side with their neighbors, until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests. Their neighbors are held apart by differences of race and language which the residents can more easily overcome. They are bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as a whole, to furnish data for legislation, and to use their influence to secure it. In short, residents are pledged to devote themselves to the duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of the social energies which too largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given over to industrialism. They are bound to regard the entire life of their city as organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to protest against its over-differentiation.

. . . The Settlement movement is from its nature a provisional one. It is easy in writing a paper to make all philosophy point one particular moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I hope you forgive me for reminding you that the best speculative philosophy sets forth the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material condition. The subjective necessity for Social Settlements is identical with that necessity that urges us on toward social and individual salvation.

  • 1. Addams quotes from one of her essays.
  • 2. “Bossism” is the control of a party or a city government or a subordinate part of a city government, such as a ward, by one man or a small group.
  • 3. A demagogue is a political leader who, in order to gain political advantage, appeals not to reason but to the passions and prejudices of the people.
  • 4. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” was written by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and published in 1807.
  • 5. Addams again quotes herself.
  • 6. A fervent supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist.
  • 7. A hart is an adult male deer.
  • 8. John 7:17.

Annual Message to Congress (1893)

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how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

19th Century

Exploring the Impact of Jane Addams and Hull House in the Late 19th Century

Welcome to my blog, 19th Century ! In this article, we will explore the incredible journey of Jane Addams and her groundbreaking initiative, Hull House. Discover how this extraordinary establishment transformed the late 19th century , offering hope and support to countless individuals in need. Join us on this captivating journey back in time!

Table of Contents

The Impact of Jane Addams’ Hull House in the Late 19th Century

The impact of Jane Addams’ Hull House in the late 19th century was significant in a number of ways. Hull House, located in Chicago, Illinois, was one of the first and most prominent settlement houses established during this time period. It provided a wide range of social services and support to the immigrant population, particularly those living in poverty.

One of the key impacts of Hull House was its advocacy for social reform . Addams and the staff at Hull House worked tirelessly to address the social injustices faced by immigrants and low-income individuals. They fought for improved working conditions, fair wages, and access to education and healthcare. Their efforts helped to raise awareness about these issues and push for change on a larger scale.

Hull House also had a profound impact on education during this time. Addams believed in the importance of education as a means of empowerment and social progress. Hull House offered a range of educational programs, including classes in English, citizenship, and vocational training. This helped immigrants acquire the skills and knowledge needed to improve their lives and integrate into American society.

Furthermore, Hull House played a crucial role in fostering a sense of community and cultural exchange . It served as a meeting place for people from different backgrounds, providing a space for dialogue, mutual understanding, and shared experiences. This not only helped to break down barriers between different ethnic groups but also enriched the cultural fabric of the community as a whole.

In conclusion, the impact of Jane Addams’ Hull House in the late 19th century was far-reaching. It not only addressed immediate social needs but also paved the way for social reforms, promoted education, and fostered a sense of community. The legacy of Hull House continues to inspire and influence social work and activism today.

The Haunting of Hull-House with Shane and Ryan of Ghost Files

How hull city centre looked 20 years ago – photo slideshow, what role did jane addams play in the hull house.

Jane Addams played a pivotal role in the establishment and operation of Hull House during the late 19th century. Hull House was a settlement house located in Chicago and aimed to provide social and educational services to the surrounding working-class immigrant community.

As a co-founder of Hull House, Addams was instrumental in shaping its vision and purpose. She believed that by providing a communal space for immigrants, she could help ease the challenges they faced in adjusting to their new lives in America. Hull House served as a hub for community support, offering services such as childcare, healthcare, English language classes, and vocational training.

Addams recognized the importance of creating a sense of community among the diverse immigrant populations in Chicago. She aimed to bridge the gap between different cultures and foster mutual understanding and respect. Hull House became a meeting place where people of various backgrounds could come together to share ideas, learn from each other, and work towards social reform.

Moreover, Addams used Hull House as a base for her work in social activism and advocacy. She fought for women’s rights, labor reforms, and improved social conditions for the underprivileged. Addams’s efforts extended beyond the walls of Hull House; she actively campaigned for social justice and equality on a national level. Her work made her a prominent figure in the Progressive Era movement.

The influence of Hull House and Jane Addams’s dedication to social change cannot be understated. Their impact reached far beyond the 19th century, shaping the foundations of social work and inspiring future generations of activists.

What is the importance of Jane Addams’ Hull House according to Quizlet?

Jane Addams’ Hull House was of great significance in the 19th century . It was one of the most prominent settlement houses in the United States, located in Chicago . Hull House aimed to address the social and economic issues faced by immigrants and the urban poor during this time.

The establishment of Hull House played a crucial role in improving the lives of impoverished and marginalized individuals. It provided a variety of services such as educational programs, childcare, healthcare, and recreational activities . These offerings helped to uplift the community and empower individuals to overcome their circumstances.

Moreover, Hull House served as a center for social reform and activism . Jane Addams and her colleagues worked tirelessly to advocate for better living and working conditions, improved sanitation, child labor laws, and women’s suffrage. Their efforts not only had a direct impact on the local community but also influenced broader societal changes and policy reforms .

Jane Addams’ Hull House demonstrated the importance of community-based initiatives and grassroots activism in addressing the social challenges of the 19th century. Its impact resonates even today as a testament to the power of compassion, social justice, and collective action in striving towards a more equitable society.

Who was Jane Addams and what significance did she have?

Jane Addams was a prominent social reformer, philanthropist, author, and leader in the women’s suffrage movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is best known as the founder of Chicago’s Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in the United States.

Hull House aimed to provide essential services and support to the poor immigrant communities in Chicago, particularly European immigrants. It offered various programs such as education, healthcare, childcare, and recreational activities. Jane Addams believed that by providing these resources, she could uplift and empower individuals and families living in poverty.

Addams’s work at Hull House had a significant impact on American society. She brought attention to the plight of the urban poor and advocated for social and political reforms. Her efforts helped shape the Progressive Era, which sought to address the social and political inequalities present in the United States.

Furthermore, Addams played a vital role in the women’s suffrage movement. She worked alongside other suffragettes to secure women’s right to vote, believing that political empowerment was crucial for achieving social change.

Jane Addams’s commitment to social justice and her innovative approach to addressing poverty and inequality made her an influential figure in the 19th century. Her legacy continues to inspire activists, reformers, and advocates for social change.

Who was Jane Addams and what is the Hull House on Quizlet?

Jane Addams was a prominent social reformer and activist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is best known for founding Hull House , which was a settlement house located in Chicago. Hull House served as a community center that provided various services to immigrants and the poor. It offered educational programs, childcare, healthcare, and recreational activities to improve the lives of those living in poverty. Jane Addams and her colleagues at Hull House also advocated for social and political reforms, including women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, and peace movements. Her work at Hull House and her dedication to social justice made her a leading figure in the Progressive Era.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the purpose of jane addams’ hull house in the late 19th century and how did it impact society, how did jane addams’ hull house address the social issues and challenges faced by immigrants in the late 19th century.

Jane Addams’ Hull House was a settlement house established in Chicago in the late 19th century. It aimed to address the social issues and challenges faced by immigrants during that time.

One of the main ways Hull House addressed these challenges was by providing a wide range of services and resources to the immigrant community. This included offering English language classes, childcare services, and educational opportunities. These services aimed to empower immigrants and help them better integrate into American society.

Hull House also focused on improving living conditions for immigrants. Addams and her colleagues advocated for improved housing regulations and sanitation standards. They fought against overcrowding, unsafe living conditions, and exploitative landlords. Through their activism, Hull House played an important role in initiating broader changes in housing policies.

Furthermore, Hull House served as a community center where immigrants from different backgrounds could come together and support each other. It organized clubs, classes, and events that promoted cultural exchange and fostered a sense of belonging. This sense of community helped immigrants cope with the challenges of adapting to a new country and build supportive networks.

Additionally, Hull House advocated for immigrant rights and social justice. It fought against discrimination and worked to improve labor conditions for immigrants. Addams and her colleagues actively engaged in political activism, lobbying for laws and policies that would protect the rights and welfare of immigrants.

Overall, Hull House addressed the social issues and challenges faced by immigrants in the late 19th century through providing vital services, improving living conditions, fostering community, and advocating for immigrant rights. Its impactful work laid the foundation for future social reform movements and contributed to the betterment of immigrant communities in America.

What were the main activities and programs offered at Jane Addams’ Hull House in the late 19th century, and how did they contribute to community development?

Jane Addams’ Hull House , founded in 1889 on the West Side of Chicago, was a settlement house that aimed to address the social and economic challenges faced by immigrants and the urban poor during the late 19th century. The house offered a wide range of activities and programs that contributed significantly to community development.

Education: One of the primary focuses of Hull House was education. They offered classes for children and adults, providing opportunities for learning and skill development. Children were taught academic subjects, art, and music, while adults could take classes in English language, citizenship, and vocational skills. These educational programs aimed to empower individuals and improve their prospects for economic and social mobility.

Healthcare: Hull House recognized the critical need for healthcare services in the community. They established a dispensary where trained nurses provided medical care to those who couldn’t afford it. Additionally, they conducted campaigns for public health education and hygiene, addressing issues such as proper sanitation, infant mortality, and disease prevention. These efforts helped improve overall community health and well-being.

Social Services: Hull House offered a range of social services to assist individuals and families in need. They provided childcare services, counseling, and support to immigrant families struggling with language barriers, cultural adjustment, and legal matters. They also advocated for labor rights and fair working conditions, fighting against exploitative practices prevalent during the industrialization era. These services aimed to alleviate poverty, promote social justice, and empower vulnerable populations.

Arts and Culture: Hull House recognized the significance of arts and culture in nurturing well-rounded individuals and fostering community cohesion. They organized art exhibits, concerts, and theatrical performances, allowing residents to access and appreciate various forms of artistic expression. These activities encouraged creativity, encouraged cultural exchanges, and promoted a sense of pride and identity within the community.

By offering these diverse programs and activities, Hull House contributed significantly to community development. It provided individuals with the tools and resources they needed to improve their lives and overcome challenges. The emphasis on education and skill development enabled individuals to break the cycle of poverty and pursue better opportunities. The healthcare services and social support systems helped address immediate needs and improve overall well-being. Additionally, the promotion of arts and culture enriched the community’s cultural fabric and fostered a sense of unity and belonging.

Jane Addams’ Hull House became a model for other settlement houses across the United States, inspiring similar initiatives aimed at addressing social issues and promoting community development during the late 19th century.

In conclusion, the Jane Addams Hull House of the late 19th century was a seminal institution that exemplified the progressive spirit of the era. Addams’s visionary approach to social reform and her dedication to uplifting impoverished communities laid the foundation for countless future endeavors. Through its commitment to education, healthcare, and advocacy, the Hull House provided a safe haven for immigrants and transformed the lives of thousands. The contributions of Jane Addams and the Hull House cannot be overstated in shaping the social fabric of the 19th century. Their legacy continues to inspire and remind us of the power of compassion and collective action in addressing societal challenges.

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Hull House, Chicago, IL

Postcard, The Hull House, Chicago

Jane Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in 1889 on the South side of Chicago, Illinois after being inspired by visiting Toynbee Hall in London.

Situated at 800 S. Halstead Street in the run-down Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, most of the people living in the area at the time were recently arrived immigrants from Europe, including people from Germany, Italy, Sweden, England, Ireland, France, Russia, Norway, Greece, Bulgaria, Holland, Portugal, Scotland, Wales, Spain and Finland.

Jane Addams and Ellen Starr moved into Hull House on September 18, 1889. They started their program by inviting people living in the area to hear readings from books and to look at slides of paintings. After talking to the visitors from the neighborhood it soon became clear that the women of the area had a desperate need for a place where they could bring their young children. 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. Soon after a day-nursery was added.

