Jane Addams and the Hull House - Term Paper Example

? Jane Addams and the Hull House Jane Addams and the Hull House Introduction Years before any organized movement to defend civil liberties existed, indeed before the phrase came into common use, Jane Addams had testified through bitter and dramatic experience to her unfailing devotion to these basic American principles. There is no other American of her time who could duplicate even remotely the courageous service she rendered both to public understanding and to the victims of prejudice and hysteria. Her restrained account in these pages does only half-justice to the efforts she exerted against the fury and passions directed against foreign, mainly Russian, revolutionists. As a small child, Jane wanted to be a doctor but there were only two fields that were acceptable at the time for women: getting married and having children or becoming a schoolteacher. When Jane was eight, her father re-married. Her stepmother had a big influence on the Addam's girls in the area of arts. Jane received a lot of attention from her father and because of this she realized that her potential as a woman was not as limited as she thought. She entered into the Rockville Female Seminary in 1877. She was very popular among her classmates because of her ability to write and speak.1 Soon after she graduated, she became ill and depressed, but wasn't sure how to deal with it. In 1881, her father suddenly became ill and died. She enrolled in medical school, but after the first semester, she became ill again and was put in the hospital for an extended period of time. Her brother also took a turn for the worse and had a mental breakdown, which in turn was an emotional setback for her. After Jane and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr opened the Hull House; they started to realize how bad conditions were in Chicago. They would take care of children so mothers could work; children were made to work long hours, and many other things that opened their eyes. Because of how many people they helped, Addams went around to many different women's clubs, church groups, and college students to talk about settlement houses, social reform and the ways that these people could help Chicago and the nation.2 Addams gave up a lot, considering her background; to live in the slums of Chicago and to help people the way she did was amazing. During the 1890's, settlement houses became more and more popular.3 She was a leader in this movement because of her writings and her lectures. Addams became more involved in national concerns. The US was declaring war on Spain and because of that, violent crime rates went up in Chicago. Because of her works, her protests eventually reached Charles R. Crane, a close friend of President Woodrow Wilson. These are meant to try to help people get back on their feet. These houses provide a way for parents to get jobs and not have to worry bout their kids. Once they get a steady job and keep it, then they can try to work and take care of their kids. One example of this concept would be a foster home. A foster home takes kids into the home for as long as is needed. Sometimes the kids go to another home and sometimes they stay and are adopted. After Jane and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr opened the Hull House, they started to realize how bad conditions were in Chicago. They would take care of children so mothers could work; children were made to work long hours, and many other things that opened their eyes. Because of how many people they helped, Addams went around to many different women's clubs, church groups, and college students to talk about settlement houses, social reform and the ways that these people could help Chicago and the nation.4 Addams gave up a lot, considering her background; to live in the slums of Chicago and to help people the way she did was amazing. During the 1890's, settlement houses became more and more popular. She was a leader in this movement because of her writings and her lectures. 5 Addams became more involved in national concerns. The US was declaring war on Spain and because of that, violent crime rates went up in Chicago. Because of her works, her protests eventually reached Charles R. Crane, a close friend of President Woodrow Wilson. These are meant to try to help people get back on their feet. These houses provide a way for parents to get jobs and not have to worry bout their kids. Once they get a steady job and keep it, then they can try to work and take care of their kids. One example of this concept would be a foster home. A foster home takes kids into the home for as long as is needed. Sometimes the kids go to another home and sometimes they stay and are adopted. Jane Addams and Hull House Hull House was a mansion owned by Charles J. Hull, a Chicago businessman, who was no long in need of the house. So, the women worked on the house to make it fit to open to the public and the Hull House was finally opened in 1889. While Hull House was still getting notice around Chicago, Addams and Starr made speeches around the city promoting the use of the house and how it would be able to benefit the people that really needed to use it. They were able to reach the women of wealthy families and they were able to convince them to volunteer at the house, helping with the children and the sick. The house offered opportunities for the people that they would never have received anywhere else. There were kindergarten, elementary, and adult classes offered to anyone who wanted to take them. They children had an area to play at and be safe at the same time. For the first time, these people were being offered opportunities that they had never thought possible. They were being given a chance