Take Advantage Of Twenty Years At Hull-House Depicted By Jane Addams Published As Pamphlet

about the creation and evolution of one of America's greatest "settlements" was very interesting on several different levels, Being in a similar line of work, I was intrigued to note how many differences and similarities there are between serving the poor, mostly immigrant, class one hundred years ago and now.
Many of their problems then are their problems now, but one big difference is that it was the likes of Jane Addams who worked hard and took great personal risks to persuade government to take action on behalf of the disenfranchised by instituting public health laws, labor restrictions, etc.
I loved reading the early part of the book which told of Jane's treasured relationship with her father, who was her moral and intellectual inspiration.
It was also fascinating to learn about and contemplate the lives a century ago of women like Jane Addams who were intelligent, educated and intrepid.
It was not impossible for them to achieve great things, Curiously, of all the people I know, the only two who seem to have read this book are both men! Jane Addams as a social worker: five

Jane Addams as a writer: three

At times meandering and inconsequential, its best moments illuminate why we should engage in social work in the first place.
While I rate the book a three, I rate Jane Addams herself a five, She was born privileged and after graduating from college and spending time in Europe she felt herself to be useless all this book knowledge but not doing anything actually of use in the world.
She always did want to live among and help the poor and this is what she eventually does, She buys a big house in one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago and sets out to be of use, This book chronicles the first twenty years of the settlement house she founds, HullHouse,
They start out with a kindergarten and tackle problems from there,
She explains
"It is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deepseated craving for social intercourse that all men feel.
"
In this way Jane Addams and her staff at the settlement house set out to see that a social infrastructure is put into place to accomplish these things.
Sometimes she is taken for a radical because she is calling for reformation in labor law, business practice, education, and enforcement of existing laws.
She is viewed with distrust by some businessmen and men in political power,
She says this,
"There is a certain commonsense foundation for this distrust, for too often the reformer is the rebel who defies things as they are, because of the restraints which they impose upon his individual desires rather than because of the general defects of the system.
When such a rebel poses for a reformer, his shortcomings are heralded to the world, and his downfall is cherished as an awful warning to those who refuse to worship "the god of things as they are".
"In discussion of these themes, HullHouse was of course quite as much under the suspicion of one side as the other, I remember one night when I addressed a club of secularists, . . a roughlooking man called out, "You are all right now, but mark my words, when you are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like this.
" The defense of free speech was s sensitive point with me, and I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either of them.
To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into applause, and the discussion turned upon the need of resisting tyranny wherever found, if democratic institutions were to endure.
"
The most amusing part of the book in my opinion was her visit to Tolstoy at his farm in Russia, He was gruff and unfriendly, commented on the extravagance of her dress, called her an absentee landlord, ate black bread and gruel for dinner while his guests ate European food.
He asks her "Do you think you will help the people more by adding yourself to the crowded city than you would be tilling your own soil" Jane is somewhat distraught and determines to spend two hours every morning at Hull House baking bread into order to do 'bread labor'.
It is only when she returns to HullHouse and sees all that needs her attention does she come out of her Tolstoy induced breadlabor fixation and get on with all the social reforms and cultural programs etc.
that HullHouse is involved in, The existence of HullHouse and its good works are her job, the baker at HullHouse bakes the bread, and all is as it should be.

Jane Addams deserves more study and acknowledgement than she receives, I don't recall learning about Settlement Houses nor about Jane Addams in school, So many social changes were brought about because of her tireless efforts,
The last quarter of this book is hard to read as it reads more like a dry list of accomplishments rather than a living story which is why I rated the book a three.

I read Twenty Years at HullHouse due to my interest in the literature of the American Progressive era and in preparation for visiting the HullHouse Museum in Chicago, which I did today after finishing up the book on the train ride over.
It was a lovely and informative visit, although I was quite sad that almost every building in the original HullHouse development was destroyed into make way for the University of Illinois at Chicago student center.
A seventyyearold historic community complex designed for immigrants and the poor to live, work, gain an education, learn hygiene, study the arts, and organize labor was destroyed so that rich kids could have a bowling alley next to their Dunkin' Donuts Incredible.


