Blog | Jane Addams Papers Project

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026

Hull House Has a Visitor…And the Rest is History by Terrence J. McDonald.

A sepia-toned portrait of a man with short hair and a thick mustache, wearing a suit and bow tie, looking slightly to his left.

Terrence J. McDonald is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan. He is the author of Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination (2026), published by the University of Chicago Press.

In early December 1893 Chicago’s Hull House had an important visitor. The minutes of the residents’ meeting for December 10 noted that “Miss Addams announced that she had been honored with a visit from Alderman Powers, who proposed giving some thousands of pounds of turkey and beef to the poor of the ward at Christmas, and desired Hull House to make the distribution.” The proposal from Nineteenth Ward Democratic Alderman John “Johnny” Powers set off a strenuous debate among the sixteen settlers at the meeting, with the minutes recording a “protest,” two motions, and an amendment. Finally, “by general consent it was agreed that the Chief [Addams] should write to Mr. Powers, as she had herself suggested, to the effect that Hull House had so much provender sent in at Christmas time that it would be well for him to distribute his turkeys through other agencies.”

So began what would become one of the most famous, complicated, and significant relationships between a “boss” and a “reformer” in American history. From then until the spring of 1898, Addams and her Hull House colleagues would steadfastly oppose Powers, first simply by attempting to clean up the ward without his permission, then by coordinating two attempts to defeat him for reelection to his aldermanic seat in 1896 and 1898. More important in the long run, Addams’s own reflections on this relationship would become among the most famous of her early writings and also a major source for thinking about the conflict between bosses and reformers and the possibilities for a kind of “social ethics” in the American city in twentieth-century America, in her own time and thereafter.

Book cover for Nearly Neighbors by Terrence J. McDonald, featuring black-and-white portraits of a mustached man in a suit and a woman in a high-collared dress seated in a decorative chair.

But my new book, Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination is the first – ever – to attempt to write a contextualized history of this encounter, embedding it in the social and political culture and structures of Chicago and the Nineteenth Ward in the 1890s and using that context to understand both how Powers and Addams operated politically and how her – definitely important – writings about this experience portrayed it.

By 1896 Addams began lecturing on the way that ward bosses prospered politically, and by 1897 she had written a talk that was often entitled “Ethical Survivals in City Immorality.” A much revised and lengthened version of this lecture was published in the International Journal of Ethics in 1898 under the title “Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption,” and then a shortened form appeared in The Outlook, where it received the more popular title “Why the Ward Boss Rules.” A version of the long version of this essay became the stirring last chapter of her 1902 book, Democracy and Social Ethics, and formed the core of her remarks at the 1904 World’s Fair, which were published as “Problems in Municipal Administration” in the American Journal of Sociology in 1905.

Addams set out in these writings humanely to reject the reigning conception among some reformers that municipal corruption stemmed from “ignorant foreigners” driven to the polls by devious politicians. She wrote that the “simple people” of the ward were cultureless, bound together only by their “basic human nature.” But importantly they were also bundles of genuine economic need. Her argument was that it was perfectly rational for “needy” immigrants to vote for corrupt politicians, and furthermore, that satisfaction of those immigrant economic needs that were legitimate by an expanded local state was the pathway to “social democracy.”

In recognizing these needs, she argued – for a job, bail money, legal “pull,” rent money, presents at weddings, help with funeral expenses, etc. — the ward bosses, corrupt as they were, at least noticed them. Reformers, meanwhile, spent their time complaining about this state of affairs rather than humanely recognizing the needs of the immigrants. Addams’s ringing conclusion was this: “If we discover that men of low ideals and corrupt practice are forming popular political standards simply because such men stand by and for and with the people, then nothing remains but to obtain a like sense of identification before we can hope to modify ethical standards.”

A woman in a Victorian-era dress with puffed sleeves sits on an ornate chair with carved griffins, looking slightly to the side. The photo is black and white, with a formal, historical atmosphere. — Jane Addams, ca. 1898

Addams’s views were powerful because of her position: not only was she living among the immigrant poor since 1889, but, unlike many others in the settlement movement she had bravely challenged the political “boss” of the ward. But to make this argument Addams completely mis-characterized the ward population. Her starting assumption that immigrants were “cultureless” was her rationale for the work of the settlers which was, after all, to bring the “correct” culture to the immigrants. But this led her to ignore the dense markers of ethnic culture in the ward and, in particular, to leave out the fact that Hull House was surrounded by five ethnic Catholic parishes and their schools, including the largest English-speaking Catholic church in Chicago, Holy Family – home of the Irish – whose steeples were clearly visible from Hull House. These churches and schools had been in operation for decades before Hull House opened but the word “Catholic” would only casually appear in any version of her writings, and the word “Irish” would play no significant causal role.

Moreover, her account ignored the event that galvanized an ethnic Catholic political identity, a ferocious statewide 1892 battle over a new compulsory education law that gave public school boards the power to qualify all parochial schools – Catholic, Protestant, or other — for meeting the law. Although Hull House resident Florence Kelley was more vociferous in her support for the law Addams, too, sided with the reformers against her ethnic neighbors. And although neither of them was a nativist, the campaign on behalf of retaining the law was riddled with nativist arguments.

This battle has been mis-characterized by those around Hull House including pioneering scholars Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge — as a fight over teaching in foreign languages. But this meant nothing to the Irish, all of whose clergy and schools used perfect English. The issue for all sponsors of parochial schools was control of the curriculum and, yes, the ethnic recognition that the Irish and Germans, in particular, demanded but that Addams, Kelley and the reform coalition refused to deliver. The schools were a remarkable testimony to the belief of hard-pressed immigrants, many of whom were illiterate, in the power of education for their children. But this reality seemed lost on the upper-class reformers in favor of the law including those at Hull House. And this failure of recognition eliminated the possibility of an alliance among both reformers and immigrants on behalf of education.

Condemned by Catholic and Protestant clergy alike, the law was quickly repealed after the election of Democratic governor John Peter Altgeld and Democratic majorities in both houses of the Illinois legislature. Because municipal elections in Chicago occurred in the spring and state elections in the fall, this battle did not involve Powers directly at first. Powers had immigrated to Chicago in the 1870s and thanks to the pioneering work of an uncle and Powers’s future wife had become the owner of both a bar and a grocery store in the ward. He was a practicing Catholic, sent his children to the Catholic schools, and belonged to the relevant Irish associations. But in a ward where every elected official was the same there was little need to stress his background for most of the years after his first election in 1888. For most of that time, too, he simply ignored Hull House in his campaigns.

But the political persistence of Addams led Powers to shift to a completely identity-based campaign in 1898. Its symbolic and real climax was a parade on the Saturday night before the election that local reports said involved 3,000 marchers and thousands of spectators and formed up about a block away from Hull House. The parade itself was based on the periodic parades for first communions and holy days at Holy Family and the Holy Family youth temperance band (funded by Powers) – the St. Matthew’s Cadets — led it off. Of special interest were the Ladies Auxiliary of the Nineteenth ward Democratic Club and the Nineteenth ward Businessmen’s Club.

Neither the St. Matthew’s Cadets nor the Ladies Auxiliary or Businessmen’s Clubs had been seen in ward politics before. Powers had funded the first, and his campaign clearly organized the second and third. The Cadets were named after the famous Irish temperance advocate Father Theobold Matthew and proved that although Powers was Irish and a bar owner, he was comfortable with personal temperance efforts, including those of Holy Family parish itself. The Ladies Auxiliary and Businessmen’s Club carried heavier water, the former to show that the “local” women supported him – unlike those at Hull House – and that latter that the “calumnies” in the speeches and writings of the settlers and their candidates damaged the economic interest of the ward.

But the key thing about this parade and the campaign more generally was the ability of Powers to identify himself as a member of the ward based ethnic, religious, and political culture defending its interests against the “downtown” elites displayed in the Hull House campaign. Unable to respond carefully to this neighborhood appeal the reform forces disastrously invited as their keynote speaker against Powers an “uptown” city council member who was the son of a United States supreme court justice and graduate of Princeton who emphasized that Powers was the “Prince of Boodlers” on City Council. Powers took 72 percent of the votes in this election and would remain on the council until 1923.

Although the settlers promised to keep up the fight, Hull House withdrew from ward politics just before the municipal election of 1900. In explanation Addams claimed that it was because, given his “wealth and political methods he could easily defeat any honest man.” But this had little to do with his victory. He was certainly rich and he may very well have been corrupt but had won in 1898 because – partially out of desperation – he had found a way to endorse and celebrate the identity of the ward against the “downtown” interests and “hectoring” reformers – most of whom had publicly supported the controversial school law that Addams herself never condemned.

It was an article of faith among progressive era intellectuals and reformers – originating with the young John Dewey — that an “unidentified” political subject and thus emerging citizen existed. In her important 1902 essay “Friendship in Politics,” the New York settlement worker Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—clearly influenced by Addams — wrote that progress toward that goal was actually being made. “That is the hopeful thing about democracy,” she wrote, “it is slow but thorough. A common consciousness is arising. The man is becoming the citizen.” This emerging “common consciousness” was a consciousness of shared human needs, not of differing—and sometimes conflicting—cultures. And it was founded on and ratified by the all-important experience of the settlement workers on the urban front lines who defined their mission as bringing culture to the immigrants, not necessarily discovering the role of immigrant cultures in political mobilization.

But as historian Richad Oestreicher pointed out in a classic essay about class and politics in the American city it is the process of political mobilization that helps create political consciousness and not the other way around. And that initial mobilization leaves a mark. This process was repeated in Chicago through the next decades with the rise of the United Societies for Local Self-Government as the bane of reformers and the foundation for the election of the city’s first foreign born mayor, Anton Cermak.

Addams’s wise – if misdirected — words ring down through the centuries: “If we discover that men of low ideals and corrupt practice are forming popular political standards simply because such men stand by and for and with the people, then nothing remains but to obtain a like sense of identification before we can hope to modify ethical standards.” But identify with what? The immigrants around Hull House were bearers of culture and not just bundles of economic needs. Their enrollment in what has come to be called “identity” politics was a foundational historical reality rather than an obstacle to historical development based on some other criterion, such as class, mobility, assimilation, etc. And the failure of otherwise brave and self-less settlers to understand this has impeded the development of a positive theory of a multicultural society down through the twentieth century.

Selected Sources:

Jane Addams, “Residents’ Meeting of December 10, 1893,” in The Jane Addams Papers, 1860–1960, ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1984).

Jane Addams, “Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption,” International Journal of Ethics 8, no. 3 (April 1898): 273–91; “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” The Outlook 58, no. 14 (April 2, 1898): 879–82; “Political Reform,” in Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 221–77; “Problems in Municipal Administration,” American Journal of Sociology 10, no. 4 (January 1905): 425–44. Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910).

Abbott, Edith, and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge. Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917.

Hamilton, Alice. Alice Hamilton to Agnes Hamilton, April 3, 1898. In Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Hamilton Letters, 120–22. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Dewey, John. The Ethics of Democracy. Ann Arbor, MI: Andrews, 1888.

Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury. “Friendship and Politics.” Political Science Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1902): 189-205.

Oestreicher, Richard. “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940.” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1, 1988).

July 23, 2026July 23, 2026

Jane Addams, the Imperialist?! by Sheryl Gordon

A woman wearing a dark, patterned coat with a fur collar and a decorative hat stands in front of a building, looking slightly to the side.

Sheryl Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the History and Political Science Department at Molloy University on Long Island, NY. Her research has centered on peace history and international relations in the early twentieth century. She published “The Limits of Labels: Jane Addams and Her Views on Self-determination and Imperialism, 1899–1923,” in Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research in 2024. She has book in press with Bloomsbury Academic entitled Marian P. Whitney and the Problem of Being a Prominent Person in the Progressive Era.

A woman in early 20th-century clothing, including a long patterned coat with a fur collar and decorative hat, stands on a sidewalk next to a case and a wall with a partial poster visible. — Jane Addams (1913) – Library of Congress

I started researching Jane Addams a few years ago for a course on women in American history I was preparing to teach. She seemed to fit well within the scope of my research interests as well, which are on peace history and the World War I era. After all, in addition to her social work, Addams was one of the best-known pacifists in America. She was even labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” because of her national stature and her pacifist views. As I read through her published works, her dedication to peace and humanitarianism were clear. Then I came across a brief article she wrote in 1921 titled “The Potential Advantages of the Mandate System.”[1] The article seemed completely opposed to her other work and worldview. The mandate system was created as a provision of the League of Nations after World War I that gave Western European nations control of the economic resources of the defeated nations and former colonies of Germany. For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the mandate system has been viewed as imperialist.

Was Jane Addams really promoting imperialism, a system linked to militarism and war?

Had her views changed since 1899, when she opposed the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War? Or had she been misunderstood by her contemporaries and scholars in some ways?

I could not find much in the secondary sources to help explain her views on imperialism or the mandate system. Addams was labeled generally an anti-imperialist. Marilyn Fischer, Professor Emerita at the University of Dayton and scholar on Addams, provided valuable guidance on Addams’s motivations and outlook. In the Jane Addams Digital Edition, I saw how Addams maneuvered through events and issues with peace as her north star.

I searched the digital edition to see if Addams expressed any thoughts to her colleagues in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), family members, or friends about her views on imperialism and the mandate system. Looking through various letters and material, I examined her views towards the Anglo-Irish War, or Ireland’s campaign for independence from imperialist England. It began in 1919 and ended with a truce in 1921 that divided Ireland into a free state and parts controlled by England. I also found the archive useful for understanding her views on the League of Nations and mandate system.

“Jumping into Boiling Oil:” Addams and the Anglo-Irish War

Opinion in America about the Anglo-Irish War was extremely divisive. Anti-British sentiments in America intensified as reports circulated of atrocities committed in Ireland by British soldiers. Addams was part of a group of 150 politicians, selected individuals, and clergy to examine the situation in Ireland. She even served as temporary chair of this group, known as the American Commission on Ireland. A letter written to Emily Greene Balch, International Secretary-Treasurer of WILPF, shows how dedicated Addams was to pursuing peace in this conflict. Addams wrote to Balch in 1920 about becoming involved with the Commission, “I quite realize that it is jumping into boiling oil as it were, but it may be useful and even afford a chance for our old idea of continuous mediation.”[2] In a letter to her English friend and WILPF colleague, Henrietta Octavia Barnett, Addams explained she was involved with the Commission to lessen the chance for military escalation.[3]

Addams viewed the Commission as a way to help England and Ireland arrive at a resolution. What was not in the digital edition was also meaningful. Addams expressed sympathy for the suffering of Irish civilians and helped how she could. In her correspondence, though, Addams did not express support for Ireland’s right to choose a government supported by the majority. In her published and unpublished writings, Addams prioritized food security for nations. For Addams, it was more important to avoid a war, which would further endanger the population in Ireland.