to make something of themselves and have a life of meaning and worth. These people were being given a life, something no one had ever offered before. Soon after it opened, Hull House became the center of attention for the city because some had actually stepped up and took action to help those in need. Since immigration began its big boom in the late 1800s, no one had paid any attention to the mistreatment they had been suffering. But finally, someone, Jane Addams, realized what she needed to do and did it and she was recognized all over the country for her efforts. Because of her accomplishment with Hull House, she was offered the opportunity to serve on Chicago's Board of Education and was given the title of Chairman of the School Management Committee in 1905. The whole time she was doing her other jobs; she was still in charge of Hull House and made it an American success story by all the attention it received and by all the people it helped. Throughout the 1910s, Jane Addams voiced her opinion on women's rights and their position in politics. She was a strong believer that women deserved a right to vote and they deserved a right to be heard when it came to politics and their country.6 When America entered World War I, Addams spoke openly against that decision and spoke at colleges and ceremonies promoting peace. Because of her peace efforts, she was awarded positions such as chairmanship of the Woman's Peace Party and President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. However, because of her strong opinions, Addams was publicly harassed by the press and its affiliates. She was forced to forfeit her position on the Daughters of the American Revolution Board.7 But her attacks also gained her more publicity and she was allowed to provide relief in the form of food and supplies for the families of the opposing forces in other countries. Soon after the war ended, Jane Addams had a heart attack which put her out of her work until her death. Although she was still involved in her commitments and positions, she never recovered her strength to help in the efforts. Because of her efforts and strength and hard work, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. But because she was being admitted into the hospital that same day, she was unable to attend the ceremony. Jane Addams died in 1935 from complications after a surgery that showed that she had cancer. With her death, came the death of a spirit that shaped a nation in its own way. Jane Addams was an extraordinary woman who accomplished things in her life that it could have taken twenty life times to achieve. She was a great woman who will always be remembered for giving people a life and for giving our country life.8 Hull-House gave a home to its neighbors without distinction of politics. Among them were anarchists and socialists fresh from their struggles against European tyrants. Chicago in the 1890's and early 1900's was particularly sensitive to foreign radicals; it had not recovered from the shock of the Haymarket bomb explosion of 1887, for which anarchists were executed and for which a governor who had pardoned others was pilloried. She had no legal formulation of civil liberties, but she obviously accepted the Bill of Rights and the philosophy of free speech and association as basic to democracy. She would not qualify moral principles by distinctions between liberty and license. When in 1906 as a young man just out of Harvard, running a neighborhood house in St. Louis, Jane Addams was a national figure with a reputation for municipal reform in Chicago coupled with an air of controversy over her defense of the rights of aliens and radicals to be fairly heard and justly treated. The incidents she relates in this chapter had been front-page stories, often garbled, and calculated to arouse both intense loyalty and passionate opposition. Jane Addams and Civil Liberties Civil liberties as such were unknown then, but the struggles of minorities for free speech, press, association, and justice in the courts were daily news items. Yet only a few centers of influence such as Hull-House in Chicago aided the most persecuted among them. Not until the World War did an organized civil liberties movement appear, and then under the auspices of an organization opposed to the war--the American Union Against Militarism. Jane Addams was among its earliest supporters as a pacifist, although not formally on its board. Her account of her experiences as a pacifist in the war, related in Peace and Bread, is not to be distinguished from civil liberties in principle, for pacifists were denied their rights of speech and expression and suffered ostracism and, in many cases, prosecution and prison. Miss Addams became thus the defender not only of other people's rights but of her own. Although she describes herself as a middle-of-the-roader striving only for the "best possible,9" she was forced, as she writes, to the left of the road on the issue of war and peace. She never flinched under the pressures; she aided all of us who sought her counsel. When after the war, in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union grew out of the wartime Union Against Militarism, Miss Addams was one of the founders as a member of the national committee. Miss Addams served for a decade on the Union's committee, actively sponsoring meetings in Chicago, conferring with colleagues in New York, giving her counsel without caution or criticism, even when some was merited. She was as faithful and active a supporter as the Union had. The League and the Civil Liberties Union have long fought on the same side, and they have had the same opponents--the professional patriots and guardians of the status quo. Jane Addams and her role during and Post after