Twenty Years at Hull House

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1910

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-18

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Hull-House and the American Modification of the English Settlement

The English Settlement Movement, in particular Toynbee Hall, fascinated Addams. However, she did not want American Settlements to be “mere echoes and imitations of the English movement” (43). There were different conditions in the United States that required modifications of the English Settlement concept although both reform efforts responded to the effects of industrialization and poverty, espoused reciprocal relations between different segments of society, and were humanitarian in spirit.

Americans were habituated to self-government and volunteerism in a democracy. Consequently, Addams felt that some of what seemed pathbreaking for the English Settlement, such as “a group of Oxford students” who “went out to mend a disused road, inspired thereto by Ruskin’s teaching for the bettering of the common life” was not innovative for an American used to having all the country roads “mended each spring by self-respecting citizens […] carrying out the simple method devised by a democratic government” (43). The rigid class stratification among the English also made some of their Settlement conclusions seem artificial to Addams, “a western American who had been born in a rural community where the early pioneer life had made social distinctions impossible” (42). On the other hand, the pioneering Americans’ expectation of self-reliance and their ideal of the self-made man made them sometimes slower to recognize that extra help might be needed for struggling people or that government legislation was required. Addams recounts English visitors’ surprise at Americans’ lack of knowledge of the conditions of the poor and the British view that American cities were “the results of an industry totally unregulated by well-considered legislation” (145). Addams’s defense was “that our very democracy so long presupposed that each citizen could care for himself that we are slow to develop a sense of social obligation” (255).

In addition to this reluctance to provide social aid in the individualistic American culture, the conditions and expectations of the immigrant community created obstacles to the establishment of an American Settlement. Immigrants from nations with autocratic governments were unfamiliar with American civic principles. English language classes, as well as other clubs and activities, were needed to bridge the gulf between the immigrants, who tended to isolate themselves in ethnic neighborhoods, and English-speaking Americans who lived in other parts of the city. The warden of the Oxford Settlement House in England was able to hold religious service at the end of each day to unite the Church of England-affiliated residents in their tasks. Addams told him that the Hull-House residents did not worship together because of their wide range of faiths. The heterogenous nature of American urban society and the rapidly changing ethnic, industrial, political, and socioeconomic landscape of the late 19th century necessitated a new vision of the Settlement Movement specific to American needs.

Theory vs. Practice and the Education of Settlement Residents

Although the educated, middle-class residents of Hull-House taught classes on many topics, Addams repeatedly emphasizes the mistakes made by the well-meaning reformers and the lessons they learned from their immigrant, working-class neighbors. For Addams, the Settlement’s “function is revealed through the reaction on its consciousness of its own experiences” (308). Addams gives numerous examples of how the Hull-House residents’ discoveries of their neighbors’ needs led them into new enterprises and fields of activity.

During the first Christmas at Hull-House, the reformers were astonished when “a number of little girls refused the candy which was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer, saying simply that they ‘worked in a candy factory and could not bear the sight of it’” (148). Through this incident and the injuries of several boy members of a Hull-House club, Addams and the Hull-House residents learned about the long, working hours and bodily harm experienced by laboring children. On neighborhood visits, the reformers also witnessed small children assisting their mothers in unhealthy sweatshop work. Addams and her colleagues then realized that they needed to compile careful data on these practices and urge the passage of protective legislation in order to stop these industrial abuses. Through the reformers’ acquaintance with pale, listless young women who were constantly exhausted by all-night work shifts, followed by household duties, they recognized the need for legislation limiting women to eight-hour workdays. After encountering several crippled children in the neighborhood who had been injured because their hard-working mothers had to leave them at home unsupervised, the Hull-House residents started a day nursery to take care of working mothers’ children.

However, at times, the Hull-House residents attempted to impose reforms that the neighborhood inhabitants rejected or misunderstood because of cultural differences. When Hull-House reformers investigated the nutritious food value and cost of the imported foods eaten by the immigrants, they decided that cheaper meats and vegetables could be more nutritiously cooked by a slow method. Hull-House opened a public kitchen, where scientific training enabled this food to be carefully prepared. The effort failed, according to Addams, because the reformers did not anticipate “the wide diversity in nationality and inherited tastes” (102) and the immigrants’ priority of taste preferences over nutritiousness. Yet Hull-House succeeded in opening a coffeehouse, since the neighborhood wanted a safer place for social gatherings. Addams recalls that the coffee-house experience taught the Hull-House residents “not to hold to preconceived ideas of what the neighborhood ought to have,” but to be ready “to modify and adapt our undertakings as we discovered those things which the neighborhood was ready to accept” (103). When an unemployed man was told he had to labor at an outdoors job that his health could not endure and he died, Addams learned a harsher lesson: “that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to invite blundering” (123).

The Expansion of Women’s Roles in Settlement Work

In Addams’s essay, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” she describes the fast-growing number of cultivated young people, particularly college-educated young women, who have no proper outlet for their abilities and energy; consequently, they feel a “sense of uselessness” (94). In addition to the assistance the Settlement Movement gives to the urban working-class, Addams argues that the Settlement provides an opportunity for these middle-class young women, who possess the advantage of university training, to contribute to society and fulfill their potential for service. Most of the Hull-House residents were women who had earned college degrees; several held advanced degrees, including Alice Hamilton, M.D.; Florence Kelley, J.D.; and Sophonisba Breckinridge, Ph.D., J.D. Through the Settlement work, these women were able to use their attainments to improve societal conditions, which often led to their appointments to public offices and other positions not previously occupied by females.

Addams asserts that women’s traditional domestic role, including responsibility for childcare and family health, justified women’s activity in the public sphere as investigations and government lobbying were necessary to achieve legislation protective of children’s and families’ welfare. Addams recalls that even though many of the immigrant women “saw that their housewifely duties logically extended to the adjacent alleys and streets,” they were still shocked by Addams’s appointment as the garbage inspector of their ward, believing “’it was not a lady’s job’” (204). However, Addams explained to them “that if it were a womanly task to go about in tenement houses in order to nurse the sick, it might be quite as womanly to go through the same district in order to prevent the breeding of so-called ‘filth diseases’” (204).

The Hull-House residents had their first experience in government lobbying after discovering the harsh child labor in the immigrant neighborhood. Addams “insisted that well-known Chicago women” (151) accompany the Settlement reformers as they lobbied the state capitol on behalf of factory legislation. When Hull-House resident Florence Kelley suggested to the Illinois State Bureau of Labor that they investigate Chicago’s sweatshop system, she was engaged to do that task. After the passage of the factory law, Kelley became the first woman to hold a statewide office when the governor appointed her Chief Factory Inspector for Illinois; her deputy, Alzina Stevens, was another Hull-House resident. Examples abound of Hull-House Settlement residents’ social reform work translating into pathbreaking positions, including that of Julia C. Lathrop who became the first woman to head a federal bureau, directing the United States Children’s Bureau from 1912 to 1922.