Black and white 1921 newspaper front page with bold headline about Ireland, several articles, and a photo of seven men in suits standing outside a building. — Headline of the Anaconda Standard with image of Jane Addams and other Commissioners, April 1, 1921.

Addams and the Mandate System

Reading through her unpublished letters in the digital edition, I understood better her support of the League of Nations and views of the mandate system. The thinkers she corresponded with discussed the mandate system as the path to peace in a world uprooted by war. Since the control over nations would be temporary, transparent, and supervised, they did not view the mandate system as imperialism. These thinkers reasonably influenced her views.

Addams began to envision a different pathway to permanent peace. Before the war, Addams was optimistic that citizens could work together to pressure their governments to create conditions necessary for peace. These conditions meant having enough food and resources. After the war, Addams viewed governments incapable of creating these conditions. Several governments had collapsed and economies were in shambles. For Addams, the League of Nations would be able to balance the world’s economic resources to provide humanitarian aid for immediate suffering and to help countries regrow their economies. Only then could the conditions for lasting peace be created. Addams expressed confidence that the League of Nations would be able to minimize nations from being exploited in this process.

Addams wanted America to join the League of Nations to help with this humanitarian aid. She had worked for the government during the war helping with international food relief efforts. She wrote to Balch after the war that famine relief was “the most useful thing that can be done just now.”[4] The digital edition contains several newspaper articles summarizing her various talks across the nation and abroad. The articles reveal how she tailored her message to each group to convey her message most effectively. Letters with Balch and Anna Garlin Spencer, the president of the U.S. Section of WILPF, indicate they had a different priority.[5] Undeterred, even when the U.S. did not join the League of Nations, Addams focused on bringing her message to the public. She continued to advocate humanitarian relief as a pathway to peace.

Political cartoon of a man in a top hat, labeled USA, sitting on a missing keystone between two bridge halves labeled Europe/France and England/Italy, with a sign about the League of Nations Bridge. Text: The Gap in the Bridge. — Cartoon highlighting the United States refusal to join the League of Nations (Punch, December 1919).

So, was Addams promoting imperialism?

After countless focused searches and fulfilling falls through rabbit holes in the Jane Addams Digital Edition and re-reading her published works, I had an answer to my original question. Addams was not promoting imperialism. However, she was not focused on refuting it, either. Addams was an independent thinker. She supported causes based on the consequences she foresaw. She theorized the Philippine population would not benefit from U.S. annexation in 1899, so supported the anti-imperialist side. She believed the Anglo-Irish War would lead to military escalation and endanger the population in Ireland. So, she did not promote Ireland’s right to self-determination. She deemed the League of Nations able to provide large-scale economic and humanitarian relief. So, she promoted it, providing certain guardrails were placed on Western nations. Embedded in her pacifism was the concept of food and resource security.

From examining her unpublished writings, we can get a better sense of the relationship between pragmatism, imperialism, and peace. Her writings reveal that anti-imperialism and pacifism are not always tied together. This understanding can be used in how we understand the women’s rights movement, international peace movement, and political landscape in the decade following World War I. We also gain a better understanding of Jane Addams. Her actions, a testament to her humanitarian and peace-focused worldview, speak louder than labels.

[1] Jane Addams, “The Potential Advantages of the Mandate System,” The Annals of the American Academy of

Political and Social Science 96, no. 1 (July 1921): 70–74, https://doi.org/10.1177/000271622109600115.

[2] Jane Addams to Emily Greene Balch, October 26, 1920, Jane Addams Digital Edition—Ramapo College f New Jersey (JADE), https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/21045.

[3] Jane Addams to Henrietta Octavia Barnett, April 22, 1921, JADE, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/21984.

[4] Jane Addams to Emily Greene Balch, March 20, 1920, JADE, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/28643.

[5] Anna Garlin Spencer to Jane Addams, February 23, 1920, JADE, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/%20items/show/19973

July 23, 2026July 23, 2026

Volume 4 is Available!

Book cover for "The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, Volume 4: Moving Beyond Hull‑House, 1901–1907, edited by Stacy Lynn with Cathy Moran Hajo and Victoria Sciancalepore. The design features a 1906 painting of Jane Addams by the artist George de Forest Brush.

We are delighted to announce the publication of Volume 4 of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams. Edited by Stacy Lynn, with Cathy Moran Hajo and Victoria Sciancalepore, it is the first volume published by the new editorial team.

This volume presents a selection of Jane Addams’s writings from 1901 to 1907, a period of significant growth in her influence as a reformer, writer, and public intellectual. The front matter provides editorial method, transcription policies, and historical context. Part 1, Progress Belongs to Us Altogether, 1901-1903, explores Addams’s expansion of Hull-House, advocacy for immigrants, child labor legislation, and engagement with political leaders. Part 2, Making All Life Fuller and Better, 1904-1905, highlights her role as a member of the Chicago Board of Education, and growing interest in international peace. Part 3, In the Hands of Women, 1906-1907, examines her deepening commitment to the woman suffrage movement and continued activism in labor and child welfare. Throughout this period, Addams’s prominence grew as she connected settlement work with broader social and political reforms. She balanced activism with writing, publishing Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) and Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), positioning herself as a leading voice in Progressive Era thought. This volume captures her evolving philosophy, expanding national presence, and enduring commitment to social justice, illustrating her transition from a local settlement leader to an influential advocate for systemic change.

Jane Addams entered 1901 as a confident voice in the American settlement movement and pioneer in many of its methods. The period that followed marked the dramatic expansion of the Hull-House campus and its reach even as Addams increasingly devoted more time to lecturing, lobbying, and building bridges of reform in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and beyond.

The fourth volume in the series follows Addams’s increasingly busy life. Her activities included greater participation in the women’s suffrage movement and speaking tours of twenty-five states and the District of Columbia to discuss child labor, settlement work, and women’s issues. At the same time, she maintained relationships with an intimate circle of female friends, her extended family, the Hull-House community, and most importantly her companion Mary Rozet Smith. The editors provide an extensive collection of documents on this side of Addams’s life while rooting her in the unique time and place of an era of fast and far-reaching change.

Image showing a book titled The Selected Papers of Jane Addams with a promo for 30% off using code S26UIP at University of Illinois Press until December 31, 2027.

This volume is available from the University of Illinois Press and other resale outlets.

June 25, 2026

Finding Morris Osofsky

A vintage registration card filled out by hand for Maurice Osafsky, dated 1940s, listing personal details such as address, age, birthdate, place of birth, and emergency contact.

I recently finished reviewing all of the congratulatory telegrams and letters Jane Addams received when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1931. More than 375 of these messages are known to be extant, and they came in from across the country and around the world. The well-wishers included other peace activists, like Frederick Libby of the National Council for the Reduction of Armaments, Mary Thoday of the North Wales Women’s Peace Council, and Addams’s cowinner Nicholas Murray Butler. There were notes from friends, family members, dozens of colleagues in the social settlement and suffrage movements, and ecstatic and proud members and state, local, and national branches of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which Addams founded in 1915. Addams heard from educators, business people, writers, clergymen, and politicians. There were letters in German, Spanish, and French, two women named for Jane Addams (Jane Addams Weinreb of Chicago and Jane Addams Thompson of Thornwood, NY), and many letters included honorary resolutions passed by peace societies and organizations across the globe.

Some of the most notable among the correspondents were racial justice reformer Mary McCleod Bethune, sitting Illinois Governor Louis Lincoln Emmerson, former (and future) Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King, journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, Oxford University professor Gilbert Murray, Chinese feminist writer Sophia H. Z. Chen, and Swedish-American painter Carl Eric Lindin. Of course Jane Addams heard from friends and family and professional associates. Naturally, as well, civic and political leaders who shared her world view were compelled to write, particularly those who supported Addams during the post-war years when her unwavering pacifism caused many to criticize her and to question her patriotism.

Yet the letters from the more common folks are the ones I find most revealing. The well-wishing from the people Addams didn’t know illustrate more clearly the scope of her influence and the myriad ways her life and work inspired people outside of the reform movements she led. These more common messages came from women, men, and young people worried about the state of the world. They came from mothers, teachers, and religious souls who admired Addams’s integrity, humanity, intellect, and resolve. One came from Harold Palmer, an inmate in a New York Prison, who had grown up in the Hull-House neighborhood. One came from Bess Swett, a representative from the South Sioux City Woman’s Club in Nebraska. Another came from Mamie Jefferson, a school teacher in Camden, NJ. And one came from Morris Osofsky, a teenager from the Bronx, New York:

2085 Walton Avenue
Bronx, New York
December 10, 193

Dear Miss Addams,

Bravo!! May a seventeen-year-old high-school student offer his very sincerest congratulations on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize?

As an advocate of peace and a great humanitarian you have long been the idol of we young would-be philanthropists who so often say, “If I had a million dollars. I’d give it to charity.”

But perhaps I bore you so I will cease now and again permit me to say that no person is more deserving of the prize than yourself, Congratulations!

Very respectfully,
Morris Osofsky

One of my favorite tasks as a historian is to uncover the lives of ordinary people, to do the detective work necessary to identify them, and then to share their stories. It is often a difficult task, because historians are always at the mercy of the incomplete historical record. People of the past are often hiding in the historical shadows. They move, they get married and change their names, they die at sea or in foreign countries, they are illiterate, they have their foreign names butchered or change them to become American, they burn their letters. Sometimes the paper trail ends and the historical trail runs cold.

From young Mr. Osofsky’s letter, I know he lived at 2085 Walton Avenue in the Bronx and was born in 1914. I quickly find him in the 1930 U.S. Census, living at that exact address with his parents and an older sister. From that census page, I learn that Morris’s father Nathan Osofsky (born c. 1875) immigrated from Russia in 1904 and was a clerk in a delicatessen. Morris’s mother Miriam Osofsky (born c. 1875) immigrated from Russia in 1910. The native language of both parents was Yiddish, so I also know now that the family was Jewish. Morris and his sister Ethel (born c. 1917) were born in New York and grew up as the children of immigrants.

I find Morris and his parents in the 1940 U.S. Census, as well, although in this record his mother is named Mary, either a personal choice or a mistake by the census taker. At some point between 1931 and 1940, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York. Morris’s father was a counter man at a delicatessen there, and Morris, aged 26, had been out of work for seventy weeks. In trying to fill in the nine-year gap and move beyond 1940, I do some searching in newspapers but quickly learn there were two Morris Osofsky’s in Brooklyn at the same time and nearly the same age, and there is not enough evidence to untangle them.

I then attempt one those hopeful-but cautious searches in Ancestry.com, hoping to find another clue to pick up the trail. I find a military registration card signed by a Morris Osofsky, born in Yonkers, N.Y., on April 14, 1914. And, huzzah! His address on the card matches his address in the 1940 census. Also on the card, Osofsky had listed his mother Mary Osofsky at that same address in Brooklyn as his contact. This card is not only a record of his name, birthdate, and current address, it is also my historical missing link. Because, at the top of the card, the name “Morris Osofsky” was stricken, and written in red ink was “Maurice Paul [effective] 1-15-46.”

Eureka! Morris Osofsky had changed his name, and that is why my trail ran cold in 1940.

I then check the 1950 census and find Maurice Paul, the Brooklyn 36-year-old formerly known as the Bronx high school student named Morris Osofsky. He was living with Nathan Osofsky, age 76 (that tracks), and Mary Osofsky, age 76 (also tracks), and both born in Russia (more corroboration). Miriam had, indeed, morphed into Mary, and their son had become Maurice Paul. A quick newspaper search fills in the final detail. In 1945, Morris Osofsky petitioned the court to legally change his name to Maurice Paul. The notice included his wife Rose and one-year-old son Barry, also legally changing their surname to Paul.

Oh, how I do love playing history detective. And when a single document connects two disparate dots, in this case a corrected military registration card, I give my thanks to Clio.

The discovery of the legal name change opened up a flood of new documents and evidence of the ordinary extraordinary life of Morris Osofosky/Maurice Paul. I am especially happy to share the details here in a blog post, because only a very distilled version of his story will appear in a footnote to his letter, which we will publish in Volume 6 of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams.

As a youngster, Morris Osofsky was employed in the restaurant business, perhaps even working in the same delicatessen as his father. He appreciated the strict discipline of his parents and respected their hard work and struggle as immigrants. He was also greatly influenced by their good sense and frugality, but remembered that “every so often Pop would slip a dollar bill in the toe of my stocking while I slept (so Mom shouldn’t know about it). While Mom always slipped me an extra quarter or so when I went to the movies (only don’t tell Pop).

Osofsky was unemployed during at least one good stretch of time during the Great Depression, he married Rose Ress in Brooklyn on December 12, 1941, and had a son named Barry. In 1945, he changed his name to Maurice Paul; and sometime before April 1950, he and Rose were separated. I found no evidence that the couple divorced, but Maurice Paul never remarried.

In 1950, Maurice Paul was living in Brooklyn with his parents and working as a journalist in a literary agency. It is the professional side of his story about which he left the most clues. He became a reform-minded journalist and wrote on a wide variety of subjects, especially in the beginning of his journalism career. He published articles in newspapers and periodicals, including the Brooklyn Daily, where he started writing a column entitled “Unadjusted Impressions.” The column was an eclectic collection of facts, observations, and literary quotes. The style of the writing was colloquial.

In 1961, Paul became the editor of the Canarsie Courier, which covered the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn on Jamaica Bay. He continued to publish the “Unadjusted Impressions” column in his new paper. Yet it was in his role as editor that Paul found his true calling, living up to the spirit of a good journalist by speaking truth to power. His hard-hitting editorials called out bad government and demanded community improvements, and his advocacy was hailed as instrumental in pressuring local officials to build a modern, new high school and to replace an antiquated and dilapidated police station. Paul also took on the N.Y. Transit Authority, which resulted in improved transportation networks in Brooklyn.

In 1967, Paul was awarded the Canarsie High School Human Rights Award for championing “the cause of tolerance, human decency, and brotherhood.” I wonder if the 53-year-old Maurice sitting in that packed high school gymnasium being honored remembered the 17-year-old Morris who wrote to Jane Addams, identifying himself as a “would-be philanthropist.” I did not have the luxury to read all of the articles Maurice Paul wrote over the years, but a search for him and Jane Addams’s name together in one newspaper database revealed no evidence that he ever publicly credited her with his civic concerns.