Anyway, back to the book: Addams' writing is not the most gripping, She begins by giving a few chapters of her own autobiography, which sort of just fizzles out as she gets to her European travels that inspired Hull House.
She doesn't take us through a chronology of Hull House, but instead gives us loosely organized chapters on certain topics, jumping from storytostory rather haphazardly.
There are a few memorable moments: when a young secondgeneration girl learns to respect her immigrant mother when her mother is able to practice her weaving craft at Hull House, or when Addams travels to Russia to meet Tolstoy, and the literary giant shames her by asking her why she's dressed so well and why she doesn't farm for her own food.
Kind of a dick move, Count Leo! That was probably my favorite chapter because I also happened to be reading Anna Karenina this week, so it was nice to see a peek behind the curtain to get a small glimpse of the man who wrote it.


I went through periods of high interest and boredom while reading Addams' book sometimes on the same page! She is no doubt an important figure for social justice in the United States, but I think Twenty Years is probably best read in select excerpts.
A modest, thoughtful look at Chicago's innovative Hull House Settlement as well as a fascinating glimpse into the personal development and accomplishments of Jane Addams.
I wound up really liking and relating to Jane Addams as a personoccasionally, her reflections on her own foibles, naivete, and growth are hilarious.
And the political and community work done by HullHousethe empowerment framework in which it was done, before there was the word 'empowerment' was astonishing.
I should have read this book a long time ago,

"Whatever may have been the perils of selftradition, I certainly did not escape them, for it required eight yearsfrom the time I left Rockford in the summer ofuntil HullHouse was opened in the autumn ofto formulate my convictions even in the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan for action.
During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it" p.
.

"My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine into one which took place later when I put before my father the situation in which I found myself at boarding school when under great evangelical pressure, and once again I heard his testimony in favor of 'mental integrity above everything else'" p.
.

"To return to my last year at school, it was inevitable that the pressure toward religious profession should increase as graduating day approached.
So curious, however, are the paths of moral development that several times during subsequent experiences I have felt that this passive resistance of mine, this clinging to an individual conviction, was the best moral training I received at Rockford College" p.
.

On privilege: "In spite of my distrust of 'advantages' I was apparently not yet so cured but that I wanted more of them" p.
.

"I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the everlasting 'preparation for life,' however illprepared I might be.
It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase 'the snare of preparation,' which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew

and to conform it to their own ideals " p.
.

"The Settlement casts aside none of those things which cultivated men have come to consider reasonable and goodly, but it insists that those belong as well to that great body of people who, because of toilsome and underpaid labor, are unable to procure them for themselves.
Added to this is a profound conviction that the common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it, that those 'best results of civilization' upon which depend the finer and freer aspects of living must be incorporated into our common life and have free mobility through all elements of society if we would have our democracy endure" p.
. "In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life".
The first part of this book is simply beautiful, In it Addams provides a strange and insightful look at what it was like to grow up the daughter of a welloff miller in rural Cedarville, Illinois in theth century.
Surprisingly for a Victorianera social reformer, she's eminently relatable and selfreflective, She describes in detail things like a nightmare she had as a young girl where everyone in the world was dead except her, and the world depended upon her solitary work as a blacksmith to start it up again.
She is able to recognize in this the early delusions of grandeur so common to children, and a sense of her own impotence she carried into the women's seminary and beyond.
She discusses how her later educational tours of Europe furthered her charitable and democratic sensibilities along with her hope for a nonreligious "cathedral of humanity" to unite all mankind, and yet she also realizes that this excessive education was only part of what Tolstoy called "the snare of preparation," that chilling sense that infinite training only impedes real life and action.
Addams saw that she and the other overeducated and underemployed women of her generation needed real vigorous action, especially in public life, to feel like worthwhile members of society.
So, she starts the Hull Street Settlement House, Overall, it is the best psychological description of what motivated a Progressive reformer, or just a charitable life, that I've ever read.


Unfortunately, the other half of the book tends to ramble, She certainly has loads of interesting stories, from the time Hull House challenged its corrupt local aldermen in the Chicago city elections, to the time they set up a "Museum of Labor" to teach immigrant children about their parents' crafts in the Old World, to the time she visited that Mecca of reformers, Tolstoy's farm at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia he eats a porridge of gruel with them after coming in from working on the farm with his peasants.
He is less than personable, But most of these stories have a predictable pattern they are finished in two pages and then move on to an almost completely unrelated one.
Some, like her attempts to pass a law forbidding pharmacies from selling cocaine to minors, are interesting, others, less so,

I highly recommend reading the first half, and the second you can take or leave, It'sa classic. .