Twenty Years at Hull House

A Settlement House was an institution of social reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The prototype was England’s Toynbee Hall, which opened in 1884 in impoverished East London. Typically, Settlement Houses were large houses located in poverty-stricken, immigrant neighborhoods in industrial cities. Addams’s Hull-House in Chicago was the best-known Settlement House in the United States. Addams envisioned college-educated middle-class young women like herself residing in the Settlement House, helping the urban poor and improving their conditions. Middle-class men and women often lived cooperatively as Settlement residents and volunteered as teachers or club leaders.

Toynbee Hall, England’s first University Settlement, was established by Samuel Barnett (1844-1913), an Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Henrietta. Toynbee Hall was a place in East London where university students from Oxford and Cambridge could live among poor, working class-people and share their culture, trying to improve their condition by offering free legal aid, organizing boys’ clubs, or volunteering in other ways. Toynbee Hall was named after English economic historian Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), who had actively attempted to improve laborers’ lives in the East London slums. Addams visited Toynbee Hall in 1888 to get ideas for establishing Hull-House on Chicago’s West Side.

A system of exploiting labor (often used in the garment industry) that paid by the piece for work done on materials in the worker’s home or in small, crowded workshops (sweatshops). Typically, women and children worked long hours for very low wages in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. The sight of women sewing, assisted by their young children in sweatshops helped to convince Addams and other Hull-House residents of the need for protective legislation in Illinois.

Tolstoyism was a utopian movement inspired by the religious and philosophical opinions of the famous Russian author of War and Peace, Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Tolstoy’s study of the ministry of Jesus Christ in the Gospels convinced him to become a pacifist and live an ascetic, simple life despite his aristocratic heritage. Although Tolstoy suggested that individuals listen to their own consciences rather than follow set dogmas, his work developed a following of Tolstoyans who advocated egalitarianism and rejected private ownership of property and immoral government. Drawn by Tolstoy’s effort to translate his conscience into action by sharing the common lot of the poor, Addams traveled to Russia to visit Tolstoy but was shocked by his criticisms of her efforts. Tolstoy infused his novels with debates reflecting his philosophical beliefs, and his conscientious pacifism became an important model in early 20th-century Russian and worldwide reform.

A cooperative is a voluntary association of people who unite to meet their common economic or other needs through a jointly owned enterprise. Addams was inspired early by the life of Robert Owen (1771-1858), considered the father of the cooperative movement, and his experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana. Addams encouraged cooperative efforts of workers, such as the Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association and the Jane Club.

A member of a trade union, which is an organization of workers trying to improve their employment conditions in a specific industry (or trade). Addams discovered that although the protection of workers may be secured by legislation, the trades-unions helped to maintain those better conditions in practice. Trade unions allowed workers to bargain collectively and strike if their employee did not meet their terms.

An anarchist believes that society should have no government, laws, or any constituted authority in order for people to live free from domination, allowing the development of equality and community. In the late-19th-century anarchism movement, the doctrine of “propaganda of the deed” emerged, with some individual anarchists committing acts of terrorism against government leaders, such as the assassination of reformist tsar Alexander II in 1881 and President William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. Anarchists had also been involved in the violent conflict between workers and the police in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot in 1886. Other anarchists advocated change through nonviolent means. Hull-House developed an early reputation for radicalism for merely allowing free speech in the Working People’s Social Science Club at Hull-House when debates often occurred between socialists and anarchists.