Jane Addams and the White Supremacy of Her Time: Vision and Limitation
“Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.” (Democracy and Social Ethics, 1902)
Jane Addams was an activist. She struck at the roots of social injustice through astute, persistent, thoughtful action during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. She, with Ellen Gates Starr, founded Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. Hull House opened in September 1889 in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, a neighborhood of immigrant families living in the unsanitary, inhumane conditions resulting from industrialized poverty. Hull House was a center of culture, advocacy, and education located in the heart of a city at a time when there were no public social programs addressing the needs of immigrants or people living in poverty. It was also Addams’ home from its opening until her death in 1935.
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Jane Addams: Champion for the Working Poor
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Digital History ID 3131
Jane Addams was the daughter of one of Illinois' richest men. Instead of leading a life of leisure, however, she dedicated her life to aiding the urban poor. A friend of labor, a proponent of women's suffrage, a foe of city bosses, and an opponent of war, she struggled to make the ideal of civic equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence a reality. Instead of offering charity, she sought to assimilate the immigrant poor into American society and became a pioneer social worker.
Born in 1860, Addams was just two years old when her mother died. Suffering a severe curvature of her spine, she was coddled by her family. Her Quaker-born father, a banker, mill owner, and Republican politician, sent her to Europe twice and to college at Rockford Female Seminary. But like many other members of America's first generation of college-educated women, she felt deeply torn about what to do with her life. “A woman,†she wrote, "was practically faced with an alternative of marriage or a career." She could enter teaching, or medicine, or missionary work, or el
In her essay “Personal Reactions In Time of War,” Jane Addams describes her experience as an opponent of World War I during a time of growing pro-war sentiment in the US, fed by government and media propagandists. By 1922, when Adams wrote the book from which the essay is drawn (Peace and Bread in Time of War), disillusionment had succeeded enthusiasm for America’s entry into the European conflict. The war had been promoted to those who enlisted as both a evaluate of personal manliness and a holy crusade to protect democracy. Yet it did not fulfill these expectations. A new considerate of warfare, characterized by unchanging shelling along a nearly immovable front line, did not present clear opportunities for individual heroism. Most often, it pitted relatively helpless human beings against impersonal machines of destruction: mortars, artillery, flamethrowers, and poison gas. More important, instead of completely disabling German aggression against self-determining, democratic nations, the war ended in an armistice between the exhausted foes. Nevertheless, the changing American view of the war did not bring Addams back into harmony with public opinion.
Isolationism vs. Internationa
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Written by: John Bodnar, Indiana University
By the end of this section, you will:
Explain the various responses to immigration in the period over time
Explain how different reform movements responded to the rise of industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age
Suggested Sequencing
Use this Narrative to give students a greater understanding of the Progressive movement and how Progressives like Jane Addams used their position to help new immigrants.
Jane Addams used the Social Gospel to remedy what she saw as a restoration of American democracy. Coming of age in the decades after the Civil War, she feared democratic equality was threatened by the rise of the urban, industrial society. Uninterested in conventional domestic roles for women, she built a public career as a social reformer and peace activist that marked her as one of the leading public figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Putting her convictions into practice, she worked diligently to improve the lives of working people and immigrants in rapidly expanding American cities by helping establish Hull House, a settlement house for immigrants in Chicago.