the World War Throughout the period of the war we were very anxious that Hull-House should afford such refuge as was legitimate to harassed immigrants. Organizations whose headquarters were constantly being raided brought us their libraries--pitiful little collections of battered books--to keep for them until the war was over. Social progress during the decade from 1919 to 1929 was conditioned at every turn by the fact that we were living in the midst of post-war psychology and that, which complicated the situation much more, these years were concurrent with the development of a revolution in Russia which filled the entire civilized world with a paralyzing fear. Men were in a panic not only lest orderly methods of government be broken up by violence but even more lest the rights of private property be abrogated in other parts of the world as they had been in Russia. The situation was analogous to the cold fear which held Europe in its grip during the three decades following the French Revolution, from 1789 to 1815. Free-born Englishmen, members of Parliament, abandoned their advocacy of the abolition of slavery and even the regulation of the slave trade because any attempt to modify existing conditions was looked upon as revolutionary and held up as an attack upon religion and upon the family.10 A brilliant study has been made of this social psychology by an Oxford man who lost his life in the World War, in a book entitled, The French Revolution in English History. It remains for an American student to make a similar study of the Russian revolution in American history. If such a student turn philosopher he might well point out that as both religion and the family survived the French revolution--which was indeed the merest episode in the long history of both--so the institution of private property may survive the Russian revolution. Jane Addams as Women Rights Activist The women formed to teach neighborhood residents to speak English, discuss political events, and even hold celebrations. All these were things that had been impossible for these people before. Ms. Addams set out to see that these changes were made possible. She just wanted these people to have the basic common rights that they had been denied up until then. Jane also had a very big heart for little children, and it worried her greatly for many of them to be unattended and left to fend for themselves while their parents worked long hours. Parents of these children were making so little money that they could not afford to pay the woman they referred to as "Saint Jane."11 They greatly appreciated her volunteering her time and opening her heart to such a good cause. She wrote effectively on topics related to the house's activities, producing a total of eleven books and numerous articles. She was also a nationally known speaker and played a large role in many local and national organizations. She had led a full life of helping others, and the fact that she had so surely made a difference in the lives of people when it mattered, proved her life spent on earth worthwhile. She was buried in her childhood home of Cedarville, the place of her birth. The promise of Jane Addams and other suffrages of the time fought to give women the right to vote in order to allow women the right to clean up politics with the concept of "social housekeeping" and the idea that women were the moral ones and that women would bring morality into politics. By evaluating this thought in no way was Jane Addams stating that women should obtain the right to vote because they were equal to men, but instead they she was claiming that the right to vote would facilitate her take care of the children by voting for what would be best for them. This suppression of women's rights caused women to, together, form their own sort of political parties. These suffrage parties made clever slogans, and protested their treatment from the man, and their right to vote. In response, women generated their own style of politics. Beginning with the drive for woman suffrage, woman organized at the grassroots level around major political and social issues. New Women wanted to have the same rights as men and be on equal playing fields in the work industry and in politics. The New Woman felt that she should have the right to vote because she was a person too, and that it should be a birthright and not a sex role. Although for many years men suppressed women in the home, women were now out in the world receiving college educations and were quickly approaching equality with men as far as education went.12 It seems as if the New Woman wants to receive equal rights in the work place, and equal political status, however, recognizing that being able to conceive children is a biological right given to women, and if women decided not to reproduce the human life would not go on. Although the New Woman and Jane Addams felt differently about why women should have the right to vote, both believed that the natural rights of women should not be traded for her social, and political rights. These issues are looked upon as being two separate issues which need to be faced separately, and although the sphere of women was reaching outside of the home, it never left the home. Instead, with the broadening of the sphere equality between genders was being reached, and being fought for. Addams believed that kindness is an essential aspect of the complex reason that makes up human subjectivity. She saw this kindness as being a part of the human need to be sociable. This desire to be sociable and kind leads people to "seek a standard of ethics, or correctness - to give their actions intelligibility as being not only practical but moral." 