Twenty Years At Hull House Analysis

Part Twenty-One: The Progressive Era

21-6

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)

Based on a similar movement in England, settlement houses arose in American cities in the late nineteenth century to address various social problems connected to immigration and urbanization. Among others, the settlement houses attracted middle-class, college educated women who had no other employment outlet. Jane Addams founded the most famous settlement house, Hull House in Chicago, where she and others tried to help European immigrants adapt to their new situations.
This paper is an attempt to analyze the motives which underlie a movement based, not only upon conviction, but upon genuine emotion, wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet
They feel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of cošrdination between thought and action. I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal. These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely formulated: that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. It is easier to state these hopes than to formulate the line of motives, which I believe to constitute the trend of the subjective pressure toward the Settlement.