Hull House

AMERICAN REFORMER Jane Addams founded the Hull House settlement in Chicago in 1889 on Halsted Street, then one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. Addams and her companion Ellen Starr were inspired by what they had seen in Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, a settlement that was designed for students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities to work among the poor during their vacations.

In the same way, Addams and Starr wanted to provide middle-class women like them the opportunity to be both socially useful and independent, an opportunity [Page 509]that was denied the majority of women at the time. Hull House provided an outlet for the intellectual and practical abilities of the young females who became its directors. Without such an outlet the fate of these young women, Addams writes in her autobiographical volume Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), would be comparable to that of “the other great mass of destitute lives.” By 1900 the settlement had flourished as a popular center of political, educational, and social activity. Because of Hull House, Addams became well-known and a nationwide settlement house movement began. In 1897 there were 74 settlements in the United States, and by 1900 there were over 100. In 1911, leaders of the settlement movement founded the National Federation of Settlements.

Most of the people living in the area surrounding Hull House were recent arrivals to America, mostly European immigrants. The neighborhood of Hull House was part of poverty-stricken Chicago's 19th ward. Hull House soon came to include 13 buildings. To the poor immigrants living in the area the center became a meeting place where they could talk about their needs. Although Addams's description of the poor in Twenty Years at Hull-House is outdated and patronizing at best, the settlement quickly responded to most pressing requests of the immigrants and acted as a mediator between them and government officials.

The settlement went on to include daycare centers for children of working mothers, opened adult high schools, and provided cooking and sewing classes. An art gallery was also created, and Ellen Starr organized art classes and exhibitions. A coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a clubhouse, and even a theater were added in the 1890s. In its mission to help the poor, Hull House recruited university professors, students, and social reformers such as John Dewey, Clarence Darrow, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Partly influenced by her small-town background, Addams tried to reconstruct a face-to-face rural community within the expanding urban context. In her article “A Function of the Social Settlement” (1899), Addams defined the function of a settlement as bringing “to life the dreary and isolated” and bringing them “into a fuller participation of the common inheritance,” so that residents of the neighborhood could establish meaningful relationships to each other. Immigrants were involved in national evenings where traditional dances, games, and food of their countries of origin were offered. Hull House was first inspired by the values of Christian socialism, also due to the presence of Florence Kelley, a member of the Socialist Labor Party. Hull House thus also became a center for social reform, with Kelley organizing research into the sweatshop trade in Chicago, which eventually led to the Factory Act (1893) and to her appointment as chief factory inspector for the state of Illinois. These activities were central in the development of social work as a profession.

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