Robin J. Hall

Jane Addams’s Hull House: A Feminist Utopia or a Model for the Twenty-First Century?

In my first research post, I looked at some of the people who influenced Charlotte Perkins Gilman in writing Herland. One of those people was Jane Addams, the founder of the Hull House settlement project, which Gilman herself lived in for almost a year. In my midterm paper, I looked at several historical utopias and noticed that the most all-encompassing utopias, like the Oneida Project, were the least successful, while smaller utopian projects like bike-sharing systems and community food forests, which focused on utopian attempts to redesign only one element of a community, appeared to be much more successful. Jane Addams’s Hull House falls somewhere between the extremes, as Addams did create a whole utopian community, but that community was not isolated. It lived within its surroundings and was able to adjust over the years to meet the needs of the community. In her memoir, Addams wrote “[t]he only thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is that it loses its flexibility, its power of quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand” (1910, 56).

Addams’s vision for her project was a belief, like Abraham Lincoln’s, that a democracy could not succeed if the citizens accepted being divided into “classes.” She said “[o]ur democracy is still our most precious possession, and we do well to resent any inroads upon it, even though they may be made in the name of philanthropy.” (Addams 1910, 21). She wanted to help well-off intellectuals like herself put their beliefs into action; to show that the “dependence of the classes on each other is reciprocal” (Elshtain 1997, 110-111). The idea of the settlement house was to erase the sense of “moral superiority” that many of these people came to the project with, and also to change the misconceptions that working class people often had about wealthier people (Knight 2012). This was why it was so important for the “settlers” to actually live in the poorer communities and have the working class people as neighbors. Some volunteers lived there for many years, while others came only to help with some of the many activities at the house.  Just like utopian authors and their literature of ideas, Jane Addams was providing a template of ideas that she hoped would catch on in small or large part and help make the world a better place for everyone. You can’t get any more utopian than that.

Addams once described Hull House as “an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city” (1910, 55). The initial charter included purposes such as “to provide a center for a higher civic and social life, to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago” (Addams 1910, 49). While the latter purpose is perhaps what the movement is most well known for, the first two are directly in line with utopian community ideals. What started as a residential project to help intellectual women apply their learning to the real world became a citywide social justice movement to help meet the needs of the poor in such diverse areas as job training, food security, and the arts, and that has influenced social work education around the country. The project was able to change with the needs of the community, just as Addams had hoped. In her journal, Addams stated “life is a quest, and a life of virtue lies within one’s reach if one emulates exemplary individuals” (quoted in Elshtain 1997, 107). In other words, Addams was trying to live right, which at its core is the reason for the creation of all utopias.

Addams grew up idolizing Abraham Lincoln (Addams 1910, 14-21; Elshtain 1997, 107) and says that she knew from a young age that she wanted to live among the poor and help them, although she resisted the attempts of her teachers at Rockport Seminary to steer her into mission work (Addams 1910, 24). On Addams’s second trip to Europe while recuperating from serious health issues, she developed an idea with her friend Ellen Starr to move into a house in the poor area of the city and put her principles to work. She visited Toynbee Hall settlement house in London to see how it operated (Addams 1910, 39-40). In late 1889, she and Starr leased part of a large house on the west side of Chicago that had been built by William Hull as a country mansion but had been overtaken by the city (Addams 1910, 43). In her memoir, Addams described the neighborhood as characterized by what we now call “white flight,” with English-speaking families moving away as soon as they could afford it and new immigrants moving into the low-rent district. She described the intellectual programs they were able to offer at Hull House as an oasis for educated residents who found themselves impoverished and an opportunity for those who had been forced to leave school early to go to work. One of the former, an early resident of the house, had spent time at Brook Farm with Nathaniel Hawthorne in years past and said she wanted to rediscover that “atmosphere of idealism” (Addams 1910, 45). The Irish poet W.B. Yeats once visited Hull House and orated on their little stage (Addams 1910, 158). The Chicago Arts and Crafts Society got their start at Hull House. Because of their community of Russian immigrants, Hull House not only hosted refugees from the Russian Revolution, but also brought speakers to discuss it, ranging from a member of the Russian Duma to a high-ranking former revolutionary to a former aristocratic prisoner of the government (Addams 1910, 161). Hull House offered activities for all ages, as part of Addams’s goal was to engage the people in becoming a community (Addams 1910, 48). The projects included clinics, drama classes, day nurseries, lectures, and an immigrant arts and crafts museum, to name only a few. The resident intellectuals also used their experiences to compile studies on urban housing, hygiene, employment conditions, and prostitution (Elshtain 1997, 111).

