Twenty Years at Hull-House

Summary

Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical. In Cedarville, Illinois, the young Jane, who has lost her mother in infancy, adores her father, a miller and state senator. She remembers first seeing city poverty at the age of about seven and vowing to live in a large house among the small ones; a recurring dream in which she alone must make a wagon wheel; and her father's advice to wear her old cloak to Sunday school so as not to make poorer girls feel badly. She recalls the black-draped flags on the gateposts and her father's tears when Lincoln died, and the letters from Lincoln that he treasured. At Rockford Seminary she resists pressure to become a missionary. After her father's death in 1881 she enters medical school in Philadelphia, but a spinal illness puts her in Dr. Weir Mitchell's hospital and then in bed for six months, and she drifts through years of travel and study marked by nervous depression. Watching a bullfight in Madrid in 1888, she is shocked to realize that she has been hiding behind endless preparation, and she tells her school friend Ellen Gates Starr of her plan to live among the poor. A visit to Toynbee Hall in London confirms it. In September 1889 the two women move into the old Hull mansion on Halsted Street, among Italian, Irish, German, Jewish, Bohemian and Greek neighbors. The later chapters describe the house's growth: a kindergarten, reading parties on George Eliot, clubs, a coffee-house, a gymnasium, a theater, a music school and the Labor Museum, where immigrant women demonstrate spinning and weaving for their American-born children. Addams describes the poverty of the 1893 depression, the sweatshops investigated by Florence Kelley, the first Illinois factory law of 1893 and its eight-hour clause, and the bitterness of the Pullman strike of 1894. She recounts her visit to Tolstoy and her failed attempt to bake bread with her own hands, her term as garbage inspector of the nineteenth ward, the typhoid epidemic of 1902 and a campaign against the sale of cocaine to boys, the founding of the Juvenile Court, political battles with the ward alderman, the clubs for young people, the arts, the Russian revolutionary exiles who came to Chicago, and her belief that education must be socialized for all. The book appeared serially in The American Magazine in 1910 and was published that year by Macmillan with illustrations by Norah Hamilton.

Top Lessons

• The snare of preparation

  For years after college Addams studied and traveled, telling herself she was preparing for great things. A bullfight in Madrid made her see that preparation had become an excuse for inaction. The lesson is that at some point one must stop getting ready and begin.

• Living among, not only giving to

  Hull-House was not a mission run from outside but a home in which educated residents lived among their neighbors. Addams says settlement work met a need of the residents as well as of the neighborhood. She treats friendship and shared life as the basis of service.

• Honoring the older generation

  Addams saw immigrant children growing ashamed of parents who could not speak English. The Labor Museum let mothers show their skill at spinning and weaving, and their children came to see them with new respect. The lesson joins education with filial piety.

• Seeing both sides

  During the Pullman strike Addams knew both George Pullman and many of his workers, and she tried to understand each side's view without denying the bitterness. Her father, she writes, had taught her to look for charity on both sides of a conflict.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book is a primary source for Progressive Era public health and for the medical history of women of Addams's generation. Addams describes her year at the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia, a spinal condition from childhood that put her in Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's hospital, six months bound to a bed, and years of what she calls nervous exhaustion and nervous depression; these belong to the period's diagnosis of neurasthenia and Mitchell's rest cure, and any later psychiatric reading is interpretive. At Hull-House residents worked as investigators of sanitation and disease: Addams served as garbage inspector of the nineteenth ward to prevent so-called filth diseases; residents traced the typhoid epidemic of 1902, in which the ward had a sixth of the city's deaths, to defective plumbing; Florence Kelley's inspectors destroyed garments finished in houses with unreported smallpox after the World's Fair; and Hull-House campaigned against the sale of cocaine to boys until a new Illinois law was passed in 1907. The book also mentions the Visiting Nurse Association, tuberculosis in the neighborhood and the County Hospital.

• Chapter IV, The Snare of Preparation

  Medical school, the spinal difficulty, Weir Mitchell's hospital, six months in bed, and years of nervous depression.

• Chapter XIII, Public Activities and Investigations

  Addams as garbage inspector of the nineteenth ward and the women of the neighborhood who thought it was not a lady's job.

• Chapter XIII, Public Activities and Investigations

  The typhoid epidemic of 1902 and the residents' investigation of plumbing near clusters of cases.

• Chapter XIII, Public Activities and Investigations

  The campaign against druggists selling cocaine to minors and the death of a former kindergarten pupil at seventeen.

• Chapter XIV, Civic Cooperation

  The smallpox epidemic after the World's Fair, garments finished in infected houses, and Julia Lathrop's visits to the pest house.