Jane Addams (1860-1935) is best known for being the guiding force behind Hull House, one of the earliest "settlement houses" in the U.S. Settlement houses, usually a neighborhood welfare institution in an urban slum area, arose in the mid-1800s in England. Different from social welfare agencies, settlement houses were designed to improve neighborhood life in general.

Hull House, co-founded in Chicago's west side slums with Ellen Starr, was widely considered a great success and inspired other people to launch similar settlement houses in their own geographic areas. Her idea began when Addams was on a visit to east London in 1883. During the trip, she saw a horrifying site--poor children bidding on rotten vegetables.

Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands--empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn--showing white in the uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat.

Swimming Upstream

To move into an area of Chicago primarily made up of immigrants was a bold move on Addams' part. This was a time of a rapidly-increasing influx of immigrants, many of whom were poor and forced to work in menial jobs for low pay. Most could not speak English at first, and brought customs and values with them that seemed odd to most Americans. For this reason, there was an increasing hostility and indifference toward immigrants.

Forward-Thinking Style

Only in the 1970s and later did child abuse advocates begin to wonder if the first choice for an abused child was immediate placement in a foster home, or whether it should be working with healing the whole family so that the child could return home. The latter approach, still considered leading-edge in the U.S., is the philosophy of NBA Tennyson Center for Children at Colorado Christian Home, which was founded by "Champions of Children" John and Mary Warren.

Addams used this philosophy in the late 1800s at Hull House. Her goal was to preserve families whenever possible, boost economic opportunity, and--though this phrase was not used at the time--"break the cycle" of abuse and neglect.

Marcella

In her writings about Hull House, Addams brought to the public the plight of the many immigrant children forced into child labor by their families:

In a recent investigation of two hundred working girls it was found that only 5 percent had the use of their own money and that 62 percent turned in all they earned, literally every penny, to their mothers.

Addams wrote about Marcella, a German teenage girl who helped her widowed mother care for a large family while also working. Marcella was not allowed to keep her wages, even to buy a gown when a young man invited her to a fancy ball. Desperate, she attempted to steal a few yards of material from where she worked in order to make a dress, and was caught. Both her mother and employer were merciless in their responses, the employer even taking the young girl to court.

Sad Christmas

I know a Polish boy whose earnings were all given to his father, who gruffly refused all requests for pocket money. One Christmas his little sisters, having been told by their mother that they were too poor to have any Christmas presents, appealed to the big brother...the night before Christmas he nonchalantly walked through a neighboring department store and stole a manicure set for one little sister and a string of beads for the other..."

The department store wrote that in the Christmas season, they arrested as many as 20 children a day for shoplifting, almost all of them poor immigrants from the neighborhood. The Polish boy was caught and turned over to the Juvenile Protection Association.

Addams attempted to explain that the children were not just "rotten to the core," but had been prematurely flung into hard jobs and city life in a new country with an entirely different culture than they were used to:

Most of these premature lawbreakers are in search of Americanized clothing and others are only looking for playthings. They are all distracted by the profusion and variety of the display, and their moral sense is confused by the general air of open-handedness.

Addams noticed that boys as young as 10 tended to escape abusive homes and lived in groups in empty warehouses or other vacated buildings. Putting in year after year of hard work, she battled abusive families, inner-city poverty and child labor, all while contending with a society that had little sympathy for the immigrants or the poor. Ironically, she is now credited with being a shining example of American democracy for these children and families.

In an era when women did not have equal rights, Addams was very socially active in a number of causes. In 1901, she founded the Juvenile Protective League, now called the Juvenile Protective Association. Due to this organization, the first probation officers were designated for the first juvenile court in the United States (later this became a government function).

In 1911, she founded the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers and served as the first president. She was also a leader in the women's suffrage and pacifist movements. She authored several books, including The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), and Twenty Years at Hull-House, an account of Hull House from 1889-1909. In 1931, jointly with Nicholas Murray Butler, she received the Nobel Peace Prize.