In addition to the contemporary social and intellectual benefits provided by Hull House to the surrounding community, it left some lasting marks on Chicago and the nation. Addams was a supporter of the labor movement, although she believed in a more cooperative means of action and strongly disapproved of strikes as damaging to the vulnerable workers they were intended to benefit (Deegan 1988, 236). This was tied to her belief that the classes were not in opposition to each other but were all a necessary part of democratic society. Addams was a firm believer in nonviolent solutions to problems, and she encouraged face to face debate to help people on both sides of an issue, such as labor conditions, to see and hear the other side (Elshtain 1997, 112). Because most unions in Chicago did not allow women, Hull House served as home for the Cloakmakers’ Union, the Shirtmakers’ Union, and the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League (Deegan 1988, 236). Addams noticed that, during a strike at a shoe factory, the most vulnerable workers were single young women who were responsible for their own rent payments. Collectively, the Hull House community determined to develop a “boarding club” that would provide apartments for women who were out of work due to a labor strike. After three years, the “club” had 50 members and 6 apartments (Gross 2009, 89).

Chicago icon “The Second City” and its improvisational art owe their roots to a teacher of “theater games” at Hull-House named Viola Spolin. A child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Spolin, who was born in 1906, studied progressive education methods for 3 years at Hull House in the 1920s. As a young mother in the 1930s, Spolin studied dramatics at DePaul University and hosted “improvisation nights” for her friends at her home. After her divorce in 1934, Spolin and her two children lived in a communal house with other young divorced mothers that they dubbed “The Educational Playroom.” They pooled their assets to hire a cook and shared childcare responsibilities for all the children. From 1937 to 1941, Spolin taught dramatics and improvisational games at Hull House and around the city (Viola Spolin website, n.d.). A 1940 Sunday Times Magazine review of a children’s performance at Hull House read:

Organized recreation for children takes many unique forms, none more unique than what is being done at Hull House. Aimed at stirring creative ability inherent in all children, it’s a program of unorthodox drama that hews to no lines, knows no cues, and never heard of a rehearsal. The youngsters are given a bare idea, characters are chosen and the impromptu play begins. It’s fun, stimulates reading, eliminates the ‘dis, dat and dose’ from the children’s speech. Are these young thespians good? ‘They’re the finest ad-libbers the stage has seen,’ says Director Viola Sills Spolin. (Viola Spolin website, n.d.)

Spolin and Addams shared a belief in the value of play for its creative and educational value, and as a way of providing constructive activities to fill children’s time. Play provided ways for children to process the difficult realities of the world around them (Goodson 2015, 31-32). Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, took the games he had learned from his mother to the University of Chicago, where he founded “The Playwright’s Theater” and “The Compass Players.” In 1960, Sills and a partner founded the iconic “The Second City” and began holding improvisation workshops there (The Second City website, n.d.). As Ann Goodson wrote in her 2015 Master’s thesis “When examining the intelligent, self-aware, defiant satire produced at Second City, it is difficult to not observe shades of Spolin’s work with immigrant children and families at Chicago’s Hull House; both encouraged actors to perform improvisation based on their own life experiences and to comment on social issues with which they were compelled” (2015, 46-47). During the early years of “The Second City,” Spolin herself led a number of improvisation workshops there. Her political influence lingers, mingled inextricably with Addams’ own, as “The Second City” still produces politically and socially relevant shows that are accessible to a wide audience (Goodson 2015, 44).

