Hull House

Founded in September 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Hull House is the best known of the early American social settlement houses. An important component of Progressive Era reform movements, settlement houses sought social justice by assisting ethnic immigrants and the urban poor in housing, health care, nutrition, employment, education, and a variety of civic engagements, including labor and social policy reform activities. Settlements typically provided housing for educated women and men who devoted a portion of their lives to living in poor urban neighborhoods with the goal of improving society through sharing their culture with inner-city populations.

Addams was head resident of Hull House from 1889 to 1935. Following a trip to England, Addams and Starr established Hull House on South Halstead Street in Chicago's 19th ward, a poor neighborhood populated by tenements and sweatshops. Hull House began in a decaying mansion (originally built by Charles Hull) belonging to philanthropist Helen Culver. Hull House residents first occupied a top floor of the mansion, but eventually expanded to include the entire house as well as a city block of buildings. The complex provided meeting spaces for social clubs, educational programs, and trade unions. A library, art gallery, museum, coffee shop, theater, health infirmary, public park, and cooperative apartments became a part of Hull House in a neighborhood with high concentrations of Greek, Italian, Russian, and Polish immigrants. Residents established comprehensive programs to improve living conditions and to ease the strains and problems associated with rapid urban growth and industrialization.

[Page 445]Hull House was first modeled after the English settlement house Toynbee Hall, which housed university men seeking to apply the principles of Christian Socialism in assisting the poor and bridging the gap between social classes. In Hull House, however, this model gave way to a more egalitarian and a less religious one and to settlements established and managed largely by women. Mary Jo Deegan notes that within a few years, the initial emphasis placed on bringing culture to the neighborhood shifted to an emphasis on addressing the practical issues of poverty. Under Addams's leadership, Hull House became a central institution of sociology (nonacademic), providing opportunities to women in the development of research and social thought. It grew simultaneously with the emergence of sociology as a discipline and before the establishment of state-funded welfare and public policies to support social programs. Importantly, Hull House served as a meeting place for intellectual exchange, becoming home to a large network of women who profoundly influenced American thought and government policies. Most prominent among this group of women were Florence Kelley, Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Mary McDowell, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, and Grace Abbott. The women of Hull House were successful in defining a nonacademic basis for the practice of sociology during the same period that men at the University of Chicago were creating an academic basis for the discipline. During its peak years, as many as 2,000 persons visited Hull House daily.

Although the work of residents at Hull House placed primary emphasis on pragmatic social change, residents also conducted social scientific research with the goal of generating systematic evidence in support of public policies and social reforms. One of the most important contributions of Hull House residents was to applied social science research. A groundbreaking publication, Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), became the seminal study for much of early academic sociology that developed at the University of Chicago. Kelley led in the coordination of this set of neighborhood studies and almost every resident participated in the project. Maps and Papers thus became a comprehensive survey of the living and working conditions of families within a third of a square mile of the settlement and a model for other surveys of American cities. The work included multicolor maps, interview schedules, and charts representing 18 nationalities as well as the wages, health, and working conditions of women and children in the local sweatshops. Also documented were the physical characteristics of the Chicago ghetto, the works of local charities, the works of local artists, and the role of the settlement in the labor movement.

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