Jane Addams

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a pioneer American settlement worker and founder of Hull House in Chicago, Ill., author, pacifist and woman's leader. She was the most prominent woman of the Progressive Era.

Early career

Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois, on Sept. 6, 1860; her father, a Yankee, was a prominent Republican politician and supporter of Abraham Lincoln. At nearby Rockford Seminary, which she attended from 1877 to 1881, the conscientiousness tinged with rebellion that characterized her career began to appear. Valedictorian and president of her class, she played a leading part in transforming the Congregational finishing school school into a degree-conferring college. She was a voracious reader in history and philosophy. Elshtain (2002) emphasizes her religiosity, showing that Addams was influenced by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and tried to imitate Christ through a service ethic.

In 1881 her father died. Eight restless and unhappy years followed in which she underwent painful operations to correct a spinal curvature. In 1883-1888 Addams traveled in Europe seeking a purpose in life. The idea of founding a settlement house for the underprivileged came to her in Spain in 1888. In England she visited Toynbee Hall, London's famous settlement house, and consulted the head resident, Canon Samuel A. Barnett.

Hull House

In September 1889, Addams and a friend, Ellen Gates Starr, moved into an 1850s mansion built by banker Charles Hull, but located in a neighborhood that had become a crowded multiethnic slum on the near West Side of Chicago controlled by local political bosses. Hull House, as Jane Addams called it, became America's best known settlement house. Addams used Hull House to generate system-directed change--to keep families safe, community and societal conditions must be improved. Starr and Addams developed three "ethical principles" for social settlements: "to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy, that is, egalitarian, or democratic, social relations across class lines." Hull House therefore offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world, in including William Lyon MacKenzie King, a graduate student from Harvard who later became prime minister of Canada. In the 1890s Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents of the house made it a world center of social reform activity. Hull House used the latest methodology (pioneering in statistical mapping) to study overcrowding, truancy, typhoid fever, cocaine, children's reading, newsboys, infant mortality, and midwifery. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city- and state-wide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women. Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world, and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. In 1912 she helped found the Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, even though his platform called for building more battleships.

Emphasis on children

Hull House stressed the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants, and fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth. Addams feared that cities and factories were killing the spirit of youth; recreation and play were healthy mediums to channel the spirit of youth. Hull-House featured multiple programs in art and drama, kindergarten classes, boys' and girls' clubs, language classes, reading groups, college extension courses, along with a labor museum and playground. They were all designed to foster democratic cooperation and collective action and downplay individualism. She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws in Illinois. Addams spoke of the "undoubted powers of public recreation to bring together the classes of a community in the modern city unhappily so full of devices for keeping them apart." Addams worked with the Chicago Board of Health and served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America.

World Peace

Addams was a major synthesizing figure in the domestic and international peace movements, serving as both a figurehead and leading theoretician; she was influenced especially by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Addams became an anti-war activist from 1899, as part of the anti-imperialist movement that followed the Spanish-American War. Her book Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) reshaped the peace movement worldwide to include ideals of social justice. She recruited social justice reformers like Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Emily Balch to join her in the new international women's peace movement after 1914. Addams's work came to fruition after World War I, when major institutional bodies began to link peace with social justice and probe the underlying causes of war and conflict. After 1915 Addams, who never married, centered her interests in the peace movement. She was a leader at the International Congress of Women at The Hague, Holland, in 1915 and presided at the first meeting of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1919, which she served as president. Her pacifism was denounced by patriotic groups during World War I (1917-18), which she reluctantly supported. After 1920, however, she was widely regarded as the greatest woman of the Progressive Era and in 1931 she won the Nobel Peace prize.

Addams ideals

Addams and her colleagues originally intended Hull House as a transmission device to bring the values of the college-educated high culture to the masses, including the Efficiency Movement. However, over time the focus of Hull House changed from bringing art and culture to the neighborhood (as evidenced in the construction of the Butler Building) to responding to the needs of the community by providing childcare, educational opportunities, and large meeting spaces. Hull-House became more than simply a proving ground for the new generation of college-educated, professional women - it also became part of the community in which it was founded, and its development reveals a shared history. Addams stressed that women--especially middle class women with leisure and energy, as well as rich philanthropists-- had a civic duty to become involved in municipal affairs as a matter of "civic housekeeping."