In addition to revering Lincoln, Addams was also influenced by many members of the Chicago school of sociology, and she was equally responsible for influencing them, although she gets little credit for it. She clearly had read Jacob Bachofen, Friedrich Engels, and Otis Tufton Mason, anthropologists who studied the role of women in matriarchal societies and helped develop a school of thought called “cultural feminism,” which was widely accepted by (primarily) female sociologists around the turn of the century (Deegan 1988, 225-226). In a very broad nutshell, Addams believed that women were culturally superior to men and society would benefit from more of the feminine, cooperative, interactional, and family-centered ideals and less of the competitive and warlike masculine ideals. Mary Jo Deegan believes one reason Addams’s concept of cultural feminism did not last, despite its widespread popularity for a brief period of time, was that she based much of her theory on biological determinism, that women were “made” to do things a certain way. Deegan also noted that Addams did not fully understand the way the patriarchy worked, shown by how viciously she was attacked for her pacifist activism during World War I (1988, 242).  By the end of the war, “she concluded that any state founded on nationalism and militarism was incompatible with genuine social progress, perhaps even with democracy” (Elshtain 1997, 112). Despite earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her pacifist efforts (Nobel Prize website, n.d.), and despite her now-recognized contributions to the Chicago school of pragmatist sociology (Deegan 1988, 248), it can hardly be a surprise that Addams remained unacknowledged in the academic field and unpopular politically for the remainder of her life (Deegan 1988, 243).

Addams was not the only proponent of the settlement movement. In her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House, she recounts attending a conference about social justice in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1892, at which the settlement movement was discussed. Some like-minded individuals included Robert Woods, who had stayed at Toynbee Hall and was starting a settlement project called Andover House in Boston; and Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley from The College Settlement Association; as well as Julia Lathrop and Addams from Hull House. She noted that, while they were all young and idealistic at the time of the conference, they all remained active in the settlement movement for the subsequent eighteen years (throughout the time covered by her memoir) (Addams 1910, 50). A common thread in their ideology, she noted, was a shared interest in “socializing their democracy,” in the brotherhood of all, and in putting their social justice ideals to use (Addams 1910, 51).

An interesting addendum to my first post is the revelation that Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were lifelong friends, not just colleagues. During Gilman’s brief tenure at Hull House, she gave lectures on the labor movement, the advancement of women, childhood, social organization, the “body of humanity,” and social ethics. She also participated in a protest against sweatshops with Addams. Gilman’s book Women and Economics is revealed to have been widely read at Hull House, by both the staff and the residents (Deegan 1988, 229). It is interesting that in 1913, two years before the publication of Herland, Addams published an article in The Ladies Home Journal entitled “If Men Were Seeking the Franchise.” In it, women in an imaginary matriarchal society debated the benefits of giving men the vote, pointing out that men’s carelessness about things like household cleanliness applied to their work in factories, where they would be unlikely to care about letting textile workers inhale all the tuberculosis-causing dusts (Deegan 1988, 230).

When Hull House was shuttered for lack of government funding in 2012, Louise Knight, a writer for The Nation, suggested that our modern society might benefit from following Addams’s lead and looking for new ways to “come together on the common road” (2012). Jean Elshtain also suggests that Addams’ seemingly naïve solutions to thorny political problems, like face-to-face conversations, might in fact provide a useful alternative for today’s intransigent problems (1997, 112). Addams’s project lasted over 100 years. That it finally shut its doors due to a lack of government funding, rather than lack of participation, indicates a flawed economic model but not a flawed philosophic model. Jane Addams’s utopian ideals and ideas were never more important than now.

References

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910. New York: Open Road Integrated Media Inc., 2016. Adobe Digital Editions EPUB.

Deegan, Mary Jo. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, Inc., 1988.

Elshtain, J.B. “A Return to Hull House: Reflections on Jane Addams.” Feminist Issues 15, Issue 1-2 (March 1997): 105-113. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02860611.

Goodson, Ann. “The Settlement Stage: How Hull House Bridged Leisure, Creativity, and Play.” Masters thesis, Loyola University of Chicago, 2015. https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3890&context=luc_theses.

Gross, Matthias. “Collaborative Experiments: Jane Addams, Hull House and Experimental Social Work.” Social Sciences Information 48, no. 1 (2009): 81-95. https://doi:10.1177/0539018408099638.

Knight, Louise W. “As Chicago’s Hull House Closes Its Doors, Time to Revive the Settlement Model?” The Nation. January 25, 2012. https://www.thenation.com/article/chicagos-hull-house-closes-its-doors-time-revive-settlement-model/.

“Biography.” On Viola Spolin’s official website. Accessed March 29, 2019. https://www.violaspolin.org/bio/.

“Viola Spolin: The High Priestess of Improvisational Theater.” The Second City (website). Accessed March 29, 2019. https://www.secondcity.com/viola-spolin/.

“The Nobel Peace Prize 1931.” The Nobel Prize Website. Accessed March 29, 2019. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1931/summary/.