I wish I could write that Jane Addams inspired Maurice Paul’s good deeds, although I do believe that every adult who inspires a young person gets into the subconscious mind of the emerging adult. Maurice Paul certainly had good parents, and they can take the credit for his success in the world. They fled horrible conditions for Jews in Russia to make a better life for themselves in the United States, and their all-American son, no doubt, made them proud. Yet I cannot help but believe that the teenager so inspired to write to Jane Addams in 1931 was also shaped by his knowledge of her good work. Maurice Paul was a writer in his bones, but perhaps Jane Addams’s dedication to make the world a better place inspired him to use his own unique talent and passion to make his community a better place.

Maurice Paul suffered a fatal stroke in 1969. He was only 55 years old, and his death was a terrible shock to his newspaper and his community. He had only just taken on a campaign, through his editorials, to eliminate the “Jet noise problem” in Canarsie. His advocacy would be missed, as the obituary in the Canarsie Courier opined: “Canarsie lost one of its most respected and dedicated fighters for civic improvement … He wrote extensively about the wonders of nature and the animal kingdom. But Maurice was at his best at a typewriter, ‘telling off’ disinterested public officials who neglected their civic obligations.”

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Legal Notice for Morris Osofsky, Brooklyn (NY) Citizen, Dec. 12, 1945, 8; 1930, 1940, 1950 U.S. Censuses; U.S., World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947; New York, NY, U.S., Marriage License Indexes, 1907-2018; “Unadjusted Impressions,” Canarsie Courier, Feb. 18, 1966, 9; “Human Rights Award to Maurice Paul,” Canarsie Courier, June 8, 1967, 7; “Maurice Paul, Editor, Dead at 55,” Canarsie Courier, Aug. 7, 1969, 1; Letters to Jane Addams in the Jane Addams Digital Edition: Nicholas Murray Butler, Dec. 9, 1931; Louis Lincoln Emmerson Addams, Dec. 10, 1931; William Lyon Mackenzie King, Dec. 10, 1931; Frederick Joseph Libby, Dec. 10, 1931; Carl Eric Olaf Lindin, Dec. 10, 1931; Morris Paul Osofsky, Dec. 10, 1931; Oswald Garrison Villard, Dec. 11, 1931; Jane Addams Thompson, Dec. 12, 1931; Jane Addams Weinreb, Dec. 13, 1931; Gilbert Murray Addams, Dec. 16, 1931; Mamie E. Jefferson, Dec. 17, 1931; Bess Swett, Dec. 22, 1931; Mary McLeod Bethune, Dec. 23, 1931; Sophia H. Z. Chen, Dec. 24, 1931; Mary Gladys Sykes Thoday, Feb. 6, 1932.

March 30, 2026

Generation Sangfroid

A woman with outstretched arms welcomes a young girl running toward her; two women watch in the background. A suitcase labeled Montana sits nearby. Text reads: That child needs a woman to look after her.

Currently, I am editing documents in the Jane Addams Papers from the 1920s. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the United States Congress, has been popping up a lot in my daily work. Rankin went to Europe with Addams in 1919 to attend the International Congress of Women in Zurich. She was a field secretary for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), of which Jane Addams was president. And in 1924, she lived and worked at Hull-House.

Of course, I had known about Rankin since I was an undergraduate studying women’s history, but I never had any depth of knowledge about her or her life. For a blog post I thought I would explore what led her to Hull-House, suspecting that Jane Addams was that gravitational pull. But those plans went almost immediately off the rails when I read a description of Rankin as exhibiting considerable sangfroid—sang-froid, from the French, literally “cold blood”—self-possession, coolness, or, as Merriam-Webster defines it, someone who is “cool as a cucumber,” possessing “imperturbability especially under strain.”

Wow, what a word, sangfroid, I thought (after I looked it up). And the more I kept reading the more I agreed with the description of Jeannette Rankin, the tough nut from Montana. This woman dared to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916, just two years after women earned the right to vote there. She was a woman who unapologetically campaigned on a platform of equal suffrage for all American women, child protection legislation, and preparedness for peace instead of preparedness for war, while all of Europe was at war.

Cool as a cucumber, indeed, this 35-year-old Republican woman who won her Congressional seat despite Democrats sweeping up nearly all the others in Montana that year. This unrepentant pacifist Congresswoman voted NO in 1917 to declare war on Germany. “I want to stand by my country,” she said, “but I cannot vote for war.” Her vote won her praise in Montana, within the peace movement, and among Quakers, but she had been one of only a handful of dissenters in Congress and there was not much praise coming from anywhere else. Interestingly, Rankin had the historic opportunity to vote against world war again during her second term in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 8, 1941. On that day she cast the single, lonely, dissenting voice of Congress on the resolution to declare war against Japan. Defending her position, which was widely condemned and made her reelection impossible, she said: “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”

And guess what? Jeannette Rankin lived long enough to protest the Vietnam War, too. On January 15, 1968, she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade and several thousand marchers protesting the war in Washington. When a reporter asked her if she wanted her country to surrender in Vietnam, 87-year old Rankin said: “Surrender is a military idea. When you’re doing something wrong, you stop.”

A woman in a long white dress and wide-brimmed hat descends outdoor stone steps, holding her skirt. Two men in suits stand at the top of the steps, watching her. Wrought iron railings line the stairs. — Rankin leaving the White House in 1917. Photograph by Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs, Washington, DC.

Through all of it, Rankin was true to her principles, unwavering under tremendous pressure.

I kept reading about Rankin because she is fascinating, but I was no longer interested in her time at Hull-House (at least for now). Now I was intrigued by the qualities of Rankin’s character, particularly as compared with those of Jane Addams. I saw the common traits of quiet determination, commitment to personal values, and self-confidence. You see, at the Addams Papers we sometimes grumble a little bit about the stoicism of our dear subject. We sometimes long to discover chinks in the armor of her curated public personal. Jane Addams didn’t write much of anything at all about how hard it was to be a woman trying to save the world in the Progressive Era. We are sometimes frustrated that her composure even during the most stressful periods of her life makes it hard to know her. But as I kept reading about Rankin, I wondered if that biographer was onto something. Sangfroid, that curious new word, was pounding in my head as I continued reading.

Born in Montana in 1880, nine years before it gained statehood, Rankin was educated at Montana State University and the New York School of Philanthropy. Rankin’s interest in reform and social work mirrored the perspectives and paths of other educated and reform-minded women of her generation, but unlike most of them her priorities of suffrage, reform, and pacifism veered her directly into politics. Rankin’s term in Congress brought her fame and much respect and she rendered good service to her constituency, but she failed to be reelected in 1918. However, she seemed unphased by the defeat and just moved forward open to the next opportunity. After she left office in 1919, she joined the pacifist movement, went to Zurich with Addams, and became an active WILPF member. After Zurich, she worked with the formidable Florence Kelley at the National Consumers’ League. Then after she left Hull-House in 1924, she bought a small farm in Georgia, living a simple life there without plumbing and electricity. She kept her home in Montana, perhaps always thinking she might return to politics, and served nine years as a lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War. She won her second term in Congress in 1940, beating out her antisemitic incumbent opponent. No matter what she was doing or where she was, she lived with intention and on her own terms.

The surface reading I was doing to write a short piece about her life was making it easy to see why Jane Addams took a shine to Jeannette Rankin. She was an intriguing woman, principled, fair-minded, and strong-willed. As if I needed more proof to believe that Jeannette Rankin was self-possessed, an example of Sangfroid right out of the Oxford English Dictionary, I came across the official portrait of the 65^th Congress., the first in which she served.

A large group of men and one woman in formal attire pose on the steps of a government building; one person near the center (the woman!) is circled in yellow. Numbers are marked above each individual. — The 65th Congress, 1917, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs, Washington, DC. Click to see the full photograph in all its panoramic glory.

There is Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, sitting nearly dead center, the central portico of the U.S. Capital right behind her. The only hat and the only skirt. A woman in a sea of men. Uncrossed legs and upright posture, she commands her space. There is a quiet, determined expression on her face. She is far more dignified than many of her fellows near her in the front row, slouching, legs splayed, arms crossed, and one shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazes into the distance at something he deems more interesting than the capturing of this historic photograph. Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin is sitting in that portrait like she belonged there because, of course, she knew she belonged there.

Yep.

Sangfroid.

Unflappable is a word I have frequently used to describe Jane Addams. It is an apt word for a woman who stuck to her principles no matter the pressure. A woman who over and over and over again kept making informed arguments in Springfield before the Illinois General Assembly about the evils of child labor against the manufacturing lobby who did not care one whit that factories were stealing the futures of children. Jane Addams, unflappable in the face of attacks that she was un-American, a Bolshevik, a traitor, because she dared to exercise her constitutional right to speak out against war and to promote peace for the benefit of humanity.

Unflappable works, but at every turn Jane Addams also exhibited considerable Sangfroid. Yes. Sangfroid is better. Unflappable sounds like a stiff brimmed, oversized, Edwardian hat on the windy city streets of Chicago. Sangfroid is a mighty oak standing against an impossible and exasperating Prairie tempest.

Yes. Sangfroid is better, so much so that I am beginning to consider the idea that what we have here is a generation of Sangfroid. Jeannette Rankin and Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop and Jane Addams and so many members of that reforming generation of women were unperturbed, especially under strain. They had to be.

Rankin was the only woman in Congress when she served that first term in Congress. Everything she did and said was under a microscope. America was watching. The press was watching. History was watching. Jeannette Rankin stood up tall against all of that scrutiny. Sangfroid.

When Florence Kelley became the chief factory inspector for Illinois in 1893, she had to enter factories run by men to tell them that they were in violation of the law. She had to report her findings to a legislature of men at a time when women had no political power at all. Not surprisingly, men fought her tooth and nail, but still she kept walking into those factories and writing reports that led to the enacting of child labor legislation that changed lives and the future. Sangfroid.

When Julia Lathrop became the director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1912, she was the favorite choice of many progressive men in Washington. However, many believed her task was woman’s work, not real work, and her budget to protect children was a fraction of the budget the U.S. government spent on the protections of livestock. Still, Lathrop did her work, spearheaded revelatory research studies, educated an entire generation about the needs of America’s most vulnerable children, and changed how Americans defined childhood despite an economic and political system that chafed at every suggestion of reform. Sangfroid.

Jane Addams was the first woman to do so many things I cannot name them all here but will give you a few examples: she was the first woman garbage inspector in Chicago, first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, first woman to deliver a commencement address at the University of Chicago, and the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She served on numerous boards and committees in which she was the sole woman. She boldly took her seat on panels of male scholars. She lobbied before male-dominated state legislatures and the U.S. Congress and met with the most important religious, business, and political leaders in the United States and around the globe to make her arguments for a better world. For much of the time she had no political power, but she exerted her will anyway. She couldn’t even vote for president until 1916, but long before that she commanded audiences with presidents and sat down with them as an equal. Sangfroid.

This reform generation of American women was smart and compassionate and they had bold and brilliant ideas about how to make the world a better place. But perhaps even more important than their empathy and their ideas was the nature of their steely nerve. Men had all the power, and if women wanted to change the world they had to sit down at the table with disagreeable and disinterested and dismissive men and make them see the light. These women expected the chorus of doubt from those men (and some women, as well), but doubt for themselves was not an option. They had to open the doors and let themselves in, stand in extremely uncomfortable spaces, and hold their ground. Although they possessed warm hearts for the betterment of humanity, they had to be a little cold blooded. Self-possessed. Cool as damned cucumbers.

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote Jane Addams: “Will you let me say a word of very sincere thanks to you for the eminent sanity, good-humor and judgment you always display in pushing matters you have at heart? I have such awful times with reformers of the hysterical and sensational stamp, and yet I so thoroughly believe in reform, that I fairly revel in dealing with anyone like you.”

Jane Addams, Jeannette Rankin, and all of those reform women were up against thousands of patronizing Theodore Roosevelts as well as thousands more men who didn’t have Roosevelt’s bent toward reform and general interest in interesting women like Jane Addams. I’m now thinking about the bold women who organized female workers through the Women’s Trade Union League, Mary McDowell who worked her entire life in the impossibly tough Union Stockyards of Chicago, and suffragists, yes, all the suffragists. Alice Paul certainly exhibited imperturbability under strain! Sangfroid. All of them. Sangfroid.

I’ve written before about how Jane Addams developed a particular persona she found politically effective, a voice that would be heard in a public arena that in many ways was unattuned to women’s voices. I stand by my previous arguments that Jane Addams was guarded, deliberate, and dispassionate because, for her, the changes she wanted to see in her world were more important than any one person doing the work. She set her inner self aside, displayed a resolute dispassion, and made many of the tough Theodore Roosevelts of the world respect her, hear her, and listen to her ideas.

But now I have to wonder. Maybe it wasn’t so hard for Jane Addams to construct a demeanor of calm. Maybe Jane Addams was born exhibiting considerable sangfroid, like Jeannette Rankin’s biographer said she was born. Perhaps Jane Addams succeeded in her work and became the icon of the Progressive Era she became because imperturbability was innate in her character. I certainly would have slugged many of the fools Jane Addams had to face down, because I am, naturally, not even unflappable. I wonder, if we did a personality study of the all of the women who were first to do all kinds of stuff we wouldn’t find that each and every one of them possessed considerable sangfroid. Perhaps the historical circumstances didn’t effect such a demeanor but rather the demeaner itself, deep in their bones, made these women capable of opening all those doors and calmly standing in the fire on the other side.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Nancy C. Unger, “Rankin, Jeannette Pickering,” American National Biography; Biographical Directory of Congress; “Jeannette Rankin: ‘I Cannot Vote for War,’” U.S. House of Representatives, blog; Martha G. Stapler, ed., The Woman Suffrage Year Book (National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1917), 14; from the Jane Addams Digital Edition: Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, January 24, 1906; Congratulatory Telegram for Jeannette Rankin, November 12, 1916; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, April 9, 1917; Romain Rolland to Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, May 15, 1917; Alice Thacher Post to Jane Addams, December 17, 1918 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, April 18, 1919; Alice Hamilton to Mary Rozet Smith, May 12, 1919; Contributions Received in National Office in Response to Miss Addams’ Letter, March 20, 1924.

March 16, 2026March 13, 2026

It’s Women’s History Month at the Jane Addams Papers!

A collage of historical black-and-white and sepia portraits of women, each photographed individually, showcasing a variety of hairstyles, clothing, and expressions from different eras.

At the Jane Addams Papers Project every month is women’s history month, but in March we take the time to officially recognize it! Addams is an icon of women’s history, famous in her time as a social worker, social reformer, philosopher and advocate for peace, equality, and social justice. If we have learned anything while working on her papers, it has been the sheer breadth of her work — the connections that she had with women from every continent as they tried to better the world through cooperation, community, and charity.