Other activities for the neighbors soon followed. Jane Addams ran a club for teenage boys and Ellen Starr provided lessons in cooking and sewing for local girls. University teachers, students and social reformers in Chicago were also recruited to provide free lectures on a wide variety of different topics. Over the years this included people such as John Dewey, Clarence Darrow, Susan B. Anthony , William Walling, Robert Hunter, Robert Lovett, Ernest Moore, Charles Beard, Paul Kellogg , Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Ray Stannard Baker, Francis Hackett, Henry Demarest Lloyd and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Reception Room of Hull House

In 1890, Julia Lathrop joined Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr at Hull-House. All three women had been students at Rockford Female Seminary together in the 1880s. Lathrop, who had been trained as a lawyer by her father, the United States senator, William Lathrop, was an excellent organizer, and took over the day to day running of the settlement. In the early days of Hull-House, the Christian Socialism that had inspired the creation of Toynbee Hall influenced the three women. This was reinforced by the arrival in 1891 of Florence Kelley at Hull-House. A member of the Socialist Labor Party, Kelley had considerable experience of political and trade union activity. It was Kelley who was mainly responsible for turning Hull-House into a center of social reform.

The presence of Florence Kelley in Hull-House attracted other social reformers to the settlement. This included Edith Abbott , Grace Abbott , Alice Hamilton , Charlotte Perkins, William Walling, Charles Beard, Mary Mc Dowell , Mary Kenney, Alzina Stevens and Sophonisba Breckinridge . Working-class women, such as Kenney and Stevens, who had developed an interest in social reform as a result of their trade union work, played an important role in the education of the middle-class residents at Hull-House. They in turn influenced the working-class women. As Kenney was later to say, they “…gave my life new meaning and hope”.

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). 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.

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. Hull-House opened a boarding home for girls, without chaperon or “lady board of managers.” Many of the neighbors came to the center for weekly baths.

Hull-House exists today as a social service agency, with locations around the city of Chicago. The University of Illinois at Chicago has preserved a small part of the buildings as a museum, after the University razed many of the original buildings of Hull-House. The original Hull mansion remains with much of the furniture used by Miss Addams. South of the original Hull-House is the restored settlement dining hall, one of the first buildings in addition to the main house opened by Jane Addams. University and community groups for meetings now use the hall.

For further reading: 

Hull-House Yearbook (1907).  The Internet Archive.

Portraits of Hull-House from the Jane Addams Collection (DG 001) . Swarthmore College Peace Collection

15 Replies to “Hull House”

Very interesting. I think my grandmother, Marion Monroe (Lower) worked at or with Hull House, pretty sure. Anytime from 1916 to 1920. I feel certain she received the equilalent of an AA certifice to teach kindergarten, then she helped teach at the nursery. I don’t know how to nail this down and realize you are probably working away from the center due to the virus.

I love hull house and jane addams and all the women and men who turned theory into action and worked so hard and so thoughtfully and devoted their lives to helping others 🙂 <3 thank you guys for helping me see that i can do this kind of work too

Yes, a heroic, courageous woman who followed through on her ideals. Regarding social work, I wonder what was going on in the black community when many were coming north after the civil war.

To obtain more information about “…what was going on in the black community…” at this time in American history, I recommend you review some of our entries on Civil Rights:

1. The Niagra Movement; 2. Black Studies in the U.S. Department of Labor; and The Civil Rights Act of 1875.

There are others, but these all reflect developments during the years that Jane Addams was active. Warm regards, Jack Hansan

cool i needed research for a paper in social studies ! thanks Jane Addams for making the hull house!

I assume to learning hull house history very interesting

Can’t wait to visit! Looks very interesting!

I am doing a history fair with two friends and it looks amazing its for the Chicago metro history fair. It’s so interesting and has many sources.

Glad you found the article helpful!

Although the Hull-House Association closed in 2012, their ideas live on. Some of the Association locations were taken over by other neighborhood organizations, such as Christopher House in Rogers Park. Some of the organizations that got their start at Hull-House have been independent for some time. The Immigrants Protective League became the Heartland Alliance, the Mary Crane Nursery became the Mary Crane childcare organization on the city’s west side now. The Jane Addams Hull-House museum also lives on, inspiring the next generation of reformers and activists.

i love the HH

I assume you have learned that Hull House closed suddenly in January. A great loss. Jack Hansan

I assume you have learned that it was turned into a museum not long ago…

Very good news. To learn more about the museum visit their website Jane Adams Hull House Museum

Comments for this site have been disabled. Please use our contact form for any research questions.

The settlement idea appealed to young Americans who wished to bridge the gulf of class, help the urban poor, implement “social Christianity,” and understand the causes of poverty. Stanton Coit, who lived at Toynbee Hall for several months, opened the first American settlement in 1886, Neighborhood Guild on the Lower East Side of New York. In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr launched Hull House in Chicago. As word of these experiments spread, other settlements appeared in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Hull House inspired Charles Zueblin to organize Northwestern University Settlement in 1891. The following year, Graham Taylor started Chicago Commons and Mary McDowell took charge of University of Chicago Settlement near the stockyards. By 1900, there were more than 100 settlements in America; 15 were in Chicago. Eventually there were more than 400 settlements nationwide. The most active and influential ones were in the large cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

Unlike their British counterparts, American settlements were in neighborhoods populated by recent European immigrants, few of whom spoke English. Thus the first outreach was to children and mothers, through day care nurseries, kindergartens , and small play lots. Mothers' clubs , English classes, and groups interested in arts, crafts, music, and drama followed. The early residents paid room and board, and volunteered as group leaders or teachers. As their numbers increased and programs expanded, the settlements incorporated and trustees raised money to purchase or build larger quarters. These structures accommodated gymnasiums, auditoriums, classrooms, and meeting halls, as well as living space and communal dining facilities for a dozen or more residents. Settlements welcomed meetings of trade unions, ethnic groups, and civic organizations. Some established country summer camps, and a few developed their music programs into serious schools. Many exchanged information through city federations, the first of which was established by the Chicago settlements in 1894. Approximately half of the American settlements, usually the smaller ones, had religious sponsors and comparatively small programs. The rest eschewed religious orientation because it was bound to offend at least some of their neighbors.

In Chicago, Hull House was displaced by a new university campus; closure of the stockyards and packinghouses undermined the University of Chicago Settlement; a new expressway destroyed much of the Chicago Commons neighborhood; and the Chicago Federation of Settlements expired in the 1980s. However, the Chicago Commons Association (1948–) and Hull House Association (1962–), both loose federations of former settlements, neighborhood centers, and social service agencies, perpetuate the names and at least some of the aspirations of the original settlement houses.

