Ellen Star's Hull House

In the article, it stated that a group of thirty Building Inspectors inspected 3,500 buildings in Chicago, some were ten floors plus. The article stated what they found, “women and girls were found locked in rooms, the fire escapes obstructed, or access to them barred. In one [,] women and girls were locked in heavy wire cages on the seventh and ninth floors. On the tenth floor of the same building, where 400 ‘persons’ worked, heavy tables blocked the fire escapes” . Jane Addams was busy in Chicago to make sure this horrible event would not happen there.

They were building 32 homes per day, it was as if they had constructed the homes with a cookie cutter as all the homes were identical. Nonetheless, this was only a great era for white males. During this time period women began stepping back from their careers to become breeders. American families added 25 million children to the population, the baby boomers. The average American family had three to four children, lived in suburban areas, stay at home mothers and fathers working white collar jobs. The men were expected to dress the same, have two drinks at lunch and an attractive secretary. This was a couples society, if you weren’t married or were divorced, you more likely not invited to a party. Activities were centered in the home. People had a lot of parties and shared similar

“Helen on 86th street” by Wendi Kaufman is about a 12 year old girl who tries out for a lead part in her school play. The play was about the Trojan War and when results rolled around she had gotten a smaller part, and was extremely jealous of Helen who made the main role. Vita was going to play inside the horse with a really cute boy. While Vita was jealous of Helen, Helen was jealous of Vita because the cute boy accompanying Vita during the play was the boy she had a major crush on. Throughout the play Vita was comparing her life to the one her father was living. Her dad left them unexpectedly when she was a little girl, and they still to this day don’t know where he is in the world. Vita says

Addams toured in Europe in 1883 and was impressed by Toynbee Hall, which was a charity workers’ residence situated deep in a London slum. When Addams returned to Chicago in 1889, they purchased and refurnished Charles J. Hull’s mansion and opened the Hull House, in a settlement approach.

Jane went to Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia in the fall of 1882. Later in the 1880’s Jane traveled to Europe where she visited a settlement house by the name of Toynbee Hall. Settlement houses were the country’s way of providing community services to the poor. Addams and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr, the Hull House in the lower income section of Chicago in 1889. Most of the residents who lived there were from countries such as Italy, Russia, Poland, Germany, Ireland, and Greece. Hull House provided a day care center for children of working mothers, a community kitchen, and visiting nurses. Addams and her staff gave classes in English literacy, art, and other subjects. Hull House also became a meeting place for clubs and labor unions. Most of the people who worked with Addams in Hull House were well educated, middle-class women. Hull House gave them an opportunity to use their education and it provided a training ground for careers in social work.

Although Addams has done many impeccable things, one of her most distinguishable actions was co-founding Hull House with her friend Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Hull House is a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, inspired by the Toynbee Hall she visited in England. Opening Hull House, Addams expected the settlement to be a place where the poor could attend cultural programs, such as art, however her ideas changed as she explored the city and got to know her neighbors. While walking down the streets of Chicago, the reformer noticed all the poor immigrants residing in the cramped and dirty tenements, which led to her newfound passion to help

At first, Addams and Starr were only offering readings and painting slides, but the Hull-House took a turn when they realized the need for a safe child environment. A kindergarten was added to the house with 24 enrolled children and 70 on the waiting list, and a day-nursery followed soon after. But the Hull-House was not only for mothers and children. Starr offered sewing and cooking lessons for girls, while Addams ran a boy’s club. Lectures and classes on a wide range of subjects including English, citizenship and art were offered for free by social reformers, students and university teachers like Susan B. Anthony and Frank Lloyd Wright (“Hull House” 1).Soon after, Addams and Starr were joined by Julia Lathrop, a college friend and lawyer, and Florence Kelley, a member of the Socialist Labor Party. It was because of Kelley that the Hull-House became a center for social reform. She, along with Alzina Stevens and Mary Kenney, spear headed the research of the sweating trade in Chicago which lead to the passing of the Illinois Factory Act of 1893. As a result, Kelley, Stevens and Kenney were recruited by Senator John Altgeld as factory inspectors. Other working-class women interested in social reform also educated the middle-class of the Hull-House (“Hull House” 1). By 1907, the Hull-House had expanded to include 12 additional buildings, a gymnasium, a boarding school for

Angel Island immigration station was on the San Francisco Bay. Another immigration station was Ellis Island and they had immigrants from the East and were mostly Europeans. Ellis Island was a small island in New York Harber. The Hull House is located in Chicago, which was founded by Jane Addams to help poor immigrants get steady there and find a job, a place to live, and then leave. The Chinese Exclusion Act worked on Railroads and mines (cheap labor source).The U.S. banned Chinese immigrants for 10 years possibly, and would probably renew it in about 10 years. A advantage is how immigrants could come to the U.S., but the disadvantage to this was how much time and effort it took to come to the U.S.

In the nineteenth century, families of all different kinds of races resided in tenements. The tenements I will be writing about are located on 96 Orchard Street in the lower east side of New York City. Every room tells a remarkable story of the lives

“Although the demand was motivated by a need for labor, the Children’s Aid Society took pains to ensure the children were well cared for. Families applying to take children had to be endorsed by a committee of local business owners, doctors, and journalists. According to the societies “Terms on Which Boys are placed in Homes,” boys under twelve were to be “treated by the applicants as one of their own children in matters of schooling, clothing, and training,” and boys twelve to fifteen were to be “sent to a school a part of each year.” Representatives from the society would visit each family once a year to check conditions, and children were expected to write letters back to the society twice a year”. (Scheurman,

an you imagine living in a run-down neighborhood, with streets full of garbage? How about having to watch little children play in the streets wearing dirty, ragged clothes? Jane Addams grew up in a place like this, and she wanted to make changes in the world, so she founded the Hull House. How did the Hull House have a positive impact on people and America? It helped create new laws, teach immigrants important skills, improved education, and inspired others to fight for what is right.

Hull House was established to give people food, a place to live and

Urbanization in the progressive era was a huge factor, with millions of immigrants flocking to America for jobs. African americans flooded north also in search of jobs. Cities exploded outward and upward, condensing people into building and houses. This, given the time was highly unsanitary, with waste and filth in the streets, disease spread rapidly. Pollution caused poor living conditions often crowded and unsafe. Often there was little clean water or paved roads for transportation. Many people in the city's began to push for urban reformers. A Progressive reformer named Jane Addams stepped up and opened one of the first settlement houses in Chicago with Ellen Gates Starr, which greatly helped out local immigrants by producing education and even social services. Many reformers supported laws that would improve living conditions in the center city and fought to get rid of political corruption, which had been widely spreading.

Settlement houses provided a safe place for poor residents to receive medical care and provided nurseries for the children of working mothers. Settlement house offered meals and employment. Lillian Ward another reformer like Jane moved to lower east side of New York City to become a nurse and help the residents of the settlement houses. Jane and Lillian gave the immigrants a home and showed them what America was

Two Works Cited    Victoria Bissell Brown's introduction to Twenty Years at Hull-House explains the life of Jane Addams and her commitment to insight social change to problems that existed during the turn of the 20th century.  As a reaction to the hardships of a changing industrial society, Addams decided to establish a settlement house in the West side of Chicago to help individuals who had suffered from the cruelties of industrialization.  Rejecting the philosophies that stemmed from the Gilded Age, such as social Darwinism and the belief that human affairs were determined by natural law, Addams was a progressive who wanted government to be more responsive to the people.