The Jane Addams Papers tells the story not just of Jane Addams, but the women who worked with her, who were inspired by her, and who opposed her. It offers a deep understanding of the wide variety of women’s experiences in a pivotal time in world history. Over 9,000 women have been named in Addams’s papers, ranging from rank and file members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, settlement workers in New Orleans and Minnesota, and child labor activists in Chicago and New York. They include Japanese and Chinese feminists, Italian peace workers, Mexican social workers, and Dutch suffragists.

Please support the Jane Addams Papers Project!

The National Endowment for the Humanities will match donations dollar-for-dollar to the Project! The past year has been a challenging one financially for the project. Funding for the humanities is in short supply, and for projects that document the work of women, especially those who worked for equality and social justice, support has been tough to find. We lost an editor in 2025 due to federal funding cuts and have been short-staffed as we try to stay on task. Private support is needed in order to meet the costs of student researcher salaries, research, and web development. For that we need you!

Our goal is to raise $5,000 during this Women’s History Month. Can you help?

March 11, 2026July 23, 2026

Transcribing the Addams Papers!

A woman in a formal, ornate dress with puffed sleeves sits on a large, intricately carved chair with lion heads on the armrests and decorative figures on the backrest. She looks to the side, holding her hands in her lap.

We have partnered with From the Page to invite the public to transcribe Addams documents from 1877 to 1899. Using this innovative platform, you can transcribe Addams’s speeches, articles and other writings, transcribe her incoming letters, and if you are feeling brave, tackle Jane Addams’s handwriting yourself!

Screenshot of a digital archive webpage displaying a handwritten letter from 1887. The left side shows the letter, while the right side has a typed transcript and options to edit, save, and mark the text as complete. — Transcription interface on From the Page.

When the Project came to Ramapo College ten years ago, our two goals were to complete the Selected Papers of Jane Addams and to create the digital archive. We started our work with the year 1901, where Volume 4 of the Selected Papers began. As we are getting close to completing the years 1901-1935, we are turning back to the first three reels of correspondence and to Addams’s early writings. These years include, Addams’s college years, her travels abroad as a young woman, and the first ten years of Hull-House.

Crowdsourcing is a great way to engage those interested in Addams’s life and work, and by transcribing you get an experience of close reading unlike any other. Puzzling out the names, finding archaic terms and spellings brings us closer to the authors and gives a real sense of what it was like to be alive in the late 19th century.

From the Page’s interface is easy to use. All you need to do is create an account and then find the Jane Addams Papers. You will see documents that need to be transcribed and can select any that interest you, or you can press the Start Transcribing button and get a random page!

We started adding documents to the portal last month, and even before a day was out, volunteers hooked on transcription rolled up their sleeves and got to work. As of this morning, 360 pages of material have already been transcribed, from 71 of the 868 works we mounted. We haven’t even advertised it yet!

Once these are transcribed we will import them into our digital archive and students working the the project will attach metadata and link the names of people, organizations and events to the text, just as we have done with those created by project staff. The work of volunteers will make it easier for us to make these documents freely accessible to the public.

So if you would like to try your hand at transcription, dive on in!

February 18, 2026February 5, 2026

What’s in a Name? The Jane Addams of. . .

A world map with pink location pins marking various cities in North America, Europe, and South Asia, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Norway, Turkey, and India.

You know that you have made it when your name becomes an adjective. In the course of our research on Jane Addams, we regularly come across people in all walks of life who are described as “the Jane Addams of India,” or “the Jane Addams of Northern Michigan,” or even “the Jane Addams of Social Work.” That last one seems a bit odd — as Jane Addams was clearly the Jane Addams of Social Work!

Because Jane Addams was engaged in so many reforms, her namesakes vary as well. Some are social workers and settlement women, such as Lillian D. Wald (New York), Constance Currie (Minnesota) or Muriel Lester (London). Others were peace activists, like Halide Edib Adivar (Turkey), Alice Salomon (Germany) or María Elena Landázuri Gil (Mexico).

I’ve built an interactive map of those we have found so far with short biographies that you can explore (see in full screen) .

Who is the Jane Addams of Today?

Seeing the impact that Addams had on the lives of her contemporaries begs the question, Who is the Jane Addams of today? What problems do we face today that need someone of her character and care? Settlement houses faded away for the most part in the mid-20th century, but neighborhood organizing is still a vital movement. Immigrants still need help navigating American society. Even child labor, the reform Addams achieved in her lifetime, does not seem so settled. War still ravages the world, and its great expense hampers our ability to fund social services, education and health care.

Is she (or he) out there? — working quietly to better their neighborhood, protesting for peace and social justice, or helping improve the lives of individuals through sympathy and social work? Time will tell!

February 5, 2026

1926

Three uniformed soldiers stand on a dirt road, holding up a banner that reads U.S. OFFICERS STOP near an old car, with buildings and open fields in the background.

Sometimes, we just need to take thirty minutes and read a little history.

In 1926, the United States, which was marking the sesquicentennial of its founding, was not in a particularly democratic mood. Nor were the political, economic, social, and racial conditions of the country reflective of the promise of the U.S. Constitution and the ideals of American democracy. The democratic malaise was so complete, even the Sesquicentennial celebration of the American founding failed to inspire and encourage the body politic.

In 1926, American women had the vote, but Black voters in the South were effectively disenfranchised by Jim Crow policies such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and all-white primaries. Groups like the KKK employed violence and vigilante tactics to terrorize Black, Jewish, and Catholic Americans, as well as immigrants. Immigration at this time was governed by the 1924 Immigration Act—which favored white European immigration, functioned by a rigid quota system, was based on race and “fitness” for American citizenship, and completely barred immigrants from Asia. The purpose of the new act was to preserve a mythological ideal of American homogeneity. On the heels the 1924 act, Congress also established U.S. Border control, which fundamentally altered the U.S. government’s interactions with immigrants. Nativist propaganda was rampant, a growing fear that different cultures would destroy America was surging, eugenics was being seriously discussed, and racial stereotyping was the norm.

In 1926, American law enforcement and politics were rife with corruption and scandal. This was the era of gangland violence in American cities, organized criminals running around armed with machine guns. The Volstead Act (prohibition) had created an underworld of bootlegging and crime and bribery of police officers by rum runners with pockets full of cash. In 1926, Al Capone ruled the underground of Chicagoland, and in September rival gangs shot up his headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel in a massive drive-by shooting, spraying 1,000 bullets into the hotel’s restaurant.

Cities like New York, Chicago, and St. Louis were rife with political corruption, and the fallout of the corrupt Presidency of Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), most notably the Teapot Dome Scandal, was still coming to light. In Chicago hand grenades (called Chicago pineapples) were used to intimate voters, a U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Illinois resigned after he was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for abuse of power, and the U.S. Senate investigated a senate campaign in Illinois for campaign finance corruption, one of the candidates caught taking a $125,000 bribe from the director of a public utility. Next door in Indiana, the KKK had infiltrated Indianapolis municipal government and had members in the statehouse, as well. And that is just a modest Midwestern sampling of the political and judicial corruption running roughshod over American law and politics at every level in 1926.

In 1926, American foreign policy was generally characterized by political isolationism and economic nationalism. American wealth was concentrated in the top 5 percent of Americans. Businessmen controlled Congress, and corporations paid low taxes, while two million Americans were unemployed, more than 70 million (60 percent) lived in poverty, and 80 percent had no savings to stave off personal economic disaster. It was the Roaring ‘20s, but it was not roaring good for the majority of working people.

In 1926, the future of the post-World-War world was uncertain. There was considerable unrest across the globe with authoritarian coups in Lithuania, Poland, and Portugal; a general strike in Britain that led to a declaration of martial law. Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos assumed dictatorial powers in Greece, and the fascist Benito Mussolini increased his power in Italy by cracking down on public demonstrations and abolishing opposition parties following an assassination attempt.

In 1926, fear of fascism and socialism and communism, internationalism and humanitarianism—basically all of the isms—became a rallying cry for the white and rich power brokers who employed the rhetoric of othering to gain political support in communities that should have rejected their politics. During this time, not even the best among Americans were safe from attack.

Jane Addams in a dark fur coat and hat stands by a railing, holding a small handbag and gloves, looking thoughtfully into the distance. The image is in sepia tone. — Jane Addams in 1926. Image courtesy of Swarthmore College.

In 1926, Jane Addams was a sixty-six-year old internationally famous and well-respected reformer who had dedicated her entire adult life to improving the lives of vulnerable people. A renowned settlement worker, social philosopher, and orator, she was the author of seven books on democracy, social uplift, peace, and humanitarianism. Since cofounding Hull-House in Chicago in 1889, she had worked to expand democracy, shed light in the darkest corners of American cities, and lobbied for legislation and public policy initiatives to improve the lives of children, women, immigrants, and the working poor in the United States. She was beloved, and most Americans never wavered in their respect for her principled advocacy for a better world. Yet because she was an unflinching advocate for ALL vulnerable people, stood her ground on peace and antimilitarism, and constantly used her public platform to decry injustice and to stand up for free speech, the rule of law, and the ideals of American democracy, the fearmongers, who were smaller in number but so much louder in voice, branded her a dangerous radical.

In 1926, people hell-bent on silencing speech against the U.S. government or others merely seeking to draw attention to themselves and their political, social, or religious views, declared Hull-House a harbor for all of the “isms” and called Jane Addams anti-American. Although she seized opportunities to defend her good work and her reputation throughout the year, she refused to take the bait of the fearmongers, even when many of her friends and supporters urged her to sue for slander. It was not the only time in her life people had doubted or questioned her, and she certainly absorbed a great deal of negative press during World War I when she was unwavering in her position of peace. Yet the assaults in 1926, during a roller-coaster year that included two trips abroad and a heart attack, took their toll. As she wrote Dorothy Detzer, a sharp-tongued feminist and secretary of the WILPF, in November 1926: “I have had a horrid attack from the Commander of the Ill. Div. of the American Legion. I wish you were coming over soon to confront him!”

Some Jane Addams highlights of 1926:

January 14. Jane Addams and Mary McDowell, Chicago commissioner of public welfare, hosted a meeting with Capt. C. B. Hopkins, a member of the Military Intelligence Association who had accused them of being “Reds” because of their association with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When Addams asked him why he considered her dangerous, he responded: “Because of the good you have done your influence for wrong is far greater than that of any other.” (Statement on Pacifism and Patriotism, Jan. 13, 1926).

January 16. The Chicago Tribune, in an editorial with the headline “Both Wrong and Dangerous,” agreed with Hopkins that “the universal recognition gained by persons like Miss Addams for their good works makes them all the more dangerous when they turn to doctrines of pacifism which no experience supports.” (Chicago Tribune, Jan. 16, 1926, 8).

Jane Addams in dark clothing and a cloche hat sits with her hand resting on a cane. The image is framed and captioned with a headline about patriotism and includes a quote discussing the need for a new kind of patriotism. — A new kind of patriotism, opined Addams: “free from dislike and mistrust of things foreign.” Elmira (NY) Star Gazette, March 4, 1926.

February 28. In a speech to the United Neighborhood Houses of New York, Jane Addams argued: “It is quite as devoted and loyal as the old type, but it believes that certain humanitarian ends can be achieved only through cooperation between all nations and all races. In the United States … we believe in brotherly love, in international cooperation and goodwill … but we need something beyond words. We need what I may call an emotional shove that will bring us to a reassertion of our birthright, the moral leadership we have always assumed we had. Other countries are for the moment showing more devotion to the advancement of humanity than we are, and to regain our place we need leadership, not so much by the individual as by the group. Women in groups, joined together not only for settlement work but for every other kind of high minded endeavor, can break down these inhibitions in the public mind so that we can assert our moral leadership, and, while working for the best interests of our country, advance the world.” Speech to the United Neighborhood Houses of New York).

March 20. In a speech before the Women’s National Republican Club, Col. Hanford MacNider, assistant secretary of war, called Jane Addams a “professional agitator” because she opposed military training in the public schools. (New York Daily News, Mar. 20, 1926, 7).

April 1. A Sioux City, Iowa, newspaper questioned the patriotism of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), of which Jane Addams was president. “It is believed,” it read, that “these good women have been deceived by the ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ This so-called League for Peace and Freedom starts out with a high sounding title and fairly reeks with expressions of good will and Christian spirit. An investigation into its activities and its associations, however, will show that it is one of the most vicious and unpatriotic organizations in the United States.” When the WILPF demanded a retraction in November, the newspaper retracted its opinion, local American Legion members doubled-down and demanded that the newspaper “reaffirm its belief that certain activities and purposes of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom are disloyal, unpatriotic and inimical to the national safety.” (League For Peace and Freedom Opposed, Apr. 1926).

April 5. Paul Kellogg, editor of The Survey, who had a meeting with Addams in NYC in late March, wrote her: “There was one comment of yours which I have thought over several times since. You visualized how the fear of Russia was sort of a red herring drawn across the nascent forces in American life; just as the fear of France balked things in England during the first decades of the last century. You cited how the suppression of the slave trade was delayed, for instance, because everyone who espoused such a cause was denounced as a ‘red,’ or its equivalent a century back.” He also asked Addams to write an article for The Survey which would celebrate social work, so much of which was under attack, because “there is a great hungriness among folk who are up to their elbows in work for their communities, and who would a prize word from you at this time.” (Paul Underwood Kellogg to Jane Addams, Apr. 5, 1926; “How Much Social Work Can a Community Afford?, The Survey, November 15, 1926, p. 199-201.).

May 24. Addams in a speech at a meeting of the National Federation of Settlements in Cleveland said: “The American people are in a panic. We must help to mitigate the scare, remembering that all this is nothing new. The same thing happened after the French Revolution. Fifteen years ago those of us who felt that child labor, for instance, could be better controlled by the federal government than by the states, simply went about saying so, and nobody questioned the sincerity of our position. But if you say it now you are a Bolshevik. A member of congress once asked me who wrote the proposed child labor amendment to the federal constitution, and where. I told him it was written by Dean Lewis of the University of Pennsylvania, but whether in Philadelphia or New York or Washington I didn’t know. I was willing to find out where he sat, if that was important. “I am reliably informed,” the congressman replied, “that this was written by Lenin, sitting in Moscow.” (Speech to National Federation of Settlements, May 24, 1926).

May 25. During a Chicago meeting of the American Legion Auxiliary, president Mrs. Eliza London Shepherd declared pacifists and “breeders of pacifism” as “the most dangerous menace to the United States; ” and C. B. Hopkins (yep, same guy), continued his “red-baiting” by denouncing Jane Addams again. (Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1926, 31).

June 7. Addams defended herself in this letter to the editor of the Boston Herald: “I am not in any sense a Socialist, have never belonged to the party, and have never been especially affiliated with them. I am certainly not a communist nor a Bolshevik. I am, of course, president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and we have advocated recognition of Soviet Russia, not because we have been in favor of the government any more than we were with that of the Czars. … I do not know why I am called a Bolshevik except as a term of opprobrium that is easily flung about. …” (Jane Addams to the Editor of the Boston Herald, June 4, 1926).