Louise Carroll Wade

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how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

Exiting nps.gov

Hull-house and the ‘garbage ladies’ of chicago.

Exterior of Hull House complex along Halsted showing many buildings

https://archive.org/details/hullhouseyearboo1906hull/mode/2up

black and white photo of seven people living in a two room tenement

“Foul Beyond Description”

“The streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond description.”

View of a Chicago Tenement Alley, unpaved, muddy, and full of trash

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000955441

The ‘Garbage Ladies’

black and white photos of babies sitting in bathtubs

Photo from the Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago (https://explore.chicagocollections.org/ead/uic/25/nk66/)

Beyond the Bins and to the Ballot Box

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Hull-House: An Experiment in Social Service, March 12, 1923 (excerpts)

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Social Problems in U.S. Interest Natives of India

Miss Jane Addams of Hull House Questioned During Lecture at Madras.

QUERY ABOUT LIQUOR

Also Curious About Habits of Thrift, Negroes in Hull House, Beggars and the Destitute.

(Special to The Omaha Daily News.)

Madras, India, May 5. -- Miss Jane Addams, a leading social worker of America and an author of several books on social problems, arrived in Madras from Rangoon on Sunday. She is a recognized authority on social problems and is the founder of Hull House, a social settlement in Chicago, which has made a contribution of considerable value to all interested in social work.

Miss Addams, as a result of spending her life among the people who have emigrated to America from Europe and elsewhere, has been a student of international problems and an enthusiastic supporter of all movements toward world peace. She addressed a public meeting last evening in the Y.M.C.A. auditorium on "Hull House: An Experiment in Social Service." O. [Kandaswamy] Chetti, the well known philanthropist and social uplifter of Madras, presided.

Miss Addams said that Hull House, which was started thirty-three and a half years ago, was situated in a part of Chicago which was occupied very largely by people who had come from Italy, Russia, Poland, Bohemia and some other parts of Europe. They were all scattered in small, separate colonies. Their habits, customs, traditions, language and food differed widely. It was, therefore, felt that something ought to be done to bring them together along the essentials in which they were very much alike. The people of the different nationalities were anxious that their children should become Americanized. They were induced to attend certain lectures and classes.

Miss Addams Invited Questions.

Proceeding, Miss Addams, a lady of distinguished bearing and an able speaker, said that the Bombay Social Service league with its membership of 15,000 -- larger than their own Chicago Social Service league -- was struggling with many problems which they, in America, were trying to solve.

She then invited questions to be put to her. Many interesting questions were asked, all of which she readily answered well. The following are some of the more important:

"Did you not have difficulty with the drink problem?"

She replied that in their immediate neighborhood there were a good many Irish people who were given to drinking whisky. They spent too large a proportion of their income for it. The prohibition campaign in the country improved their conditions very much, and as a result there were fewer arrests than before. They began to spend more of their income for their families.

The second question was about the methods adopted to inculcate habits of thrift. She answered by saying that women were given lessons in household management, cooking and other matters of that kind. Thus a great deal of thrift was effected.

Few in Hull House.

"Have you Negroes in Hull House?"

"In point of fact, there are very few, but we do not distinguish against them at all. There are a few Negro women in the cooking class and a few men in the gymnasium."

"What of the financial side of Hull House?"

"We have a little endowment and rent out a good many buildings in the neighborhood. Money is received in several other ways to make the house self-supporting."

Indians Hope for Real Unity.

"Are there any Indians interested in Hull House?"

She said that there were some Indian students studying in the University of Chicago. One man was a teacher in the State University of Iowa. There were a few Indians interested in the Hull House movement.

Never Solved Yet.

"How do you solve the problem of the beggars, the destitute and the disabled round your vicinity?"

"I think all that we can do is to get some data or information and then see what can be done for them. The problem has never been solved yet. The poverty of the world is a very sad thing."

Mr. Chetti thanked the lecturer for her interesting speech and said that if it is possible for Miss Addams and her [coworkers] to manufacture American citizenship out of diverse elements of the human race, "we in India should be able to create a common humanity and a real unity through social service and social reform, divided though we are by different castes and creeds."

After a vote of thanks to Miss Addams and the chairman the meeting adjourned.

Miss Addams, international chairman of the Women's International League [for] of Peace and Freedom, sailed from New York November 21, last, to attend a meeting of the league at The Hague. Starting from London in January, she began a tour of the world to sound out opinion as a means to bring about economic reconstruction and peace.

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Lessons from Hull House

By: Laura Gale, LCSW

My staff member knocks tentatively on my half open office door, and I invite her in. I notice immediately the wide eyes and how she is twisting a strand of long brown hair around her finger.

    “Is it true?” She asks.

    “Will I lose my job? What about my clients? Sergio can’t go without his medication, and Nancy just started with the behavioral aide it took us four months to line up. What would happen to them?”

    I settle back in my chair. I’ve had this conversation before.  Despite my best efforts to maintain an environment of safety for both my clients and my staff, rumors once again emerged. News stories of county and state budget cuts make their way into lunchtime conversations. Fears arise, and conversations like the one I am about to have must take place.

    I have been fortunate. My organization has not had to shut down programs, pulling through each year by reducing costs and managing staff reductions through attrition rather than lay offs. We are the exception rather than the rule. Even established, respected institutions are having to make hard economic choices regarding which services to continue to offer and which to abandon to keep their doors open, as the recent closing and subsequent filing for bankruptcy of the Hull House Association in Chicago illustrates.

    Founded by Jane Addams in 1889, Hull House provided social services to residents of Chicago for 122 years. In recent years, the agency focused services in the areas of foster care, domestic violence, and job training. At the time of closure, it employed more than 300 workers, and served 60,000+ clients in 50 programs at 40 sites throughout Chicago (Jane Addams Hull House Association, n. d.).

    While rumors about mismanagement of funds began to circulate and fingers began to point regarding the agency’s over-reliance on government funds, there is another lesson to be learned from this tragedy. The social work profession has forgotten about our role in advocating for social justice at the policy level.

