Jane Addams and Hull-House, The Settlement That Made Social Policy

The neighborhood around Halsted Street on Chicago's Near West Side in eighteen eighty-nine was one of the most densely populated immigrant districts in the United States: Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Czechs, and Eastern European Jews crowded into tenements within walking distance of the sweatshops and garment factories that employed them. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr rented a large Victorian house at eight hundred South Halsted, a house that had once been the country residence of a real estate developer named Charles Hull, and began what they called a settlement: a place where educated women would live in the community they sought to serve, not above it.

Within a decade, Hull-House had expanded to thirteen buildings and was running a kindergarten, a day nursery, a dispensary, English-language classes, a labor museum, a music school, and a public kitchen. It was also a meeting ground for every major social reform movement of the Progressive Era. Florence Kelley moved in in eighteen ninety-one and used Hull-House as her base of operations to document child labor and sweatshop conditions in the surrounding garment industry. Her investigation produced Illinois' Factory and Workshop Inspection Act of eighteen ninety-three, and she became the state's first female factory inspector. Julia Lathrop, another Hull-House resident, later became the first director of the United States Children's Bureau. Alice Hamilton pioneered industrial toxicology here, documenting lead poisoning and occupational disease before the fields had names.

Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen thirty-one, the first American woman to do so, in part for her work building Hull-House and in part for her anti-war activism during the First World War, which had cost her nearly all of her mainstream political support.

The Italian neighborhood that surrounded Hull-House was demolished in the nineteen sixties to build the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Two of the original buildings survive. The house where Addams lived and worked for forty years is a museum now, sitting at the edge of a university that replaced the community it had served.