13This idea of morals leads to her theory that society needs to develop a collective ethic. Addams saw society as constantly changing and evolving. However, change doesn't always move at the same speed in every part of society. Addams calls the disjunction between rate and type of change as "belatedness." This belatedness leads to social tensions. Addams "explains social tensions much less in terms of class conflict than of people caught in processes of change that they have not yet brought into alignment" 14Conflict and tensions arise because people need to update their morals with the times. "The central social fact is that people must achieve a social ethic aligned with the current state of material production. The chief contradiction is that the new forms of social organization are still pervaded by the old ethics."15 These old ethics, such as "the family ethic which calls for loyalty to one's own immediate kin and few other intimates," need to be replaced, or updated, to a point where an "individual identify[s] with the larger, heterogeneous, even anonymous community of which he or she is a part of." 16This is what Addams describes as a democratic social ethic. Addams wished to transform democracy from a political form into a social creed. She identified the difficulties in doing this as being caused by the tension between the old and new way. The old way being the "claim" of individualism, the new way being the "claim" of the social or collective effort. 17Another difficulty is that people are not able to see things form each other's "vantage point". 18Addams identified three changes that must take place. The first is that people "must learn to identify their individual interests with the common good, to see themselves not in an individual struggle for the good things of life but as participants in a group effort to that end." 19This must be learned by actively living this way. In this people must learn to relate to each other's lives and experiences. The second change is that people need to create new forms and sites of association thorough which different people can come together. 20Examples of this are trade unions, debating societies, and neighborhood associations. 21The third change that must take place is for people to use their new associations to urge the government to change. "Addams analyzes the state's inadequacies as arising out of a desire not to act at all, a predilection for misdefining its activities in militaristic and formalistic rather than in ethical terms, and a tendency, when it does act, to do so through the ward politician rather than established ethical procedures." 22 Conclusion Today Addams is known much more as the founder of social work than as a sociologist. She doesn't receive a lot of the credit she deserves for her social theory. Mead and Addams worked closely together at Chicago school. It is hard to say exactly how much she influenced him because at that time people were working so closely together that they did not cite each other. Mainly, Mead and Addams both viewed society in the same way. They did not see society as being made up of social structures but in the interaction and relationships of human beings. Mead, like Addams, believed that it was important to focus of society as a whole before the individual. They both saw the goal of social theory as being a means to improve society. Mead had a well developed concept of a human beings desire for sociability. Addams' theory of sociability is distinct from Mead because she describes how this desire to be sociable represents itself in people actively seeking to be kind. The main implication of Addams' work today is the field of Social Work. Addams, and the work she did at Hull House, are considered the foundations of social work. However, for people today to see Jane Addams simply as the mother of Social Work is a great injustice. Addams was a great sociological thinker, whose radical ideas no doubt changed the direction of sociology at the turn of the century. We can look back at how some of the contributions of this great person were overlooked in the field of sociology, and use this as a reminder of where this field has come from and what direction we should now take it. Addams and the women of Chicago school opened the doors for women today to work in this field. One of the first settlement houses that had been established was in Chicago of 1889, by Jane Addams. Jane Addams bought a house in a poor immigrant neighborhood on the West Side that came to be known as the Hull House. Most of the settlements began as cooperative living arrangements. Often the association or individuals paid the rent while the residents paid board, took at least the evening meal and kept their rooms neat; though the house usually hired servants to do the cooking and cleaning. Bibliography Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Curti, Merle, “Jane Addams on Human Nature”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (April-June, 1961) 240-253. Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Deegan, Mary Jo. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. 1988. New Brunswick, New Jersey. Farrell, John C., Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams' Ideas on Reform and Peace. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type. London, Chatto & Windus, 1966. Lengermann, Patricia. Niebrugge-Brantley, Jill. 1998. The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory. Boston : McGraw-Hill. Linn, James W., Jane Addams: A Biography. New York, Appleton-Century, 1935. Polikoff, Barbara Garland. With One Bold Act: The Story of Jane Addams. Chicago: Boswell Books, 1999. Ritzer, George. 2000. Classical Sociological Theory. Boston: McGraw-Hill Tims, Margaret, Jane Addams of Hull House, 1860-1935. London, Allen & Unwin, 1961. Read More