Twenty Years At Hull House

by Jane Adams


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  • Twenty Years at Hull House

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Hull-House was the first settlement house in Chicago. It was founded in 1889 by Jane Adams and Ellen Starr. "Hull House attracted a remarkable group of residents, most of them women, who rose to prominence and influence as reformers on the local, state, and national levels. In the neighborhood, these residents established the city's first public playground and bathhouse, campaigned to reform ward politics, investigated housing, working, and sanitation issues, organized to improve garbage removal, and agitated for new public schools. On the municipal level, they helped establish the first juvenile court in the United States, fought for neighborhood parks and playgrounds, agitated for branch libraries, and initiated housing reform. At the state level, Hull-House residents initiated and lobbied for protective legislation for women and children, child labor laws, occupational safety and health provisions, compulsory education, protection of immigrants, and Illinois' pioneer mothers' pension law. On the federal level, Hull House residents joined with settlement house leaders and reformers nationwide to fight for national child labor laws, women's suffrage, the establishment of a Children's Bureau, unemployment compensation, workers' compensation, and the many other reforms that made up the Progressive agenda in the first two decades of the twentieth century" (Johnson).



The teacher in a Settlement is constantly put upon his mettle to discover methods of instruction which shall make knowledge quickly available to his pupils, and I should like here to pay my tribute of admiration to the dean of our educational department, Miss Landsberg, and to the many men and women who every winter come regularly to  Hull-House, putting untiring energy into the endless task of teaching the newly arrived immigrant the first use of a language of which he has such desperate need. Even a meager knowledge of English may mean an opportunity to work in a factory versus nonemployment, or it may mean a question of life or death when a sharp command must be understood in order to avoid the danger of a descending crane.

In response to a demand for an education which should be immediately available, classes have been established and grown apace in cooking, dressmaking, and millinery. A girl who attends them will often say that she "expects to marry a workingman next spring," and because she has worked in a factory so long she knows "little about a house." Sometimes classes are composed of young matrons of like factory experiences. I recall one of them whose husband had become so desperate after two years of her unskilled cooking that he had threatened to desert her and go where he could get "decent food," as she confided to me in a tearful interview, when she followed my advice to take the Hull-House courses in cooking, and at the end of six months reported a united and happy home.

Two distinct trends are found in response to these classes; the first is for domestic training, and the other is for trade  teaching which shall enable the poor little milliner and dressmaker apprentices  to shorten the years of errand running which is supposed to teach them their trade .




Johnson, Mary Ann. "Hull House." Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society, n.d. Web. <http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/615.html>.