117 Years Ago Today

Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, who linked art and labor causes, opened Hull House to help immigrants in Chicago. Hull House was located in the heart of a poor immigrant Chicago neighborhood. At that time, immigrants represented three-quarters of the city's one million inhabitants. Addams and Starr sublet the second floor and set out to find other women with interests similar to their own who would offer instruction and work with the Chicago urban poor.
Very soon, Hull-House had become a complex of thirteen buildings including an art gallery, gymnasium, theater, dining hall, dispensary, playground, and apartments for staff. It provided art, music, sewing and cooking classes, job training, kindergarten and day-care facilities for children of working mothers, an employment bureau, a cooperative boardinghouse for working girls, summer camps, and meeting places for local groups and trade unions. Each week, approximately two thousand people entered the doors of Hull-House.

Hull-House, through its residents and volunteers, followed two main lines of activities. First, it delivered a variety of programs to help individuals improve their quality of life, with a focus on educational programs for the immigrant population. Second, anticipating what later would be known as 'participatory action research', it worked with neighbors to collectively investigate common problems and find common solutions. Led by Jane Addams, the residents of Hull-House were at the forefront of the struggle for parks, playgrounds, housing, health care, safe streets, women's rights, compulsory education, labor standards and fair wages. Hull-House also had a labor museum, in which immigrants from different parts of the world could share different methods of production and preserve their heritage. The celebration of the diversity of immigrant cultures was complemented with dancing, music and drama courses, recitals, and presentations.

A large part of the success of Hull-House was due to Addams' ability to obtain the help of outstanding personalities of that time, like John Dewey and William James. Dewey occasionally lived and worked at Hull-House, and remarked that Addams was a personification of his educational idea that people learn by doing. Later, upon Jane's death in 1935, Dewey would dedicate to her one of his most important books, "Liberalism and Social Action." William James admired her work and told her that "you utter the truth we others vainly seek". Like Dewey and James, she was concerned about education and democracy, and devoted great energy to public speaking and writing. Like them and many others, she was an advocate of child-centered education and of social reforms leading to the construction of a more egalitarian and humanitarian society. In the words of Alexander Rippa,

"Basic to the philosophy of education that Addams developed during the forty-four years she lived at Hull-House was a vision of society in which all people, regardless of race, gender or socioeconomic status, would have a chance to develop individual talents and interests. She believed that personally enriching experiences for the immigrants were vital in a society based on democracy as a way of life. At the settlement house, she tried to solve the daily problems of new citizens. The result was a humane institution in which the immigrants were able to grow and eventually contribute to community affairs." (1997: 141-2)

In 1931, Jane Addams became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

(Biographical information obtained from here.)