    It has been reported that 85% of Hull House funding came from various federal, state, and local grants and contracts, whereas only 10% came from unrestricted private donations. As a result, when government money dried up, the agency’s revenues decreased by almost half, from a high of $40 million in the 1990s to $23 million (Wisniewski, 2012). The management of Hull House is being criticized for not diversifying its funding streams more effectively, and for not putting more emphasis on private donations.

    But is reliance on unrestricted private funds and foundation grants any more reliable in tough economic times? Would Hull House have realistically been able to raise an additional $17 million to cover existing programs? Perhaps, but individuals and foundations are also struggling with limited funds. What is available is being stretched over the increased need for services that a poor economy stimulates, resulting in difficult dilemmas about who should receive services. When economic times become difficult and government money seems to be unavailable, it is easy to throw up our hands and blame the now struggling nonprofit for not seeing that the good times would end. Perhaps an additional approach would be to put pressure on local, state, and federal governments to increase commitment to social welfare programs in times of economic challenge.

    When Jane Addams began her work at Hull House, she was an active fundraiser for her organization. However, she also involved herself heavily in the areas of political and social reform. She sat on the Chicago Board of Education, was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She also campaigned heavily for Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party, contributing to the eventual passage of the Social Security Act, the foundation for many of our government welfare programs today (“Women in History,” n. d.).

    Jane Addams understood the vital role that government funding needed to play in the provision of social services and was committed to engaging in policy advocacy work toward this end. It has been the habit of the social work field to shy away from macro practice in times of political conservatism and to focus heavily on micro work, waiting passively for the political and economic times to change before becoming involved in policy work once again. However, it is exactly in times of greatest economic and political challenge that social workers need to grab the public attention and work to focus our political systems on the needs of our most disadvantaged citizens.

    Through involvement in political campaigns, social workers can help insure that progressive candidates who share our values of social justice and equality are voted into office. We can use the many easily accessible media outlets available today to educate the public about how the provision and funding of quality social services positively affects all of society. We can become aware of the policies that are being proposed in Congress every day that affect our clients both positively and negatively, and work to ensure the passage of those that support our clients’ best interests, including those that appropriate funds to important social issues.

    So, perhaps the greatest lesson from the closure of Hull House is that the field of social work needs to recommit itself to macro policy work. Yes, private money and the diversification of funding will always play a vital role in the sustainability of social service agencies, as will the sophisticated and skillful management of boards of directors and nonprofit administrators. However, without government commitment to adequate and timely payments to nonprofits, long-term sustainability will be difficult to achieve for many organizations. It is time to recommit to the work that Jane Addams so clearly understood—that social work is not just about meeting individual client needs; it is also about creating changes within systems that will have a radical impact on the quantity and quality of services our clients receive.

Jane Addams Hull House Association. Who we serve. Retrieved from http://hullhouse.org/aboutus/whoweserve.html.

Wisniewski, M. (2012, January 19). Chicago Hull House closing for lack of funds. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/19/us-hullhouse-closing-idUSTRE80I2IQ20120119.

Women in history. Jane Addams biography. Retrieved from http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/adda-jan.htm.

Laura Gale, LCSW, is an adjunct lecturer for the University of Southern California School of Social Work Virtual Academic Center. She has 20 years of experience in the areas of nonprofit administration, clinical supervision, and social welfare policy.

This article appeared in THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER, Spring 2012, Vol. 19, No. 2.  All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher/editor for permission to reprint/reproduce.

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Death of the Hull House: A Nonprofit Coroner’s Inquest

how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

When Hull House, founded by legendary social activist Jane Addams, closed down early this year, the reverberations of the failure of the nation’s most famous settlement house were somewhat muted. Was it that the modern era Hull House was so different from the Hull House Addams described in her autobiographical 20 Years at Hull-House that the place had lost its symbolic meaning for the nonprofit sector? Might there have been the presumption that the day of Hull House—and perhaps much of the settlement house movement that flourished around the turn of the century—had simply passed?

Or, was the bankruptcy of Hull House, despite the organization’s amazing history, just another example of a nonprofit caught in an exorable spiral of decline due to the usual factors we all associate with nonprofit shutdowns?

Although the settlement house movement doesn’t add up to the hundreds of facilities that existed in the decades before World War I, many settlement houses that got their start during that era still exist, function, and in some cases, thrive. Examples include the Henry Street Settlement in New York, founded by Lillian Wald in1893, University Settlement in Cleveland, founded in 1926 to serve the Broadway/Slavic Village neighborhood, and the Community Settlement Association , serving the Eastside neighborhood of Riverside, Calif. Was Hull House, founded by Addams in 1889, destined to die, or could it have modified itself to survive and thrive?

The Settlement House Model and Hull’s Proud History

Originally, the settlement house was not about the delivery of charitable services. Rather, like Addams’ Hull House, it was meant to be an inner-city residence for settlement workers who would deliver educational, art, music, and cultural programs to address the spiritual poverty of poor people. Typically, like Hull House on Chicago’s Halsted Street and the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side, they viewed poverty as more than a financial condition. Largely directed, initially, by affluent but socially concerned people like Addams, the early settlement houses and settlement workers, many of them volunteer, saw themselves as bridging a socio-economic chasm, helping the poor immigrant communities surrounding them while also learning from their poor neighbors.

But in learning from the poverty-stricken, often immigrant neighbors, the settlement houses became political institutions, beacons of advocacy for issues such as an increased minimum wage, labor rights, child labor laws, and decent (and nondiscriminatory) provision of public services. In a memorable part of her 20 Years at Hull-House , Addams wrote about her advocacy for improved garbage collection and sanitation in the 19th ward where Hull House was located, pressuring the alderman for better services, and eventually serving for a time as the ward’s garbage inspector to identify for the city exactly where the garbage was that needed to be addressed.

Just think of the people who lived and worked at Hull House: Mary McDowell, who worked to support the trade unions in Chicago’s “back of the yards” neighborhood; Frances Perkins, who later became the U.S. secretary of labor and the first woman appointed to the presidential cabinet; Julia Lathrop, who became the first woman to ever head a federal bureau when she became director of the United States Children Bureau; and Florence Kelly, who became head of the National Consumers League. As for Addams, the founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, called her “ the most dangerous woman in America .” Theodore Roosevelt admired her greatly, but also called her dangerous when she became one of the most famous and influential pacifists opposing U.S. entry into World War I. Although she seconded Roosevelt’s nomination for president in 1912, she broke with him when he refused to allow African Americans to be part of his Progressive (Bull Moose) Party. A co-founder of the NAACP, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the American Civil Liberties Union, she probably deserved and appreciated the Hoover epithet.

Addams might have been seen by J. Edgar as a dangerous radical because she invited anarchists, labor organizers, and others to lecture or even conduct meetings at Hull House, but the accomplishments of Hull House would make her an essential woman in turn-of-the-century America. Among Hull House’s feats that have shaped much of what we know today are these: it created the first public playground in Chicago, the first public gymnasium in Chicago, the first public swimming pool in Chicago, and the first citizen preparation classes in the United States. Believing in the importance of facts and data, Addams led Hull House into investigations of sanitation, truancy, tuberculosis, infant mortality, and cocaine use in Chicago, prompting changes in laws and public programs. In its first few decades, the Hull House of Jane Addams was a beacon for social change and the delivery of services was secondary, or even tertiary, in the original settlement house concept.

Addams and Hull House aimed to change the conditions of poor immigrant communities and the mindsets of both the poor and the privileged. But she knew that nonprofits, charitable giving, and philanthropic grantmaking were but a drop in the bucket for the changes that were needed. To Addams, the settlement was all about social change. As she wrote, “The educational activities of a Settlement, as well as its philanthropic, civic, and social undertakings, are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement itself.”

Why the Failure? Possible Causes of Death

On January 19th this year, the leadership of Hull House announced that the organization was going to shut down in the spring due to a lack of money. A week later, it precipitously closed its doors and laid off its entire staff with no notice, no compensation, no payment for accumulated vacation time, and no health benefits. It was a remarkable turn of events for an iconic institution.

In this brief piece, we cannot possibly provide a comprehensive analysis of all the challenges and mistakes that might have been made over more than 100 years of Hull House operations, but the various elements of news coverage suggest hypotheses as to possible causes of death and lessons for us all.

A Bad Case of Founder’s Syndrome?

Founder’s syndrome is a cute piece of nonprofit parlance that sounds trivial in the context of Jane Addams. In most instances of founder’s syndrome, one finds the story of a longtime executive director who has to be dragged from his or her office kicking and screaming. Addams was actually relatively ill for some of the later years of her life before she died of cancer in 1935, so she had been letting go of Hull House for some time. The issue wasn’t about her not letting go, but it might have been more about who among her potential successors could claim the mantle of “owning” and living the ideas of Saint Jane. According to most histories, after her death, the battles over the operations of Hull House between the head resident who followed Addams, Adena Miller Rich, and the president of the board of trustees, Louise deKoven Bowen, occurred daily—on everything, big and small. Before, Addams was both head resident and in control of the board. The split played out terribly until Rich resigned. Subsequent head residents (the title was later changed to “director”) displayed their distance from the ideas and direction that Addams had displayed so forcefully for so many years. In the case of Hull House, this might have been one of the worst cases of founder’s syndrome possible, in that Addams’s successors in no way measured up to her, or perhaps didn’t even grasp some of what she might have meant by the socialization of democracy or Hull House as a “cathedral of humanity.” Some shoes are almost impossible to fill.

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An Uneasy Business Model?

At the beginning, Hull House was almost entirely self-funded by a modest inheritance Addams received on the death of her much-adored father, and the resident staff generally lived and worked there without compensation. It was essentially a volunteer-run organization, somehow able to attract programs and an unbelievable list of famous people to help out (imagine lectures at Hull House including the likes of W.E.B. DuBois, Peter Kropotkin, and John Dewey). But would a volunteer, largely self-financed organization succeed in the long run? Even during Addams’ time, Hull House bumped up against the realities of paying for programs. As she said in 20 Years , “we were often bitterly pressed for money and worried by the prospect of unpaid bills, and we gave up one golden scheme after another because we could not afford it; we cooked the meals and kept the books and washed the windows without a thought of hardship if we thereby saved money for the consummation of some ardently desired undertaking. But in spite of our financial stringency, I always believed that money would be given when we had once clearly reduced the Settlement idea to the actual deed.”

That is a tough model to pursue over time. Addams herself took to raising money, though she encountered the problem of many of today’s nonprofits with offers of financial support from corporate philanthropists who made their money through “unscrupulous” schemes. Eventually, Hull House took to raising charitable money in competition with others and raising rents on the apartments it developed in its 13-building compound. Moreover, it shifted from a largely volunteer operation to a paid staff. That may sound quaint in today’s terms, but it was a major shift in organizational culture for Hull House. While other settlement houses—not much different than Hull House at their outset—made the shift from volunteer operations to becoming more like nonprofits, it seems that the evolution for Hull House was never particularly comfortable or easy.

The Loss of the Physical Settlement?

After Addams acquired the house on Halsted Street, she acquired other properties in short order until Hull House became a thirteen-property complex. In the 1950s and 1960s, it became part of the Near West Side Urban Renewal project. Mayor Richard Daley decided to target the removal of Hull House in a plan to develop the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Only the original Hull House was maintained as a museum on the university campus, but the rest of Hull House was demolished. The Hull House program became a federation of community centers around Chicago, growing to 29 program sites by 1985. Had the urban renewal of the Hull House properties meant that the organization finally morphed from a settlement house—a physical site in a poor neighborhood where the settlement residents connected with low income immigrants—to a provider of community center programming, sort of a more typical nonprofit?

The Cost of Expansion?