June 9. An article in the DeKalb (IL) Daily Chronicle read: “Miss Jane Addams, addressing a social workers’ conference, pleads with people not to label all settlement work as ‘red.’ This label, indiscriminately applied harms the cause of social progress she says. She’s right, as she often is. Too often we unthinkingly conclude that any person who tries to improve the condition of those less fortunate than ourselves must be a wild and desperate radical.” (The Daily Chronicle, June 9, 1926, 4).

June 12. Morris Ernst, an ACLU attorney, wrote to Addams regarding Captain Hopkins attack on her and the ACLU, writing “In the course of his remarks he spoke of this organization as being directly or indirectly influenced by agents from Russia. … In the opinion of our attorneys, this attack is clearly libelous both against you and against the organization. We should like to bring libel actions against the Chicago Tribune, Captain Hopkins and the Military Intelligence Association. We shall certainly do so so far as the Union is concerned, and if you will permit us, we will take charge of a case for you and handle it ourselves without any embarrassment or bother for you. … The case is so good, that we have no doubt of our ability to win an action. It will be of immense value as putting a quietus on the pernicious activities of men like Hopkins and the Association which he represents.” (Morris Leopold Ernst to Jane Addams, June 12, 1926; Forrest Cutter Bailey (ACLU) to Jane Addams, June 12, 1926).

June 17. Addams wrote to the ACLU: “I am too much of a Quaker to care for lawsuits altho I do hope that the Civil L.U. will proceed against The Chicago Tribune.” (Jane Addams to Forrest Cutter Bailey, June 17, 1926.

November 4. The WILPF demanded a retraction of the libelous attack that the Sioux City, Iowa, newspaper had published back in April. When the paper issued a retraction, local American Legion members, who had urged the publication, doubled-down and demanded that the newspaper “reaffirm its belief that certain activities and purposes of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom are disloyal, unpatriotic and inimical to the national safety.” (Sioux City (IA) Journal, Nov. 4, 1926, 8; League For Peace and Freedom Opposed; Dorothy Detzer to Jane Addams, November 22, 1926.

November 10. Ferre Watkins, of the Illinois American Legion, in a speech to the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs said: “Hull House is the rallying point of every radical and communistic movement in Chicago. The leaders of the settlement are attempting to sell out their country to some international scheme from which they vainly hope to realize great things for themselves.” Watkins also accused the WILPF and Addams as its president of interfering “with the Government’s program of training men for service as officers in the defense of the United States” because she disagreed with her country’s policy of military preparedness and spoke up against military training in the public schools. Addams exercised her constitutional right to free speech and petition of her government, but because Watkins disagreed with her politics he sought to brand her as a communist and to silence her. (Statement on Captain Watkins, Nov. 11, 1926).

Twenty-five Hull-House residents signed a quick defense: “We, residents of Hull House, are not ‘leaders’ in any movement, but plain workers, but we feel that the recent assaults upon Miss Addams and Hull House are [too] vicious to be totally ignored. Miss Addams needs no defense at our hands, for no sane person will credit the utterly silly and puerile [charges] leveled at her by Captain Watkins. But we enter emphatic protest against the statement that Hull House is a rallying point for every radical or communist movement. Hull House believes in free speech and free discussion, but it is not in any way committed to communism or any other form of radicalism. The residents of Hull House carry on no propaganda whatever; they teach classes; they direct clubs; they do what they can for the neighborhood in the way of aid, advice, and instruction; they produce plays and supervise other recreational activities. Those who say Hull House is a center of radical or revolutionary activity are either ignorant or irresponsible. In either case, their statements should be resented by all the intelligent friends and supporters of Hull House.” (Hull-House Residents Protest, ca. November 1926).

November 10. Edith Abbott, University of Chicago professor, wrote to Addams: “Mrs. Kohn has spoken to me about that Legion business and I feel very strongly that nothing but a libel suit will stop those people. Mrs. Kohn tells me that Mrs. Rufus Dawes has been also publicly quoting Mr. Watkins and I think you or the Hull-House Trustees really ought to bring a libel suit against her as well as against Watkins. There is so absolutely no excuse for the kind of talk now. During the war when exaggeration ran high no one weighed words very carefully. But it is simply too despicable for people of this sort to go on repeating these gross slanders. It seems to me like the case when T. R. finally sued that editor for calling him a drunkard. It is the only way to stop this kind of irresponsible lying.” (Edith Abbott to Jane Addams, Nov. 10, 1926).

November 12. In a speech at a meeting of National Federation of Women’s Clubs in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Helen Dawes, of Evanston, Illinois, accused the WILPF of having “communistic tendencies.” “I speak freely,” she said, “because Miss Addams herself does not conceal the fact that she does not believe in our ideas of American loyalty.” (Jane Addams is Scored by Mrs. Dawes, Nov. 12, 1926).

November 13. Lucia Ames Mead, a Boston pacifist, wrote to Addams: “I see from the papers that your Legion savages are after your scalp again. … a fund should be raised to take these libels to court and to call a halt to this audacious slander.” (Lucia Ames Mead to Jane Addams, Nov. 13, 1926).

November 13. Margarita Seymour, a civic leader in Illinois, wrote to Addams: “Great people like yourself must carry heavy crosses, but devotion, honesty and truth will be victorious.” (Margarita Petitdidier Seymour to Jane Addams, Nov. 13, 1926)

November 14. Addams wrote to the Woman’s Peace Union: “The Commander of the Illinois Division of the American Legion who made the attack, made me say very absurd things about stripping the uniform from West Point cadets, in a speech he had heard me make against compulsory military training in the colleges. In reply to the reporter’s question I said that I had stuck to my subject and had not mentioned soldiers. This must be the foundation of the report. It seems to me however so desirable to drop the whole matter that I should deprecate prolonging the publicity which has been much exaggerated on both sides.” (Jane Addams to Women’s Peace Union, Nov. 14, 1926).

November 15. Dorothy Detzer wrote to Addams: “I realize how terrible it is for us, but I do wish a good strong libel suit could be started. I think some of these gentleman will have to pay before they stop abusing decent people.” (Dorothy Detzer to Jane Addams, Nov. 15, 1926).

November 15. John Gabriel, a Denver lawyer, wrote to Addams: “It is, indeed, with regret that I learn of the uncalled for and malicious attack made by Captain Watkins, recently named National Commander of the Illinois American Legion upon the wonderful work that you are doing at Hull House. I have known of your work, not intimately in later years so much as in former years, for now more than thirty-three years and I know there is no foundation whatsoever for such a malicious attack. The good you have done is beyond measure of computation. I wish that I might do something to let you know how much it is appreciated by the many people in the United States who have the uplifting view of things, and, also, I wish it were possible for me to do something to assist you in the great work.” (John H. Gabriel to Jane Addams, Nov. 15, 1926).

December 1. From an article in The Progressive, “a Journal Devoted to Advancement and Improvement in Education, Popular Intelligence, Science, Politics and American Welfare Generally: “The reason that many people long ago began to revolt against the patriotic firebrands who see an anarchist, communist or bolshevist in every American citizen who has a political opinion that has not been rubber-stamped by the conventional boob-intellect may be found in such charges as those recently voiced by one Capt. Ferre Watkins, commander of the Illinois American Legion, that ‘Hull House is the rallying point of every radical and communist movement in Chicago.’ Anyone who knows anything about the subject knows that Hull House, as founded and conducted by that great American woman, Jane Addams, as nearly approaches the ideal of practical Christianity as any institution in the world.” (The Progressive 10 [Dec. 1, 1926]).

December 8, 1931. Jane Addams’s steadfast devotion to her principles paid off, of course, because history tends to get it right, in the end. Jane Addams became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Within hours of the news, the telegrams and letters of congratulations began flooding in. This telegram from Walter Pyne, a Massachusetts lawyer, was one of the first: “Congratulations you should have received it long ago you are everything that is good beautiful and lovely.” (Walter William Pyne to Jane Addams, Dec. 9, 1931)

May 21, 1935. Jane Addams died. Thousands of mourners streamed through Hull-House two days later for her funeral. The Chicago Tribune devoted four full pages to her obituary and funeral, hailing her as “America’s Foremost Woman.” (Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1935, 1, 4, 38; May 23, 1935, 9).

2026. Today, Jane Addams is remembered as an icon of Progressive Era Reform and as an American who stood up for the most vulnerable Americans. She is a great hero of American democracy, arguably the equal (or even the better) of leaders like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. She made countless contributions to the betterment of the social, economic, political, and educational conditions in the United States. She helped make America more just and more free. She was principled and compassionate, never denigrating others, preferring instead to lift people up, to bring all voices to the table, and always listening and willing to learn and to grow. From much of her work we still benefit today—from the enactment of child labor laws, to woman suffrage, and to the labor protections and the safety of our food that we too often take for granted. There are schools named in her honor across the country; and Hull-House, her home and base of her reform work for more than four and a half decades, is a museum and social justice center on the University of Illinois Chicago campus.

Jane Addams’s name endures because she stood for what is good in America. She wasn’t perfect. She made mistakes, and she owned them. But she walked through all the challenges and celebrations in her life with humility and integrity, compassion for others, a fierce dedication to public service, and, unlike those who attacked her 1926, she refused to wallow in the mud of tearing people down; she never believed that humiliation of one’s opponents was the way to be right. And she never let the critics, the doubters, or the haters make her compromise her principles or shift her moral compass; and no matter who they were or how wrong they may have been, Addams recognized their humanity.

By Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Sources: Martin W. Wilson, “Sesquicentennial International Exposition,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia; “The Lasting Legacy of the Johnson-Reed Act,” Tenement Museum, New York City; Tara McAndrew, “The History of the KKK in American Politics,” JSTOR Daily, Jan. 25, 2017; “The Beer Wars and Al Capone’s Bloody Business,” Chicago Stories, WTTW, PBS, Chicago; Daily News (New York), Mar. 20, 1926, 7; 19^th Amendment, U.S. Constitution; 41 U.S. Stat. 305; 43 U.S. Stat. 153; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 16, 1926, 8; May 26, 1926, 31; Sep. 21, 1926, 1; DeKalb (IL) Daily Chronicle, June 9, 1926, 4; from Jane Addams Digital Edition (JADE): Norman Matoon Thomas to Jane Addams, Apr. 17, 1926; Edith Abbott to Jane Addams, Nov. 10, 1926; Jane Addams to Dorothy Detzer, Nov. 12, 1926; Jane Addams to Dorothy Detzer, Nov. 18, 1926; Jane Addams to Margaret Dreier Roberts, Dec. 8, 1926. (Note, most of the citations in the calendar entries are documents in The Jane Addams Digital Edition, and those with links are available for viewing).

October 8, 2025February 25, 2026

Jane Addams, Karma Yogi

A black-and-white historical photo shows six men seated in front, wearing various traditional and Western clothing, with a woman and a statue of a woman holding an arm up in the background.

It was my first weekend of an intensive 200-hour yoga training course. I was sitting with my yogi cohorts on my mat after an energetic yoga flow. We were listening to our first yoga humanities lecture on the history of yoga. Yeah! History is always the very best place to start when exploring any new topic or activity. I was enthusiastically taking notes on the history handout, listening to tales of ancient and modern practices of yoga, when—bam!—there was Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from India, coming to Chicago in 1893 to participate in the Parliament of Religions held at the World’s Columbian Exposition. On this visit to the United States, Vivekananda introduced the practice of yoga and “made a big and lasting impression on the American public,” wrote Georg Feuerstein, yoga scholar and author of “A Short History of Yoga.”

Jane Addams was in Chicago in 1893. She attended that Chicago World’s Fair. She was curious about everything, always learning, always open to new philosophies and practices, always eager to bring fascinating people to Hull-House. I bet she met Swami Vivekananda, I thought.

At the first opportunity, I searched for Vivekananda in the Jane Addams Digital Edition. And there he was! He was tagged to a speech Jane Addams delivered in November 1933 in which she said:

Black and white photo of a man in traditional Indian attire with a turban, arms crossed, looking sideways. There is handwritten text in English and another script on the left and right sides of the image. — Vivekananda, c. 1893 (Wikipedia Commons)

“I am reminded of a story told to me forty years ago by Vivekananda, a great Hindu teacher who went about in India expounding what he thought to be the great meaning and the purpose of life.” Forty years ago was 1893.Yep, Jane Addams knew Swami Vivekananda. Of course, she did. After a little more digging, I also found that Addams had related this same Vivekananda story in a 1911 speech about selflessness and charitable work, and I was able to then identify the “native of of East India” she referenced as Vivekananda himself. In this research, I also located three new Jane Addams letters to add to our digital edition.

In Addams’s 1933 speech, given during the terrible throes of the Great Depression, she recounted Vivekananda’s allegorical tale in detail:

“He told about a woman who found herself at the bottom of a pit. I suppose every religion has some sort of pit in it which it brings out on occasion. This woman was at the bottom of the pit, very hot and very uncomfortable. Because she felt so uncomfortable and so unhappy she sent up prayer after prayer to the throne above, begging that she might be released from this punishment. Finally word came down to her that if she could think of one unselfish thing she had ever done it would be taken into consideration and perhaps she would be taken out.

“She thought and thought, trying to remember an unselfish act. Finally she remembered that one day when she was sitting in her doorway getting some carrots ready for dinner a blind beggar came by and asked her for something to eat and that she had given him a bad carrot that she was not going to use herself anyway. It was not a very unselfish act, but the best that she could recall.

“Then she waited. After a while there came down into the pit from above a carrot attached to a string. It came lower and lower. She was told to take hold of this carrot and that perhaps it would pull her up. So she took hold with great fear and trembling. It began to go up and went up farther and farther and the atmosphere grew more salubrious and she felt very much happier. Then she looked back and found that somebody was clinging to her feet and coming with her, and somebody else was clinging to his feet and somebody clinging to the feet of that man. There was a whole string of people coming out of the pit upon this one carrot. She knew that it would not last very long. She knew that it was not a good carrot; so she called out ‘Let go, this is my carrot, my one chance to get out of this place.’ Then, of course, the carrot immediately broke and they all went down together.

“Vivekananda contended that if we were not thoroughly concerned about our neighbor’s good, if we were not given to considering their good quite as valuable and important as our own, then we were not on the right path of going up. When we begin to say, ‘This is mine and mine alone,’ then we are sure to drop back.”