Women's lives revolved around "responsibility, care, and obligation," and this area represented the source of women's power. This notion provided the foundation for the municipal or civil housekeeping role that Addams defined, and gave added weight to the woman suffrage movement that Addams supported. Addams argued that women, as opposed to men, are trained in the delicate matters of human welfare and need to build upon their traditional roles of housekeeping to be civic housekeepers. Enlarged housekeeping duties involved reform efforts regarding poisonous sewage, impure milk (which often carried tuberculosis), smoke-laden air, and unsafe factory conditions. Addams led the "garbage wars"; in 1894 she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of the Chicago 19th ward. With the help of the Hull-House Women's Club, within a year over 1000 health department violations were reported to city counsel and garbage collection reduced death and disease.

Addams had long discussions with philosopher John Dewey in which they redefined democracy in terms of pragmatism and civic activism, with an emphasis more on duty and less on rights.

Addams' construction of womanhood involved daughterhood, sexuality, wifehood, and motherhood. In both of her autobiographical volumes, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), Addams's gender constructions parallel the Progressive-Era ideology she championed. Addams's autobiographical persona manifests her ideology and supports her popularized public activist persona as the "Mother of Social Work," in the sense that she represents herself as a celibate matron, who served the suffering immigrant masses through Hull-House, as if they were her own children. Although not a mother herself, Addams identified with motherhood in the sense of protective care of her people.

Legacy

She died on May 21, 1935, in Chicago. Her 12 books include Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) and Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), as well as two influential autobiographies, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (1930). She wrote over 500 essays, speeches, and other works; A letterpress edition of Addams' letters and publications is underway. Her achievements are commemorated by the Jane Addams School of Social Work, a unit of the University of Illinois, Chicago. Hull House is a museum, located on the university campus. Her reputation declined after 1960 as critics portrayed her an unoriginal racist determined to civilize helpless immigrants. After 1990 the pendulum swung in her favor and numerous favorable biographies have appeared.

Bibliography

Scholarly biographies

• Brown, Victoria Bissell. Title: The Education of Jane Addams: Politics and Culture in Modern America. U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 421 pp.
• Davis, Allen. (1970)
• Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life Basic Books: 2002 online edition
• Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. U. of Chicago Press, 2005. 582 pp.; biography to 1899
• Joslin, Katherine. Jane Addams: A Writer's Life. U. of Illinois Press, 2004. 306 pp.
• Linn, J. W. Jane Addams: A biography. (1935)

Specialized studies

• Alan Dawley. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003)
• Deegan, M. J. Jane Addams and the men of the Chicago school, 1892-1918. (1988)
• Donovan, Brian. White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887-1917. U of Illinois Press. 2006. 186 pp.
• Lissak, R. S. Pluralism and progressives: Hull-House and the new immigrants. (1989)
• Ostman, Heather Elaine. "Social Activist Visions: Constructions of Womanhood in the Autobiographies of Jane Addams and Emma Goldman." PhD dissertation Fordham U. 2004. 240 pp. DAI 2004 65(3): 934-A. DA3125022
• Philpott, Thomas. L. The slum and the ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and reformers in Chicago, 1880-1930. (1991).
• Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "'Some Of Us Who Deal With The Social Fabric': Jane Addams Blends Peace And Social Justice, 1907-1919." Journal Of The Gilded Age And Progressive Era 2003 2(1): 80-96. Issn: 1537-7814 Fulltext: History Cooperative

• Stebner, E. J. The women of Hull-House: A study in spirituality, vocation, and friendship. (1997).
• Toft, Jessica and Abrams, Laura S. "Progressive Maternalists and the Citizenship Status of Low-Income Single Mothers." Social Service Review 2004 78(3): 447-465. ISSN: 0037-7961 Fulltext: [ Ebsco ]

Primary sources

• Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes, 1910 online edition
• Addams, Jane. Peace and Bread in Time of War 1922 online edition
• Addams, Jane. The Long Road of Woman's Memory. reprint U. of Illinois Press, 2002. 84 pp.
• Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics. reprint edition U. of Illinois Press, 2002. 127 pp.
• Addams, Jane. My Friend, Julia Lathrop. (1935; reprint U. of Illinois Press, 2004) 166 pp.
• Addams, Jane; Balch, Emily Greene; and Hamilton, Alice. Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results. reprint ed by Harriet Hyman Alonso, U. of Illinois Press, 2003. 91 pp.
• Elshtain, Jean B. ed. The Jane Addams Reader (2002), 488pp
• Lasch, Christopher, ed. The social thought of Jane Addams. (1965).

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