As Hull House expanded its operations into different neighborhoods, it developed the illness of the rapid process of scaling up: deficits. By 1967, Hull House had a deficit of $2 million and the various Hull House centers were competing against each other for charitable support. How many multi-faceted, multi-program, multi-site organizations do we encounter regularly only to learn that fundraising priorities are not only not coordinated, but sometimes sites and programs are cannibalizing the same funding sources? A big program expansion like Hull House’s (it became the Hull House Association after it converted from the Halsted site to a confederation of programs) doesn’t work on a fundraising scheme of assuming the funding will be there when the programs prove their mettle. Hull House had to contract, shave programs, eliminate facilities, and constrain vision. Sometimes problems of geographic and programmatic growth create strains that organizations cannot recover from, ever.

A Failure to Ask for Help?

Could the successors of Jane Addams admit their shortcomings? Could they admit to facing financial challenges, exacerbated by program modifications and re-modifications and more that simply weren’t up to the task? Renaming the Hull House Association the Jane Addams Hull House Association (JAHHA) didn’t meant that the spirit and creativity of Addams herself suddenly flowed through the organization. When the organization announced it was closing and going out of business, observers were surprised by the news. One historian on Addams, Grinnell College Professor Victoria Brown, couldn’t figure out why JAHHA leaders hadn’t publicized their financial problems earlier. “I wish we would have known. Why weren’t they screaming this from the rooftops,” Brown told the Associated Press .

It would seem that Hull House fell prey to the all-too-common nonprofit affliction of presenting the image that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the organization, that funding will build on strengths rather than remediate problems such as, in JAHHA’s case, millions of dollars of debt. For close observers, the signs were there years—perhaps decades—ago. After the effort to increase government funding in the 1990s, a new director took over in 2000 and shifted the organization’s programs from an array of job training, elderly services, and family and support services to a narrower program focus because, in his view (as paraphrased by the Chicago Tribune ), “ it may have been trying to do too much with too little .” But big lurches in program focuses are also a telling sign of trouble, and sometimes a sign of an agency looking at government funding opportunities in a hope that it will land on a healthy, sustainable program direction. Usually, it is just the opposite.

A Troubled Organizational Culture?

Reading anything by Addams, who was beyond prolific, one comes away with a strong sense of her kindness and openness. People who knew her confirm it, remarking on her propensity to hug all the little kids and to greet everyone personally. She was hardly the all-too-common manager of today, even in some nonprofits, who barely acknowledges subordinate staff and treats employees like, well, employees. With the closing of Hull House, the shocking news was of course that its 300 employees received only a week’s notice, were not paid for their accumulated vacation days, and had not been told that their health insurance hadn’t been paid for a couple of weeks. It was a shocking cultural change for Hull House that had perhaps been there for a long time, but treating employees so shabbily was evidence that something at Hull House had changed irreparably. Organizational culture is incredibly hard to change by direct action, but when it changes by slow, invisible accretion, the results can be harmful and debilitating.

An Over-dependence on Government Funding?

Not only did the original Hull House eschew much philanthropic support, but it also wasn’t government funded and wasn’t interested in government funding. It viewed itself as a critic of government and the forces that controlled government, particularly the aldermanic ward structure of Chicago politics. When it collapsed, however, Hull House was a ward of government—about 85 to 90 percent government-funded in a state renowned, in this era, for delaying contract reimbursements and shorting nonprofits on what they are owed. It was in the game of chasing government funding. One contract alone, with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) in the mid-1990s, amounted to $6 million (and was obtained when the then-director of Hull House was a former director of DCFS). At its height, Hull House’s budget was $40 million in the early 1990s, but it plummeted to $23 million in 2011. As physician Cory Franklin wrote in the Chicago Tribune , “It relied too much on a state that doesn’t pay its bill and its leaders didn’t move quickly enough to change how it operates.” Franklin added, “Once it became dependent on government funds, it was working for government…” Franklin is describing a mission problem of Hull House, but for others, an overreliance on government funding, particularly local and state government moneys, is a recipe for problems. In the words of the president of the Child Care Association of Illinois , “The government is asking you to do today’s work at yesterday’s prices.”

Warning Signs and Blinders

Maybe these are all just regular, quotidian challenges facing many nonprofits in today’s environment. If a social change organization decides to follow a path of collecting and administering government contracts, how much social change can it really pursue? This is the conundrum facing some service providers. Nonprofit management professor Ivan Medina, who teaches courses about Jane Addams and Hull House at Loyola University, pondered the demise of Hull House and wondered what Jane Addams would have thought about the organization’s denouement. Medina said that Addams “was about social change. She challenged government. She organized strikes.” With the staff fired with little notice and without benefits, Medina said, “she would be organizing them for protests.”

At one point in Hull House’s troubled modern history, it was looking for money from the city government and Oprah Winfrey to pay for expansion of its facilities. It was 1994 and the organization’s budget had more than doubled from $10 million to $22 million in a period of only four years. Although the city and the talk-show host were playing their usual roles, there was a feeling that the organization was looking for lifelines at a point when it should have been consolidating and taking stock of its situation.

A little over a decade later, the federal government was faced with bailing out the Hull House pension plan because of a shortfall of $4.8 million to cover the organization’s then 500 employees and retirees—represented by the United Auto Workers Local 2320. That predicament led to a pension fund bailout by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation and helped Hull House stave off insolvency for a couple of years. The warning signs were all around Hull House, but it appears that no one could really come to grips with the problems. On the heels of the PBGC pension bailout, the then head of Hull House pronounced , “We are not about to close our doors.”

About the author

how did the hull house attempt to solve social problems

Rick joined NPQ in 2006, after almost eight years as the executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Before that he played various roles as a community worker and advisor to others doing community work. He also worked in government. Cohen pursued investigative and analytical articles, advocated for increased philanthropic giving and access for disenfranchised constituencies, and promoted increased philanthropic and nonprofit accountability.

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COMMENTS

  1. Hull House

    Jane Addams Jane Addams, 1914. While traveling in Europe, Addams visited Toynbee Hall, a pioneer settlement founded by Canon Samuel A. Barnett in London's impoverished East End.

  2. Jane Addams

    Hull House founder and peace activist Jane Addams (1860-1935) was one of the most distinguished of the first generation of college-educated women, rejecting marriage and motherhood in favor of a ...

  3. History of Hull House and Some of Its Famous Residents

    Jone Johnson Lewis Updated on January 29, 2019 Hull House was founded in 1889 and the association ceased operations in 2012. The museum honoring Hull House is still in operation, preserving history and heritage of Hull House and its related Association. Also called: Hull-House

  4. Hull House as a Sociological Laboratory (1894)

    Hull House is a social settlement. I need not say that thus far the form of a settlement has been that a number of young men or women, gathered chiefly from the universities and colleges, have taken up residence together in some undesirable quarter of a great city, and have undertaken to make it a better place to live in by the use of whatever ...

  5. Hull-House

    During the late 1800s and early 1900s, social reformers established settlement houses in cities to address issues created by urbanization and industrialization, such as housing shortages and unsanitary living conditions. In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established Hull-House in Chicago, the first settlement house in the United States.

  6. Segregation At Hull-House: A Closer Look

    Segregation At Hull-House: A Closer Look. In June, Addams biographer and Project Advisory Board member Lucy Knight got in touch with a query regarding a claim that Hull-House was a segregated space until the 1930s. The claim first made by Thomas Lee Philpott in his 1978 work: The Slum and the Ghetto: Housing Reform and Neighborhood Work in ...

  7. Jane Addams

    Jane Addams (born September 6, 1860, Cedarville, Illinois, U.S.—died May 21, 1935, Chicago, Illinois) was an American social reformer and pacifist, co-winner (with Nicholas Murray Butler) of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931. She is probably best known as a co-founder of Hull House in Chicago, one of the first social settlements in North America.. Addams graduated from Rockford Female ...

  8. The Hull House's Impact on the Community

    The Hull House's Impact on the Community Created by: Kimberly Eastridge Time Period: 19th Century, 20th Century, Progressive Era Topic: Community and Reform, Culture, Immigration, Poverty Wikipedia.com; the Hull House illustrated on a postcard.

  9. "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements"

    This paper is an attempt to treat of the subjective necessity for Social Settlements, to analyze the motives which underlie a movement based not only upon conviction, but genuine emotion. Hull House of Chicago is used as an illustration, but so far as the analysis is faithful, it obtains wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet for ...

  10. Exploring the Impact of Jane Addams and Hull House in the Late 19th

    One of the key impacts of Hull House was its advocacy for social reform. Addams and the staff at Hull House worked tirelessly to address the social injustices faced by immigrants and low-income individuals. They fought for improved working conditions, fair wages, and access to education and healthcare.

  11. Where Do We Go From Here? Reflections on the Closing of Hull House

    January 26, 2012 Where Do We Go From Here? Reflections on the Closing of Hull House Hull House's founding signaled the start of a new era in social services in the late 19th century. Its demise at the outset of the 21st may come to stand as a milestone marking another major shift in our society's safety net. By: Daniel Stid

  12. Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers

    women reformers in U.S. history-those who assembled in Chicago in the early 1890s at Hull House, one of the nation's first social settlements, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Within that group, this study focuses on the reformer Florence Kelley (1859-1932).

  13. Hull House

    Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.Located on the Near West Side of Chicago, Hull House, named after the original house's first owner Charles Jerald Hull, opened to serve recently arrived European immigrants. By 1911, Hull House had expanded to 13 buildings. In 1912, the Hull House complex was completed with ...

  14. The Hull-House Tradition and the Contemporary Social Worker: Was Jane

    ment of purpose with the secretary of. JANE first ADDAMS' settlement house Hull-House, in the Mid the Donald Brieland state. The legal model on which the west, was founded on September 18, Hull-House tradition was built included 1889, on Chicago's Near West Side. The Hull-Home, founded just a century three ago, purposes: (1) to provide a center ...

  15. Social Welfare History Project Hull House

    Hull House, Chicago, IL. Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in 1889 on the South side of Chicago, Illinois after being inspired by visiting Toynbee Hall. Situated at 800 S. Halstead Street in the run-down Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, most of the people living in the area at the time were recently arrived immigrants from Europe, including ...

  16. Settlement Houses

    As settlement house residents learned more about their communities, they proposed changes in local government and lobbied for state and federal legislation on social and economic problems. Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), a study of housing, employment and wages, prompted other settlements to surveytheir neighborhoods. The University of ...

  17. Hull-House and the 'Garbage Ladies' of Chicago

    During the early 1900s, working-class immigrants in Chicago endured housing problems and unsanitary living conditions. To address these issues, social reformers established institutions called settlement houses, which offered social services for the community. Hull-House was the first settlement house established in the United States. It was ...

  18. Hull-House: An Experiment in Social Service, March 12, 1923 (excerpts

    -- Miss Jane Addams, a leading social worker of America and an author of several books on social problems, arrived in Madras from Rangoon on Sunday. She is a recognized authority on social problems and is the founder of Hull House, a social settlement in Chicago, which has made a contribution of considerable value to all interested in social work.

  19. Statistical Legacy of Hull-House Maps and Papers: Part 5

    Using Data to Identify Societal Problems. Hull House Maps and Papers was one of the earliest works advocating evidence-based policymaking. The authors took the view that one could not solve problems of society without first knowing the extent of those problems through high-quality data. ... Nicholas (1954). Early Days at Hull House. Social ...

  20. Reform in the Gilded Age (video)

    Out of curiosity, the dictionary and Wikipedia definition for socialism is 'publicly owned means of production and industry', which I take to mean the workers own the mechanisms of the economy as a democratic collective, but the video states socialism is a 'government owned enterprise'.

  21. Lessons from Hull House

    It has been reported that 85% of Hull House funding came from various federal, state, and local grants and contracts, whereas only 10% came from unrestricted private donations. As a result, when government money dried up, the agency's revenues decreased by almost half, from a high of $40 million in the 1990s to $23 million (Wisniewski, 2012).

  22. Death of the Hull House: A Nonprofit Coroner's Inquest

    August 2, 2012 When Hull House, founded by legendary social activist Jane Addams, closed down early this year, the reverberations of the failure of the nation's most famous settlement house were somewhat muted.

  23. Hull House Collapse Is a Cautionary Tale for Boards and Executives

    February 27, 2012 Last month's abrupt closure of Hull House, a venerable organization that provided an array of social services to thousands of low-income Chicago residents, is a pointed reminder that many nonprofits operate with precarious finances.