Week 3: The Settlement House Vision
(Professor Binford and Professor
Smith)
"The Settlement, then, is 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."--Jane Addams, Twenty
Years at Hull-House
This Week:
The main purpose of this week is to consider in detail the work and ideas
of Jane Addams and her colleagues in the Hull House Settlement on the Near
West side, and the relationship between their efforts and other kinds of
reform. Addams founded Hull House in 1889, when she was 29. She lived there
until her death in 1935. Begun as an "outpost of culture" in a
poor immigrant neighborhood, it became perhaps the most important agency
of social inquiry and social reform in American history.
Readings:
- Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
Jane Addams (1860-1935) was arguably the most noted social reformer of
her time, engaged in causes from the mundane (e.g. garbage removal) to
the idealistic (e.g. world peace). She is most closely associated with
the work of Hull-House, the settlement she founded in Chicago's Near West
side immigrant community in 1889. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
is both an autobiography and an institutional memoir.
- Electronic Resources:
Week 3 Notebook
Near West
WWW Site
The Week 3 Notebook contains a small group of images relating to Jane
Addams and Hull-House. The Near West Side WWW Site is a new project under
construction at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It contains a remarkable
amount of material relating to Hull-House and the Hull-House neighborhood.
Please look over the listings in the site as a whole, and then return (you
need to scroll down a bit). Take a look in particular at Hull-House
Maps and Papers,for a fuller sense of this work (this is only suggested
in the Week 3 Notebook). You might also look at some of Addams's other
writings besides Twenty Years at Hull-House,including such short
essays as "Why the Ward Boss Rules."
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