Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams

Her ambition was to study medicine and live among the poor. She was one of the first Rockford students to receive a bachelor’s degree when the school secured a college charter.

Trying to place the woman’s school on an equal level with the state’s male-only colleges, Addams competed in the Illinois intercollegiate oratorical contest. At age 17, Addams entered Rockford Seminary, known as the “Mount Holyoke of the West.” Addams and the other students were enthusiastic about the opportunity for Rockford Seminary to acquire accreditation as a college in the new movement for women to attain a full college education. She was impressed with the idea that the people themselves were America’s great resource.

Her father’s honorable service in the Illinois state legislature during the Civil War and his friendship with President Abraham Lincoln further stimulated her passion for democracy. Since her mother died when Addams was two years old, Addams describes the influence of her Hicksite Quaker father on the development of her moral conscience and desire to help the impoverished. Twenty Years at Hull-House begins in 1889 and traces the development of Addams’s concern with social justice from her childhood through her late twenties, when she moved into Hull-House. Through the Settlement House, Addams extended middle-class women’s traditional role in the domestic sphere into the public sphere of social action. Based on the British reformers’ Settlement Movement, Addams’s project was to socialize democracy: identifying and helping to meet neighborhood needs by providing a community center for social, educational, and charitable activities. Addams believed that opening a large, welcoming home where educated, middle-class reformers could reside in an urban, immigrant neighborhood would help bridge the gulf between new arrivals from the Old World and native-born Euro-Americans. Inspired by a trip to East London during which Addams witnessed the extreme poverty of the British urban poor, Jane Addams founded Hull-House in 1889 as an experimental effort to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial area on Chicago’s West Side. The United States did not yet have protective legislation, social security, or other welfare systems, leaving the immigrant and other urban communities defenseless against natural and human-created crises. Fourteen-hour workdays, child labor, industrial accidents, and illiteracy were common among the working class. Overcrowding, poverty, and competing cultural enclaves created volatile and unsanitary urban spaces.

By the late 19th century, rapid industrialization and immigration were changing the landscape of American cities.

Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams