Jane Addams: A True Heroine in Chicago
JANE ADDAMS was a peace activist, anti-Imperialist, sociologist, politician and — most of all — the soul of Hull House. She conceived of this settlement house, co-founded it in 1889, and ran it for 50 years.
Addams was born in 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. Her childhood in Cedarville was both privileged and harsh, because Jane’s father, John, was a kind person, a wonderful and wealthy man — but the family had severe health problems.
Jane was the youngest of nine children. Her mother died in childbirth when Jane was two, and by the time Jane was eight, only four of the nine Addams children were still living.
Jane herself came down with a painful case of tuberculosis of the spine and walked stiffly, her head to one side. While her childhood peers played rough-and-tumble games, she felt sickly and plain and, though she adored her father, she often felt she shouldn’t walk next to him on the street. Surely, he’d be embarrassed to be seen with such a homely girl.
On the other hand, she drew from her father, and from the early deaths of her mother and siblings, a sense that the world is, in a deep and basic way, unfair; and that we should strive for a better world, where rich and poor, wise and foolish, healthy and afflicted, live closely together, learning from one another.
This, she felt sure, was how it had been in the first years of Christianity, when membership in a forbidden sect united all manners and classes of Christians. As Christianity grew respectable, its members sorted themselves out into classes, which kept them tragically apart, one from another.
Abraham Lincoln was a family hero. Jane’s father kept in his desk a personal letter from Lincoln — a prized possession.
Jane hoped to go east for college, but her father asked her to stay close and attend Rockford Seminary instead. She swallowed her disappointment, obeyed her father and at Rockford Seminary was elected class president.
One day in college, she swallowed some crushed opium pills which she hoped would give her a deeper acquaintance with the poetry of Thomas de Quincey. She got into trouble with school authorities when she couldn’t easily rise from the floor. But that was the exception; the dominant impression Jane Addams made on people was how intelligent she was, and how mature for her age.
The slight stiffness in her walk, and the distinct way she held her head, the very things which had seemed odd in a girl, seemed dignified in a woman. They furthered the sense she gave in conversation of a strong woman, determined to improve the world in some way.
At Rockford, she met Ellen Gates Starr, who became a lifelong friend. After traveling in Europe, feeling like a pampered young woman who’d done little with her life, Jane Addams confided to Ellen Gates Starr her dream of starting a settlement house. Starr knew it would be difficult but encouraged Jane, and agreed to help her launch the settlement house.
Jane visited Toynbee Hall in London’s East End to see how it was done. Here was a place where rich and poor, educated and uneducated, lived closely together, learning together, working on joint projects. She returned to Chicago in 1889 determined to replicate the best of Toynbee Hall.
She and Ellen Gates Starr found for sale, at 800 South Halsted Street, the dilapidated mansion of real estate developer Charles Jerald Hull. This had once been a fashionable address, in an elegant quarter of town, and many of Chicago’s well-off had bitter words for the immigrants who’d “flooded” and “ruined” the neighborhood: the Irish and the Italians; the Germans and the French Canadians and the Greeks; the Eastern European Jews.
To Addams, these immigrants were ESSENTIAL to the neighborhood, crucial to what she hoped to achieve. Addams and Ellen Gates Starr bought the Hull mansion, made it a settlement house called “Hull House” and reached out to the neighborhood, welcoming everyone to their moldering mansion.
‘Jane Addams is in way over her head,’ people said. ‘These immigrants are tough, they’re stubborn and insular, suspicious of anyone beyond their own circle.’ The 19th Ward was full of death and disease, saloon brawls — and politicians. Chicago in those days was run by swaggering men like Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin, who shook down pimps and sex workers, gamblers and tavern owners in return for keeping the police away. Alderman Paddy Bauler liked to say: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”
Johnny Powers was the dominating alderman of the 19th Ward. “Johnny Da Pow,” the Italian immigrants called him, and Johnny Da Pow liked to remind people that nothing important happened in the 19th ward without Johnny’s personal okay.
And why should Johnny Powers okay a settlement house that catered to the needs of working people, horning in on the territory of the Democratic Party? Jane Addams and her friends and donors were wealthy, and at first Johnny Powers accused them of being rich snobs and anti-Catholic in the bargain.
Get Andrew Szanton’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But Jane Addams — politely — besieged Johnny Powers and in time made him an ally. In 1894, he even hired her as the first female sanitary inspector in the history of the 19th Ward. He’d later boast he gave her the only paying job she ever had.
The prevailing model of female charity in Chicago, before Jane Addams, had been a wealthy woman dressed in finery who made an appearance in a poor neighborhood, at a church, a mission or in an open courtyard. She smiled at the deserving poor, and gave something away — turkeys at Thanksgiving, fresh fruit in summer, blankets in winter.
The visitor and the poor people they were serving might chit-chat — but there were no questions about WHY the visitor was so much better off than the poor. The fact that many of the best jobs were given out as patronage to the well-connected, the fact that neighborhoods were racially segregated, and that building codes and sanitary codes played a major role in disparities of life expectancy — these things were never discussed.
Jane Addams disdained that sort of charity. She wanted fundamental social change — better building codes, better sanitary codes, better school and after-school programs, special courts for juveniles, and an end to racism and prostitution. She wanted charity and self-help woven into the daily lives of the poor, not given at rare intervals by well-meaning outsiders.
The one building of Hull House in 1889 had, by 1911, grown to 13 buildings. Hull House had become a place where people could get an advanced education, learn a trade, and be exposed to the arts. Jane wanted to give people struggling to get through the day a place with a much wider vision of the world, and of what their life could be.
Twenty-five women lived full-time at Hull House, and 2,000 more people came every week, to take night classes, put their kids in kindergarten, attend club meetings, or do any of a dozen other things. Within the first three weeks the kindergarten was in operation, 94 children were signed up by grateful parents.
Hull House had a well-stocked public kitchen where people could prepare meals. There was an art gallery, a coffee house, a gymnasium, a book bindery, a library — and a music school run by a dynamo named Mary Rozet Smith. Hull House was a center of women’s suffrage work; a place where people came to study sociology and world peace. Hull House built a playground. All of this grew organically.
I have no blueprint, Jane would say. “We learn life from life itself.”
She was an author, a settlement worker, and a lay expert on children and public health. In 1901, she founded the Juvenile Protection Association to help protect children from racism, child labor and neglect. She made Hull House an incubator of female executive talent. She could work on very specific, local problems — and also see the big picture. In 1931, she was the first U.S. woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Addams was very good at talking about Hull House in a way that made Chicago’s wealthy reach for their checkbooks. To Christians, she made giving money to Hull House feel like Christian charity. To wealthy Jews like Julius Rosenwald, she emphasized the secular nature of the place.
Like Booker T. Washington raising money for his beloved Tuskegee Institute, Addams struck just the right note — truly humble but also determined and practical. Donors felt, ‘This woman will not waste my money.’ Louise DeKoven Bowen and Anita McCormick Blaine were both generous patrons of Hull House. Louise DeKoven Bowen was from a family of bankers; Jane Addams made her treasurer of Hull House and a trustee. Anita McCormick Blaine was heiress to the McCormick reaper fortune.
Addams worked to combat prostitution, and wrote a book about it called “A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil.” She rejected the assumption that women deliberately choose prostitution. She insisted it was almost always the result of dire poverty, desperation, or severe acts of coercion.
Some called Jane “The Saint of Halsted Street,” and since she had no husband, no boyfriend or children, she fit the model of the “celibate matron” reformer. People assumed that any sexual feelings she might have were channeled into her work. But modern historians have found evidence that Addams had rather passionate romantic relationships with Ellen Gates Starr and later with Mary Rozet Smith, with whom she shared a house for 30 years.
Jane Addams died in 1935, at the age of 74. Almost all of Hull House is gone now, torn down in the 1960’s in the name of “progress.” It seems the University of Illinois, Chicago needed the land. But the reputation of Jane Addams lives on. She understood the linkages between democracy, peace and social justice, she served the weak and the vulnerable, and she never stopped trying to improve the world.
Once a young woman named Jessie Binford asked her wasn’t she afraid of bucking Johnny Powers? Jane Addams said no she wasn’t — because “Everything grows from the bottom up.”