Born Narendranath Datta into an upper-middle-class family in Calcutta in 1863, Vivekananda studied at Presidency College before becoming a disciple of the Hindu mystic Ramakrishna (spiritual guru and founder of the Ramakrishna Order) in 1881. He studied and toured throughout India before coming to the United States in 1893. In lectures and various public and private appearances, Vivekananda shared the Vedanta philosophy based on four sacred Vedic texts. In his lectures he discussed those texts, like the Bhagavad Gita (a first century epic Sanskrit poem), the divinities of Hinduism (Vishnu, Shiva, and various goddesses), and yoga. It is unclear when Addams heard the story of the woman and the carrot, but there were multiple opportunities for her to hear Vivekananda speak. He was in Chicago from September 1893 through June 1894, delivering multiple speeches at various venues. He also visited Hull-House at least once during this time, delivering a lecture on the economic and social conditions in India on October 24, 1893. After his Hull-House lecture, at which Addams was likely present, Vivekananda entertained questions for an hour, overseeing a lively discussion.

Addams may have also attended a Vivekananda lecture in New York City in December 1895; and Vivekananda was back in Chicago for appearances in April 1896. During that latter trip, he wrote to a friend: “Everything has been well arranged here, thanks to the kindness of Miss Addams. She is so, so good and kind.”

Vivekananda returned to Chicago in late November 1899 and visited with Addams at Hull-House. Before his arrival in Chicago his disciple, Sister Nivedita of the Order of Ramakrishna (born Margaret Elizabeth Noble in Ireland), lodged at Hull-House for several days. She described the settlement ethos as “perfect self-forgetfulness—all generosity and enthusiasm.” In a letter from Chicago, she wrote: “At Hull House I feel myself in a more natural atmosphere than elsewhere. … There—one is in the world. The whole interest is life and ideas.”

After Sister Nivedita delivered a lecture at Hull-House on November 20, she wrote: “Last night at Hull House I really did feel that we had had Swami’s blessing…60 or 70 people stayed about 1½ hour to ask questions about the philosophy. And such intelligent questions too!” Sister Nivedita was impressed with the settlement and inspired by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr (“I love her so much,” she later wrote of Starr). Sister Nivedita gave at least two more lectures at Hull-House, including one to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society entitled “The Ancient Arts of India.”

A newspaper clipping announces a lecture titled Religious Life in India by Sister Nivedita of Calcutta, scheduled for Monday, November 20th at 8 p.m. Admission is free. — Notice in Hull-House Bulletin 3, no. 12 (Nov.-Dec. 1899): 1, JAPM, 53:1083.

Sister Nivedita dedicated her life to the study of Hinduism and to the education of girls in India. She also nursed patients in Calcutta during a bubonic plague epidemic in 1899, and later joined Gandhi’s movement to liberate India from British rule. Sister Nivedita described Jane Addams as “a clear-headed quiet and unassuming person,” and she was so impressed with Addams’s compassion and reform work to better the lives of vulnerable people, she called Addams a karma yogi.

Today, we think of yoga mostly as a practice of movement, meditation, and breath work. However, there is also a deep cultural and spiritual practice associated with yoga that emphases compassion for self and others, moral restraints (yama) such as nonviolence and truthfulness, and observances (niyama) such as study and contentment. The practice of karma yoga has some uncanny philosophical similarities with the Progressive Reformers. Selfless service. A desire to perform one’s duty without attachments to personal gain. Motivation of a social gospel for collective uplift. Commitment to justice and nonviolence. The idea that all people are worthy of dignity and respect, akin to possessing, in the language of yoga, Atman, or the true nature within all beings.

Karma is the universal law of cause and effect. Karma yoga is “the practice of serving others while seeking to relinquish the ego judgments projected by one’s own ego.” A karma yogi gives freely of herself and is self-controlled, sincere, truthful, loving, and filled with the desire to serve.

That philosophy sounds just like Jane Addams to me.

Jane Addams sits outdoors, surrounded by a group of attentive children. The children, both boys and girls, are sitting and standing around her, listening closely. The setting appears to be a school or courtyard. — Swami Jane Addams (University of Illinois Chicago, Jane Addams Memorial Collection)

Jane Addams dedicated her life to improving the lives of vulnerable people—children, immigrants, women, and the working poor. She cared deeply about people she knew in the Hull-House neighborhood and in Chicago as well as the people she didn’t know in Illinois, in the United States, and throughout the world. She gave all her money and energy to the causes she served. Jane Addams was not driven by ego, and she lived a life of compassion and nonjudgment. She always sought to understand people on their own terms, to respect their beliefs and cultural traditions, to study the social and economic conditions that affected their health and wellbeing, and to tell the truth about the social ills she witnessed. She used her talents as an organizer, a philosopher, a public speaker, and a writer for the good of society not for personal wealth or accolades.

Addams wrote in 1910: “If at times the moral fire seems to be dying out of the good old words, relief and charity, it has undoubtedly filled with a new warmth certain words which belong distinctively to our own times; such words as prevention, amelioration and social justice. It is also true that those for whom these words contain most of hope and warmth are those who have been long mindful of the old tasks and obligations as if the great basic emotion of human compassion had more than held its own. After all, sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human problem.”

Philanthropic endeavor to Jane Addams was more than an occupation, it was a higher calling. She would not have defined what she was doing as karma yoga, but she was emulating the very heart of its philosophy.

Here is a humble sampling of Jane Addams Yoga Sutras (sutra = thread; general truth; rule or aphorism):

“No man, whatever his genius or his organizing ability, can hope to permanently uplift himself or his followers, unless with them he uplift the masses.”— How Would You Uplift the Masses?, February 4, 1892

“Too often we make our attitude toward the poor one of duty rather of sympathy and love. This must be changed if success would attend our efforts.”— Social Settlements, August 12, 1900

“The gravest charge I have to bring against Child labor is that it pauperizes the consumers, all of those who use the product into which this labor has entered. If I wear a garment which has been made in a sweatshop or a garment for which the maker has not been paid a living wage, or a wage so small that his earnings had to be supplemented by the earnings of his wife and children, then I am in debt to the man who made my cloak. I am a pauper if I permit myself to accept charity from the poorest people in the community.”—Child Labor and Pauperism, October 3, 1903

“The fittest man in a community is not the man who crushes his rival in business, who survives all his rivals, but the man with the greatest and broadest sympathies. The desire to crush out others, whether commercially or physically, is a sure sign of arrested development. As we go on to a deeper understanding of the philosophy of life we avoid combat more and more.”—Newer Ideals of Peace, February 19, 1904

“We must search in the dim borderland between compassion and morality for the beginnings of that cosmopolitan affection.”—Newer Ideals of Peace, 1907

“Man excited is quite different from man when calm. When we are angry we talk of what we can do; when our anger has passed away we consider what we should do.” Is the Peace Movement a Failure, November 1914

Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Notes: Darren Main, Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic, 2nd ed. (iUniverse Star, 2007), 57-62, 73, 76-94, 224; “Vivekananda” (1863-1902), Nivedita (1867-1911), and Ramakrisna (1836-1886), Encyclopedia Britannica; John Henry Barrows, The World’s Parliament of Religions, 2 vols. (R. R. Donnelley, 1893), 1:66, 5, 101-2 (speech), 118-20 (fable), 124, 128-29, 148, 153, 170-71; 2:968-78, 1590; “Chronology of Vivekananda” (https://chronologyofvivekananda.rkmm.org/k); “Sister Nivedita’s Battle for Indian Ideals in America,” Daily Katha blog, June 24, 2018; Vivekananda to Sarah Chapman Bull, April 6, 1896, in Advaita Ashrama, ed., Letters of Swami Vivekananda (Modern Art Press, 1940), 306; Letters of Swami Vivekananda, 111; Swami Vivekananda, Yoga Philosophy: Lectures Delivered in New York, Winter of 1895-96 (Longmans, Green & Co., 1896); Sankari Prasad Basu, ed., 2 vols., Letters of Sister Nivedita (Nababharat Publishers, 1960), 1:229, 230, 241, 248-51; The [Chicago] Inter Ocean, Dec. 2, 1899, p. 13; and from the Jane Addams Digital Edition (the first three are newly located): Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) to Jane Addams, Feb. 14, 1906; B. M. Malabari to Jane Addams, May 26, 1906; Jane Addams to Sara Chapman Bull (Mrs. Ole Bull), June 23, 1906; Charity and Social Justice, June 11, 1910; Address at the Indiana State Conference of Charities and Correction, October 29, 1911; November 1914; Pioneering in Social Work, November 1933.

July 17, 2025October 14, 2025

Two Chautauqua Summers

A woman with long brown hair and sunglasses smiles in the foreground; behind her, a large, white historic building stands across a sunny lawn.

Jane Addams left Illinois for Chautauqua, New York, on Friday, July 4, 1902, at 3 p.m. Traveling on the New York Central Railroad, perhaps in a sleeping car, she had at least one book with her to read, as she always traveled with books. Onboard the train, Addams enjoyed the countryside passing by outside the train windows and engaged in casual conversation with fellow travelers. She may have snacked or had a light meal in the dining car and polished up her series of five lectures she was scheduled to deliver during her week-long stay at the Chautauqua Institution. She arrived in Chautauqua in the wee hours of the morning the following day and checked into the Athenaeum Hotel, a Second-Empire building opened to guests in 1881. The hotel boasted an ornate three-story tower with a mansard roof, centered on the front façade of the hotel. It stuck a magnificent pose from atop a small hill overlooking a deep lawn and Chautauqua Lake, matching in style the long skirts and elaborate hats of the women who strolled on the winding paths below it.

Exactly 123 years after Addams arrived in Chautauqua, I left Illinois for Chautauqua at 7:45 a.m. I drove by myself in my Ford Escape hybrid, stopping overnight in northern Indiana at my mom’s house. I drove the remaining six of the nine-hour journey the next day, snacking on cashews and dried mango while alternately listening to an audio book and rehearsing memorized sections of the one lecture that I was scheduled to deliver during my week-long stay at the Chautauqua Institution. I arrived in Chautauqua in the midafternoon on Sunday, July 6, and checked into the Athenaeum Hotel. Despite its peeling paint and the somewhat ragged appearance of the wicker chairs lined across the inviting two-story porches, the historical charm of the building calmed my road-weary spirit and my nerves, frazzled from sharing the road with semi-tractor trucks oblivious to speed limits. I would not learn it until later, but the stately hotel tower was two-stories shorter than the one that greeted Jane Addams in 1902, the upper stories having been dismantled for safety reasons in the 1920s. Still, in the hazy heat of July in 2025, the hotel was yesteryear grand, nestled as it was among mature trees and rich foliage, the Victorian porches already calling me. I made a vow to enjoy them each day of my visit, to drink coffee and watch every sunrise over the lake and sip cocktails as evening shadows fell over the enchanting, historic village.

In 1902, Jane Addams was not only a featured lecturer for Chautauqua’s “Social Settlement Week,” but she also brought with her the Hull-House Summer School. After ten years at her alma mater in Rockford, Illinois, this year she was hosting the Summer School at Chautauqua Institution. Seventy young women, mostly teachers from Chicago, would reside in various cottages scattered across the Chautauqua campus, participate in a variety of Institution lectures on topics like pedagogy and history and participate in activities like swimming and an excursion to Niagara Falls. The students would also attend Addams’s lectures and then met with her each evening in a shelter by the ravine piazza of the Institution’s auditorium. Addams’s good friend and fellow settlement house leader Graham Taylor from Chicago Commons was also joining her as a member of the Chautauqua faculty that summer.

In 2025, I was at Chautauqua as part of a group assembled by President Lincoln’s Cottage, a historic site in Washington, DC, where Abraham Lincoln and his family lived for one-quarter of his presidency. It is the place where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and where he and his family grieved the death of eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln in 1862. Our group was leading a Master Class series to provide both historical and modern contexts for the Metropolitan Opera’s Chautauqua workshop of Lincoln in the Bardo, based on the novel of the same name about Willie’s death and his father’s grief. My lecture was part history about the Lincoln family and grief, and it also shared my personal story of grief and illustrated, as well, how my emotional connection to the figures I study informs my understanding of the past.

I was in Chautauqua because of my years as an editor of Abraham Lincoln’s papers, but I went to Chautauqua with Jane Addams in my head. I knew about the long, storied history of the Chautauqua Institution through my work editing Jane Addams’s papers, and I was eager to breathe in the place to which she returned many times during her long career as a reformer, writer, and renowned lecturer.

Chautauqua Institution was founded in 1874 by Episcopal Bishop John Heyl Vincent (1832-1920) and Lewis Miller (1829-1899), a religious leader, educator, and industrialist. The first Chautauqua assemblies were camp meetings for Sunday school teachers (attendees sleeping in actual tents!), but the organization expanded quickly four years later when Vincent established the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC), a correspondence school which offered “courses of reading for all classes of people.” The early popularity of the CLSC and the growth of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York spurred the organization of Chautauqua societies across the country, the Chautauqua Movement promoting the idea of lifelong learning for adults, celebrating the most important work of educators, scientists, artists, writers, political leaders, and reformers, and espousing the idea that an educated public is a healthier public.

In his 1886 book The Chautauqua Movement, Vincent wrote: “Education, once the peculiar privilege of the few, must in our best earthy estate become the valued possession of the many. It is a natural and inalienable right of human souls.”

Jane Addams was a lifelong learner herself, and all of her reform work in Chicago and beyond was rooted in her steadfast belief that education and learning had power to lift up individuals and communities and help create a better world for all people. It is not surprising, then, that she supported the Chautauqua Movement, as did numerous leaders during the Progressive Era.

Jane Addams at Chautauqua in 1915; Bishop Vincent is on the right.

Addams’s trip to Chautauqua for Social Settlement Week in July 1902 was not her first. She previously lectured there in July 1893 as part of another program about social settlements, and she returned in July 1895. In August 1898, she lectured on “Aspects of the Social Problem,” and in August 1900, she was back to deliver four lectures. Jane Addams valued the mission of Chautauqua, speaking at numerous Chautauqua Movement events throughout the Midwest and returning to Chautauqua Institution as a featured lecturer six times between 1903 and 1915. Ill health forced her to turn down an invitation to Chautauqua in 1918, but as she wrote Arthur Bestor, president of Chautauqua Institution, in March of that year: “My plans are of necessity indefinite but as it is always a pleasure to me to speak at [Chautauqua] I shall hope to be able to arrange it this year.”

My cabinet of curiosities. (And, yes, I do believe that Abraham Lincoln would have loved Jane Addams).

Two of Addams’s books were selected as part of the coveted CLSC’s annual reading curriculum: Newer Ideals of Peace in 1907-1908 and Twenty Years at Hull-House in 1911-1912. It is the Chautauqua Edition of Newer Ideals that I have in my Jane Addams cabinet of curiosities. The 2025 CLSC reading list includes one of my favorite books of recent years, Eve by scholar Cat Bohannon as well as Liberation Day, stories by George Saunders. Saunders was the featured lecturer at Chautauqua during the week I was there. He was present at the end of the week for the opera workshop of his brave and human novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Not bragging or anything, but it was a thrill for me to meet Saunders and have him inscribe my personal copy of Lincoln in the Bardo.

