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Jane Addams
Jim Menard The life of Jane Addams started with illness and pain. Born on September 6, 1860, she was the eighth of nine children. Her mother, like many nineteenth-century mothers suffered the loss of five of her nine children. Jane's christened name was Laura Addams, but her nickname was Jennie. She was a very sickly child; her most serious illness was tuberculosis of the spine. Jane was a child of three when she lost her mother. Pregnant with another child, Mrs. Addams was on her way home from helping another woman deliver a child when she slipped and fell. Jane's sister was subsequently born prematurely, and the baby followed her mother to her grave. Despite all of Jane's hardships, she managed to become one of the great women in American history. She was the founder of the famous Hull-House. Hull-House started as an idea but progressed into a major settlement house in Chicago. It took a lot of time and searching to make this plan work. In 1888 Jane found out about Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London that served the poor. Founded four years earlier by a group of Oxford University men, Toynbee Hall appealed to Jane, who thought that it was a great idea because it helped the poor by calling on skills in art and culture. Addams and her partner, Ellen Starr, also did a lot of reading and researching to start their equivalent back in the United States. After Addams finished her reading and researching, she began looking for a group of women to help the poor in Jane's settlement house plan. She first contacted the Chicago Women's Club; one former member of the club was so impressed by the plan that she promised that she would get Jane into the club, although only one member was admitted each year. A member from another club heard about Addams's plan. The women from that club did not seem very interested until they heard that it would be a house for invalid girls and the poor. The women decided to invite Jane for lunch to discuss the idea. The plan was called the "Toynbee Hall Experiment." Addams always said that it served two purposes. Besides helping the poor, the house was to benefit the people who lived there. Young college-educated women lacking an outlet for their talents were able to use their abilities to help the poor who lived in the house. Addams was very active and she liked to read about social movements in Europe and the United States. She found that she was not the only one who had plans for a settlement home. Three years earlier, an Amherst graduate, Stanton Coit, had been to Toynbee Hall and returned to New York City and founded the Neighborhood Guild. In 1887 Jean Fine, Helen Rand, and Vida Scudder organized the College Settlement Association. Addams began looking for a building. That spring, on a tour with Allen Pond, Jane saw an old, dilapidated house on the corner of Halstead and Polk streets in Chicago. She had seen the house before but had not been able to find it again. The house was located in the Nineteenth Ward, one of the worst districts in Chicago. The streets were in horrible condition and wooden boxes attached to the street were filled with garbage and ashes. There were few schools and even though many of the homes were built for one family, many families crowded into them. The red-brick building that caught Jane's eyes was once owned by Charles J. Hull. The building was built in 1865 and had since been swallowed up by the growing city. It was one of the few homes to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The tenants who lived there thought that the attic was haunted. They left a pitcher of water on the stairs of the attic because they thought that ghosts would not cross water.
Jane contacted the owner of the house, Helen Culver, immediately. Helen wondered why two well-bred ladies wanted to live in this slum. Helen rented out the second floor to them for thirty dollars a month and gave them the use of the large reception room on the first floor. Addams and Starr moved into the home on September 18, 1889, along with Mary Keyser, the housekeeper. They took good care of the home and furnished it with chairs, oriental rugs, a piano, and pieces of art from Europe. Starr and Addams read, organized art classes, exhibitions, and a lending library of art reproductions so the neighbors would have something beautiful in their neighborhood. Starr also provided free lectures by university professors, college women, and Protestant clergymen. There were also many other educational programs. Addams and Starr had many more great years at Hull-House and turned it into one of the great Chicago settlement homes.—[From Leslie A. Wheeler, Jane Addams.]
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