This post is from a talk by Rima Lunin Schultz at Swarthmore College in 2002.
I’m dividing my talk into two parts to describe the two resources for studying Jane Addams of which I have a role:
The first is the reference book Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, published by Indiana University Press in 2001. I am the co-editor. The handout I’ve prepared lists the Hull-House women, their allies, and women from the Near West Side of Chicago – in the vicinity of Hull-House – whose biographies can be found in WBC. A special feature of the separate biographies is that each one is followed by a substantial source paragraph that describes primary as well as secondary sources that were used in preparing the entry for our book. Our hope has been that such attention to primary sources –many not used before by scholars—will bring new generations of researchers to this material thereby promoting a new agenda for the history of women in the United States.
Why do these circles of women who intersected with Jane Addams in Chicago have value for re-discovering or rethinking her life and significance? Her meaning in United States history? Her place in women’s history? Her influence on social reform movements of her time?
The infrastructure of reform women in Progressive Era Chicago has been understood in a general way; Hull-House and Jane Addams have been viewed by historians including Kathryn Kish Sklar, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, as a central place for the personal and collective agendas of social feminists. Here women found a way to pursue meaningful engagement after college, to reconcile the family and the social claims of their mid-Victorian backgrounds, and to find support for enterprises they undertook which were creative and innovative. The women’s political culture which blossomed in the Progressive Era has also been described yet much more can be said about the participation of women in the political agendas of Progressivism. Our ten years of research on the lives of Chicago women demonstrated how immigrant women, African American women, Jewish and Catholic women all had parallel networks and, at different times, these coalitions of women intersected with the American born, white Protestant, middle class and affluent women generally associated with the women’s political culture and with social and reform movements.
Our aim in cross-referencing Jane Addams with other Chicago women is to plant her firmly and deeply in the infrastructure that, in fact, she influenced and was influenced by — to place her in the social environment of her times rather than to view her in isolation from these complex political, social and reform networks.
This brings me to the second resource I want to mention today. That is the Near West Side History Website, presently under construction at the University of Illinois at Chicago, of which I was recently appointed Interim Director. Our new title: The Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House, Hull House and It’s Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, describes the focus of our website: the “soil” in which Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr planted their experimental “seed” – and began a new process in the United States, the process of “settling” ; — Using historical photographs, maps, surveys, census reports, archival documents, printed materials and newspapers, books and magazines, architectural plans, art work, virtual reality 3-D reconstructions, and street tours we will utilize the phenomenal technology of the website to visually and textually build the socio-economic and geographic, physical and cultural spaces of the Near West Side. Narrating the events and participants of Hull-House in this thick description of the neighborhoods in the settlement’s vicinity, we want to fully explore its social history; in this way we plan to “link” Jane Addams to the women and men who made up the political, social, and reform infrastructures that were at work locally and nationally.
The strength of our website is in our use of local documents, often one of a kind and difficult for scholars to find without spending large amounts of time in Chicago-area depositories and archives. We are a website that provides an in-depth, one of a kind collection of an urban neighborhood, one which so it happens, has received from the 1890s on, enormous attention from journalists, reformers, social scientists, public health officials, and from the local leadership of settlements, religious institutions, ethnic organizations, and municipal agencies. For example, we are able to connect the early development of the playground and recreation training from Hull-House and its first male resident, Edward Burchard, to the construction of parks and recreation centers throughout Chicago and to the development of the courses given by the Civics and Philanthropy School, the precursor of the Recreation Training School in Chicago and the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Photographs of the parks, annual reports, articles in magazines and newspapers allow users of the website the opportunity examine through what might be termed “case studies” the way in which urban neighborhoods were actually transformed through the implementation of new concepts of cultural and recreational space first experimented with at Hull-House.
Again, the local papers of other settlements in Chicago speak directly to Jane Addams’s connection to their endeavors, as do writings by leading residents of settlements throughout the United States. The local scene on the Near West Side can reveal the dynamics of this absorption and dissemination of new ideas. [show text of Henry Booth Settlement]
We know that Addams was a talented and prolific writer whose articles in magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal popularized her ideas. The Near West Side site brings to scholars primary materials which will address Addams’s style of leadership as a social and political activist and as a coalition builder and even as a model of democratic behavior in an ethnically, religiously and racially diverse urban community.
And now, a final point about the nature of archival resources and the opportunities and dangers of websites. This seems a good place to bring up the issue of historical editing of photographs and other visual images. We have what is called a jpeg library for our website of more than 5,000 scanned-in images. Among these are many images of Jane Addams and her Hull-House colleagues. Some are similar or the same images that appear in Swarthmore’s photography galleries on your website, and I’m sure, there are many websites with images of Jane Addams. In preparing our jpegs for linkage with our website, we have come across lots of documentation questions: inaccurate or no dates; inaccurate or missing identifications of others in shots with Addams; inaccurate captions written on photos either at the time the image was originally taken or at a later date (and we don’t know for sure when); inaccurate information from archives themselves about the original photos they own. Websites, like any other reference works, ought to comply with the highest standards of historical editing. Even more so, since the proliferation of mis-information is more rapid and far-reaching when the mistake is on the internet highway. So, Ellen Skerrett, project coordinator of our site, has prepared a short visual presentation that underscores both the increased opportunity for exchange via the internet, and the need for a collective effort in which we should all engage to share information and reconcile conflicts in our documentation regarding images.
We are showing you a series of portraits of Jane Addams, each one in comparison to others found in different archives, has a problem. In focusing in on what some might consider just a minor detail, the chi-ro cross worn by Jane Addams in portraits taken between [ ] and []. As Ellen points out, in the Swarthmore photo which we think is the same image as one we have, i.e. the 1892 Alice Kellogg Tyler portrait, Jane Addams is definitely wearing a pin; while the outlines of the Chi-Rho cross are clearly visible in our image, it’s hard to make out in the Swarthmore photo. Was it shaded in over time? Deliberately? Accidently? No writer on Addams has mentioned her wearing of this Christian symbol or has tied it with another settlement head resident, Mary E. McDowell, who also wore a Chi-Rho cross. Was it worn to signify a sisterhood of settlement women? After we do not find this pin in photos of Jane Addams. Was there a reason she stopped wearing it? There are differences of opinion among scholars about Jane Addams’s religious affiliation and beliefs. Can this photobiographical detail add any insight about this aspect of her life?