George Saunders was the star of my week at Chautauqua, but Jane Addams was always the star when she visited the Chautauqua Institution.

Even in 1915, when her peace work made her unpopular with some audiences, people clamored to read her books and articles, to meet her, and to hear her speak. In a speech at Chautauqua Institution in August that year, just four months after the United States entered the World War, she took the podium to defend herself. As an unwavering peace advocate, she was subject to criticism by many who believed that patriotism required total support of one’s government during wartime. Addams disagreed, believing instead that to be a patriot was to question the government and that free speech in time of war was even more important than in peacetime. In a speech at Carnegie Hall in New York on July 9, during which she had discussed her tour of Europe as part of the work of the International Congress of Women, Addams made some statements about soldiers, the use of stimulants in the European armies, and definitions of bravery that rankled many. However, at Chautauqua she reiterated those statements, reaffirmed the horror faced by men in the trenches, and celebrated the courage of soldiers.

I don’t know how the audience received her lecture, but that the Chautauqua Institution granted Jane Addams a forum to raise her voice of peace during a time of war, speaks to the Institution’s commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

I witnessed that commitment to free speech at Chautauqua, as well. In a crowded amphitheater on July 10, at the coveted daily 10:45 a.m. Chautauqua Institution lecture, I watched Deborah Rutter, the widely regarded and long-time director of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, defend her tenure leading the Center. Fired in February by President Trump for cultivating diversity and inclusion in the arts, Rutter spoke to the Chautauqua audience about the importance of creative expression in a democracy. She defended the Center’s mission to bring people of diverse backgrounds to perform on a variety of stages and to bring in audiences across all social, political, racial, ethnic, and economic divides. Her Chautauqua audience interrupted her speech numerous times in rousing applause of her arguments that art is important for art’s sake, that creative expression in dark political times can save us, and that we must support the arts even more strenuously now that some voices are under the threat of being silenced.

Jane Addams would have been every bit as impressed with the speech and the audience as I was.

My week at Chautauqua was inspiring, rewarding, eye-opening, and a little bit magical. It was a modern experience informed by my interest in and emotional connection to the past. I was there in the company of new friends and historical figures, Jane Addams front and center in my mind’s eye during my eight days on the Chautauqua campus. I am one of those history nerds who is always looking to run into ghosts of the past, and on that front my summer week in Chautauqua did not disappoint.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

A “Chautauquapolitan” on one of the glorious porches of the Athenaeum.

Pro Reader Tip: Are you looking for suggestions for your next read? Consider consulting the CLSC Book List, 1878-2024. There is bound to be a perfect book for you to consider. Cheers and happy reading!

Sources: Jonathan David Schmitz and William Flanders, Postcard History Series, Chautauqua Institution (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2011), 13, 52; American National Biography; John H. Vincent, The Chautauqua Movement (Boston: Chautauqua Press, 1886), 2; “Next Season at Chautauqua,” The Buffalo (NY) Review, June 21, 1902, 5; “Chautauqua 1902,” The Chautauquan, 35 (July 1902): 385-411; “Railway Time Tables; Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1902, 15; “Personal Record,” The Daily Journal (Freeport, IL), July 3 1902, 4; “Jane Addams Goes East to Open Summer School,” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1902, 4; “Chautauqua Is Open,” The Fredonia (NY) Censor, July 9, 1902, 5; “A Fair Chautauqua,” Buffalo (NY) Evening News, July 10, 1902, 1; “Chautauqua’s Success,” Buffalo Evening News, July 13, 1902, 24; “Jane Addams to Be at Chautauqua,” Buffalo Evening Times, Aug. 11, 1915, 5; Hull-House Bulletin, 1 (Dec. 1, 1896): 3; Hull-House Bulletin, 15 (Semi-Annual, 1902, no. 2): 4; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, vol. 3, 320, 437, 654n7; Democracy and Education, August 9, 1900; Jane Addams to Julia Clifford Lathrop, July 13, 1902; Chautauqua Girls to Jane Addams, c. August 1902; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, August 15, 1903; Work and Play: Recognition Day Address, August 16, 1905; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Macmillan Company to Jane Addams, October 11, 1906; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, July 10, 1907; Newer Ideals in Education, July 3, 1908; George Platt Brett Sr. to Jane Addams, January 10, 1911; Peace, August 14, 1915; Jane Addams to Arthur Eugene Bestor, March 1, 1918, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

May 9, 2025July 21, 2026

Women’s Activism Before the Second Wave: The Case of Florence Scala’s Leadership in the Working Class Neighborhood of Hull-House

A woman in a striped dress and headscarf speaks into a microphone while holding papers, addressing an audience in a formal setting. People are seated in the background, listening attentively.

By Rima Lunin Schultz

In 1963, as Ann Keating recounted in her prior blog, Florence Scala had already been engaged as a social activist for several decades in the neighborhood made famous by Jane Addams. She had participated as a leader in the grassroots organization of her community on the Near West Side, had brought the various groups of people together in her working-class neighborhood to develop a plan to improve the community and remain residents. This challenged the pattern of urban renewal that had emerged after World War II in American cities, where working-class residents were being moved or were moving themselves into suburban locations away from their original neighborhoods close to the central city and the cultural and social institutions that they as immigrants had built. Here was a different attempt to live in urban space in an integrating and economically and socially mixed community that supported working-class culture. Scala’s neighborhood was not characterized as a strong hold of feminist militancy. Rather it was a place filled with religious and cultural institutions, ethnic shops

Florence had run for political office by 1963, twice. She hadn’t succeeded in winning, but she had given the city political organization, the political machine in Chicago, a scare. They had noticed her and worried about the spread of the democratic ideas and self-governing philosophy represented by her campaigns and her leadership.

When we look at the Scala’s story, it differs from the idea of a narrative of retreat, flight, and private life depicted by middle-class feminists of the second wave, when they began to develop a narrative of the origins of what they believed was a new and unique social movement of women who were being awakened from a kind of passivity and even apolitical consumerism as homemakers separated from the public events and public issues of the 40s and 50s and even early 60s. Remember 1963 is the publication date of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Florence Scala and the women of the near west side who joined her in the Harrison Halstead Street community group were not passive. They were not living private lives, disconnected from public issues. They were not separated from the challenges of urban life. Their narrative is very different.

Historians have begun the reclaiming or rediscovery of the working-class history in neighborhoods of urban America from the 1930s through the 1970s, and have begun to understand more fully that one of the major themes of the second half of the 20th century has been the transformation of cities by the intentional breakup of working-class neighborhoods. This was accomplished by the clearance of working class neighborhoods and the construction of upper and middle class housing in their place.

These working-class neighborhoods we have found in our research were never considered final or permanent parts of American urban life by the social reformers who cared deeply for the well-being of individual families, children, women, and men of the working classes but did not see the answer in working-class culture itself but only in the transformation of that working-class culture into something that resembled the middle class. It is not an accident then that we have failed to write the history of social activism of women of the working class.

We haven’t paid enough attention to the activities, daily life, and resistance and resilience of neighborhoods, the mixture of people and ideas that made up the social fabric of these neighborhoods and the value that the heterogeneity of these neighborhoods held for American democracy. Florence’s story becomes even more significant when we link it to the activities and efforts in cities across industrial America and when we begin to gather the biographies of women whose efforts to construct solutions for their communities brought them into public life alongside the men in the community just as they had joined the workforce at the beginning of the 20th century, even earlier, and had been visibly part of public life in working-class neighborhoods all along. They were never absent.

They were never isolated. They were connected and they were part of the social fabric of these communities. More than being part of the social fabric, they were builders of that social fabric along with male leadership and of course they had disabilities because of their sex.

How much credit should we give for Scala’s activism to Jane Addams and women of Hull-House? Florence is our best guide in evaluating the factors influencing her formation as a civic minded and ethically engaged community leader.

Jane Addams sits outdoors surrounded by a group of children, attentively listening to her. The scene appears historical, with everyone dressed in early 20th-century clothing. — Jane Addams and children on the steps of terrace in front of the resident’s dining hall. (University of Illinois, Chicago , Jane Addams Memorial Collection).

What Florence tells us in her talk to the teachers at Andrew Jackson Elementary School in 1994 is an important message. She tells the teachers how meaningful their role was in the neighborhood. They were guides and models of some of the best things about being American. Florence tells us something additionally about them. She says, they were able to understand us, meaning the children of immigrants, because they were themselves the children of immigrants.

These Irish American school teachers who taught Florence and her brothers at the Andrew Jackson School were themselves the products of this experience of becoming American. They modeled a kind of civic life, a public life, as educated women whose standing in the community at that time was important. They were respected and they were leaders.

Five people in tattered clothing make dramatic, animated facial expressions and gestures, with arms raised and eyes wide, conveying intense emotion against a plain background. The photo is black and white. — Hull-House production of a Tale of Two Cities. Florence Scala is second from left. (Wallace Kirkland. University of Illinois at Chicago).

In an interview Florence recounted that the Irish American teachers were catalytic in bridging her family to the Social Settlement. Florence remembered that her parents were not that eager to let their children go to Hull-House as they were wary of sending her away from their gaze, their supervision. We can speculate further about the complicated social fabric of the neighborhood and the various opportunities for social growth. Many of the first and second generation American teachers had been educated in the Roman Catholic schools in working class neighborhoods.

But Florence’s parents listened to the school teachers and she went to Hull-House, where women like Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop, stood out as exemplars of women who supported educational opportunities for immigrant and working class children.

A group of people, mostly young adults, pose cheerfully on a large wooden playground structure in a park, smiling and waving. The structure is pyramid-shaped, and some people are sitting while others are standing or climbing. — Hull-House resident Edith de Nancrede (bottom left) and her social drama club. (University of Illinois at Chicago)

More than offering classes in the arts and in practical subjects, as well as history and civics, through clubs and summer camp Hull-House infused the working class children with a belief in their own value. Scala explored her own interests and she realized there were possibilities for her own growth. Florence made that connection and these women at Hull-House became models, models of independent, educated leadership of womanhood that could have a career, that could change the world. Florence was especially interested in dramatics.

Black and white portrait of a Julia Lathrop wiith dark hair styled up, wearing a high-necked, long-sleeve light-colored blouse with ruffles and lace details, looking slightly to the side with a neutral expression. — Julia C. Lathrop, Hull-House resident and director of the Federal Children’s Bureau from 1912-1921. (Twenty Years at Hull-House).

The neighbors knew that Jane Addams traveled abroad, that she spoke with important leaders in other countries, that she was for peace and opposed war, that she was for certain kinds of reforms in the United States. They had this idea of her and she was a model and she was real to them in the sense of showing, demonstrating how you could be a leader, a force in the public arena, a person of influence, who could encourage presidents and prime ministers to adopt certain programs. Julia Lathrop, went to Washington, D.C., to head the Children’s Bureau. They were women who modeled women of service.

But it was not just Hull-House that demonstrated social activism and women participation in the social fabric of life. The women religious, who were the teaching sisters in the Roman Catholic schools in the neighborhood, the women who were part of the congregational life of the parish churches, they had a degree of autonomy and agency that belies the fact that they were part of a religious institutional structure that was hierarchical, patriarchal, and in many ways conservative, and certainly not feminist. Yet, in the context of parish life and of the parochial schools that were set up and run independently of the male diocesan hierarchy, they had independence to some degree.

They were outspoken, independent women religious, like the guardian angel woman religious, Sister Filibert (Spizirri), who was a major supporter for the work that Florence and her activist women were doing in the neighborhood. Again, demonstrating a model of womanhood in a working class community that defied the stereotype of an obedient and passive nun who was under the thumb of the male clergy. Beyond this, or even before this, Florence had her mother and a grandmother and other mothers and grandmothers in the neighborhood who were part of the entrepreneurial journey that had taken them from Europe to America, to Chicago, to the neighborhood where they had found a way to own a store, a bit of property, to have made their way into the comfortable working class that lived in this near west side neighborhood of very mixed economic outcomes.

Sepia photo of an old-fashioned grocery store with shelves of cans and goods. A woman stands behind the counter, another woman holds a child in front. Various products and sacks are visible throughout the cozy shop. — Genarosa Napolitano and Mary Marinello holding Rose Marinello at 13 months old, in the family grocery store on Polk Street. (Courtesy of Father Steven Giovangelo).

Property ownership, home ownership, retail proprietorship flourished and we can see how women worked outside the home in these family businesses, holding their babies with them. These were family businesses and the community supported this kind of entrepreneurship. They worked alongside their husbands.

One of the things we learn about the Giovangelo family is that Florence’s mother worked alongside her father in the tailor shop. She ironed, she worked alongside his craft as a tailor. The household was integrated into an economic unit that allowed the children to be near their mother and father, to have the mother and father have a partnership that sustained the family business.

So women were working. Then of course there were the women in the neighborhood who were working in factories, were taking homework back to their apartments and toiling, on night shifts, were part of the trade unions. They also were out on strike, were part of the picket lines. This was the working class neighborhood that Florence Scala inhabited.

There was no lack of female models of womanhood that projected engagement with the real world, engagement with public life, engagement with the economic realities of daily life and of the cultural and social institutions that made up the religious and cultural and ethnic activities of the neighborhood. Florence and other working class women could readily see themselves in these women and dream of getting more education, of following new pathways and making decisions about their lives. What is interesting about the middle class version of working class life, which is the story of the men and women in the neighborhood that Jane Addams tells us, in her famous Twenty years at Hull-House and in other writings that she did in her lifetime, is how different her narrative about immigrant women in the neighborhood is from the one that I am describing. In the beginning, Jane Addams did not understand the immigrant women in her neighborhood very well. She thought of them as being isolated, disconnected, not just from the life of the city itself, but disconnected even from their own children who were going to become Americans very fast, very rapidly.

She saw that the Italian women, the Jewish women, Greek women, were not able to have the same relationships with their children that they had had prior to moving to America. They were disconnected, isolated. She tells a number of stories in Twenty Years at Hull-House that identify this situation (Jane Addams, “First Days At Hull-House,” Chapter 5 in Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 110-111).

Women who don’t know much more than what they can learn from the small place they live in, the block they live in. They don’t know about the world outside. They can’t connect.

She sees them as she worries about them, she cares about them, but she does not see them as a source of strength, a source of activism. She does not see them as participating in a social life, she says they have no social life (Jane Addams, “Foreign-Born Children in the Primary Grades,” National Educational Association Journal of Proceeding and Addresses of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting Held at Milwaukee, Wis., July 6-9, 1897 (University of Chicago Press, 1897), 106).

She means not that they don’t go to parties and that kind of social life. She means they have no relationship to the social structure in society. This is a sociological observation on her part, that they’re not connected and even if they could vote at that time, they have no relationship to a public opinion.

A sense of civic-mindedness has to develop. She would not look to them necessarily as being capable of developing the kind of leadership role in the community of a Florence Scala. It’s not surprising to me when I read how the director of Hull-House at the time of Florence’s major leadership in the neighborhood, a man by the name of Russell Ballard, is happy for what Florence is doing in her political life, but would not have imagined her doing anything like that or being capable because he has his perspective, like Jane Addams’, even though he has worked closely, as Jane Addams did, with the neighbors.

Ballard has even worked more closely with neighbors, in the 1950s when he was director, was involved with the Near West Side Planning Board. He has seen the capacity of the neighbors to be their own leaders and organizers. He still retains this stereotype of working-class life and of working-class women and is hard-pressed to see Florence as something more than an energetic and well-intentioned housewife.

Addams later developed a deeper understanding of what the women in the neighborhood were really all about and she began to see that their activities, which she could not have defined initially as being a form of social activism, were indeed examples of a challenge to the conditions of life and to the patriarchy. They were a form of resilience, resistance, and in many ways a kind of feminist consciousness that she had missed in her descriptions done earlier. This realization that the women were part of a social movement that had more in common with radical feminism than she had understood before was the revelation that she writes about in The Long Road of Women’s Memory in 1916, an important book that deserves more attention (Jane Addams, The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). In this, she began to understand that the working class women in the neighborhood were engaged in challenges to the system that oppressed them and their families at the same time that they were community builders developing cultural and social space for themselves and their group in very positive leadership roles.

By the 1940s, women in working-class neighborhoods were participating in movements to improve the schools, to deal with race relations, to provide daycare and healthcare for children, and to develop affordable housing. They were standing up for their rights and the rights of minorities in the state legislature and they were fighting for representation in the unions of the AFL that were traditionally resistant to women’s participation and the empowerment of women trade unionists. This was happening at the same time that other women were developing community life in suburbia, creating new religious institutions, joining PTAs, developing school boards, working for bond issues to pay for libraries, beginning to attack the major polluters who were poisoning the air and the food supply, worrying about nuclear war.

All of this was going on in this period and when we begin to examine working-class life in more complicated gendered ways and in the context of resistance to urban renewal as a form of social activism that was more than simply a reaction to the migration of blacks to northern cities, but had to do with a more complicated set of issues stemming from the failure of social reform to accept and value heterogeneous working-class districts as permanent parts of urban America.

Working class women were on a different timetable then their middle class sisters. Working class women continued to navigate family businesses, low paying jobs, and maintain devotional and cultural affiliations and kinship relations locally and internationally. This differed from the stereotype of the American suburban housewife after World War II. This paper cannot begin to dislodge that stereotype. Here we are focusing on the social activism of a working class woman and her allies in a period in which women’s activism had been considered minimal.

Rima Lunin Schultz is an academic historian who has written articles and books on Jane Addams, Chicago women in Catholic and Protestant faith traditions and the culture of urban elites. She serves as a member of the Project’s Advisory Board.

May 1, 2025July 21, 2026

Florence Giovangelo Scala, Hull-House and Neighborhood Planning

Three women sit on the ground eating and drinking, while a fourth woman, standing, hands them food. They are indoors, beside a wall with a mural. The women appear to be engaged in conversation and sharing a meal.

By Ann Keating.

Note by the author: Rima Lunin Schultz and I have been working for six years on a manuscript entitled: In the Shadow of Jane Addams: Planning in a Working-Class Neighborhood, 1889-1963. We have encountered many interesting characters, including Florence Scala. Scala is famous for leading the unsuccessful fight against construction of the University of Illinois in the early 1960s (she was in favor of a Chicago campus but not the Near West Side location). Less well known was her strong connection to Hull-House and neighborhood planning efforts.

Black-and-white photo of a three-story corner building with worn walls and a striped awning over the entrance. People walk on the sidewalk, cars are parked, and a street sign reads Taylor and S. Miller St. — Giovangelo residence at 1030 West Taylor Street (Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1962).

Florence Giovangelo Scala was born on September 17, 1918, to Italian immigrants Alex and Teresa (Scardepane) Giovangelo. She grew up with her younger brothers in an apartment above her parents’ tailor shop at 1030 W. Taylor on Chicago’s Near West Side. The Giovangelo children attended local public schools but also participated in programs at nearby Holy Guardian Angel Catholic Church and at Hull-House both before and after the 1935 death of Jane Addams. The settlement offered the siblings a place to go for sports, recreation, arts, and crafts activities. They particularly enjoyed theater productions under the direction of Edith de Nancrede and Eri Hulbert. In the early 1930s, Florence and her brother Ernie developed a close relationship with Hulbert, the grandnephew of Jane Addams. Scala remembered that they were “his kids,” and took many adventures with him.

A young man in a suit and glasses sits next to an elderly woman in a hat and dress, holding a cane, under a large tree outdoors. Both are looking at the camera with neutral expressions. — Jane Addams and grand-nephew Eri Hulbert, August 1932 (Jane Addams Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago).

On her high school graduation, Scala worked for the Federal Theater Project (WPA) at Hull-House, contributed to a local newspaper, and worked for the draft board. She took college classes, got married, and lived in the same building as her parents on Taylor Street just west of Hull-House. During and after World War II, Scala, her brother Ernie (after attending the University of Illinois), and a group of their neighbors saw the threats to their neighborhood from plans for major expressways and slum clearance. They found a staunch ally in Eri Hulbert who worked tirelessly to create the Near West Side Planning Board with the support of Hull-House. Scala remembered that Hulbert “torpedoed me into a big world of ideas—the search for knowledge and understanding of people. To me he was a teacher and a persistent pioneer in this new idea that the people themselves must participate in the planning of their own communities.”[1] [2]

While her brother took a paid position with the Near West Side Planning Board, Scala volunteered as secretary and treasurer of the group between 1949 and 1958. An inveterate dog walker, Scala often had a camera in hand, taking photographs of her changing neighborhood. Scala’s photographs became a critical part of the reframing of the neighborhood not as a slum, but as a vibrant working-class district that needed rehabilitation and improvements.[3] The Planning Board undertook a survey of the Near West Side. Anita Villarreal, a thirty-six-year-old mother of six and active voice in the local Mexican community, created a seven-foot map of the area, while Scala continued to take photographs “of the neighborhood, so that when we ha[d] our meetings, we could show these slides.” Driving the area streets in her large car, she took candid color shots of everyday life that showed a working-class neighborhood with manageable problems. She developed and framed fifty of these images to create an illustrated lecture about the Near West Side, which she delivered to dozens of groups around the neighborhood with her brother. The siblings were central to creating an alternative to the idea that the neighborhood was blighted.[4]

Three people stand in front of a large planning board map labeled present land use, discussing and pointing to areas on the map as part of a planning meeting. The image appears to be from a newspaper. — Florence Scala, J. Ross Humphreys, and William Deknatel study a land use map. (Private collection of Father Steve Giovangelo).

Scala’s photographs, Villareal’s map, and the raw survey data created a narrative to combat the idea that the whole neighborhood should be cleared. Instead, the Planning Board identified areas to be conserved, as well as some areas that would require slum clearance and redevelopment. That redevelopment could take several forms—private housing, public housing, industrial renewal, and commercial revitalization. Their ideas came together in the groundbreaking 1950 NWSPB plan where, for the first time, a working-class community had developed its own plan for rehabilitation and renewal.

What followed was nearly a decade of delays and disappointments with little forward movement on the 1950 Plan. Eri Hulbert died in 1955, the same year that Mayor Richard J. Daley began his long tenure at City Hall. Downtown interests had the ear of the new mayor, and they wanted new middle-class redevelopment to ring the central business district. They advocated the mass clearance of the working-class neighborhood around Hull-House. When the University of Illinois went looking for a Chicago location, Mayor Daley and those downtown interests endorsed a Near West Side location.

It is at this juncture, in 1961, that Florence Scala became a household name in Chicago. Her long years with the Planning Board and at Hull-House prepared her for the challenge ahead. Well-known in the Near West Side for her unswerving support of planning initiatives, her neighbors pressed her to become their spokesperson. Scala quickly helped organize the Harrison-Halsted Community Group (HHCG) to protest the proposed campus site.[5] She targeted the City Council and Mayor Daley in marches and sit-ins at City Hall that were well covered in local newspapers, radio, and emerging TV news. In 1963, she ran as an independent campaign for alderman; she criticized Chicago’s political “machine” and hoped to defend the interests of ordinary voters in her district. Scala endured ridicule, threats, and several bombing attempts, but remained outspoken. But her campaign was not successfully and on March 5, 1963, the Hull-House trustees accepted $875,000.00 from the City of Chicago for their Near West Side properties.

A black-and-white photo of a large urban construction site, with multiple modernist buildings in progress, cranes in the background, and a city skyline visible under a partly cloudy sky. — Construction of the University of Illinois, Chicago campus, 1964 (College Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago).

Scala, who had for long years been a part of the Hull-House community, was bitter when the settlement turned its back on its neighbors. With the closure of Hull-House and the opening of the University of Illinois campus, the Near West Side was irrevocably changed. It was no longer a working-class neighborhood centered on industrial sites, religious institutions, local parks, and Hull-House. The university now shaped who lived and worked there. Scala lived in the same building at 1030 W. Taylor Street until her death in 2007, but her working-class neighborhood was gone.

Dr. Ann Keating is the Dr. C. Frederick Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College. She is a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago, and author of several books on Chicago’s buildings and development.

[1] Remarks by Florence Giovangelo Scala,” Eri Hulbert Memorial Meeting, Hull House Garden, May 19, 1955, pgs. 19-20, Eri Baker Hulbert III Papers, Box 1, Folder 39

[2]Sandro Corso, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader,” Italian Americana, 37, 2 (Summer 2019), 100-101; Eastwood, Near West Side Stories, 140–141; and Florence Scala interview transcript, 4, Folder 69, Box 4, Hull-House Oral History Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago. See also “More Unpublished Reminiscences Steven Giovangelo,” January 29, 2014, in possession of Rima Schultz.

[3]“Florence Scala, 47” in Studs Terkel, Division Street: America (Pantheon Books, 1967), 5.

[4]Florence Scala quoted in Eastwood, Near West Side Stories, 154; NWSPB executive committee meeting, January 26, 1950, Box 39, Hull House Collection. See also Sandro Corso, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader,” Italian Americana, 37, 2 (Summer 2019), 99-118.

[5]Scala in Eastman, Near West Side Stories, 154.

April 14, 2025July 23, 2026

Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920

A group of children holding hands in a circle, playing outdoors on a dirt playground near a building with arched windows and a covered area in the background. The children are wearing old-fashioned clothes.

By Fiona Maxwell, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Chicago.

Four children in period costumes stand or sit around a table with bowls, while an adult woman in an apron stands beside them holding a book, possibly directing or reading to them in a staged setting. — Hull-House staffer Nicolette Malone working with actors for a dramatic performance (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois Chicago).

In the Chicago settlement house movement, performance and sociability supplied a means and a metaphor for reimagining democracy as a collective project in service of the common welfare. My recently completed PhD dissertation, “Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920,” takes self-governing settlement house clubs as a case study for exploring how Progressive Era concepts of social democracy unfolded in everyday practice. The project underscores the role of artistic collaboration in envisioning and bringing about desired political futures, and it introduces a more extensive dramatis personae to the history of Progressive reform.

Although a work of history, “Democratic Ensembles” has its origins not merely in writerly imagination and archival holdings, but in the actor’s craft. I began studying at the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois as a child, working my way through their performance ensembles and eventually joining the teaching staff. The Piven approach to actor training—rooted in theatre games and story theatre adaptation, and defined by values of process, improvisation, and ensemble—descends from the work of Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin at Hull-House during the 1920s and 1930s. While honing my skills as a performer and pedagogue, I kept hearing tantalizing whispers about a fabled prehistory of our approach.

A black-and-white photo of a large group of women and children gathered indoors for a community event, labeled A Neighborhood Party. Some women appear to be reading or singing from papers. — A Neighborhood Party (Hull-House Yearbook Photos, University of Illinois Chicago)

When it came time to write a BA thesis as a History and Theatre major at Northwestern University, my mind immediately gravitated to Hull-House. I determined to learn as much as I could about the working-class Chicagoans who enrolled in settlement house arts education programs to further their educations, find like-minded peers, and exercise their creative imaginations. In this early stage, my research focused on the community reception of children’s dramatics at Hull-House, with the goal of tracing the social and cultural history of early, pre-Spolin theatre education while foregrounding the perspectives of youth participants. I immersed myself in the Hull-House Collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a burgeoning wealth of published and online resources, including the Jane Addams Papers Project. Wading through thousands of documents, I encountered Hull-House’s dauntless cadre of reform-minded residents, as well as countless neighbors determined to realize their individual and collective aspirations. Reluctant to return home from this time travel expedition, I realized that pursuing a PhD was in order.

My early years of graduate school at the University of Chicago coincided with an explosion of public and scholarly discourse on democracy. During the late 2010s and early 2020s, historians began to revisit late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers and theorists—particularly Jane Addams and John Dewey—with renewed appreciation for their idea that democracy could be strengthened by social interaction across political and cultural divides and by prioritizing group welfare over individual gain. I embarked on my dissertation research paying close attention to how settlement workers articulated their theory of social democracy. I discovered that the language they used to describe their political philosophy mirrored the language that is still in practice today in ensemble-based theatre—conceptual gifts from Progressive Era politics to contemporary artistic practice. Recognizing the broader political significance of the settlement story, I expanded my earlier focus on Hull-House theatre to embrace the “spoken arts”—including storytelling, group games, dramatic reading, oratory, and debate—at settlement houses across Chicago, and I moved from children to “children plus,” examining how young people refined and implemented their artistic and political agendas as they aged and tracking how children’s involvement catalyzed the participation of adult family members. I was lucky enough to discover a surfeit of underutilized materials in settlement club archives. At settlement houses across Chicago, working-class “neighbors” organized self-governing clubs that left plentiful records of their daily activities, in the form of constitutions and meeting minutes, neighborhood news and club gossip, and the occasional script, poem, joke, or lyric.[1] Piecing these fragments together recasts settlement houses, not merely as gathering places for the reform-minded middle and upper classes, but as genuinely grassroots centers of community education and local organizing.

In its current iteration, “Democratic Ensembles” investigates the ways in which settlement volunteers and participants used the spoken arts to bridge social boundaries and develop a collaborative approach to democratic participation. Generations of scholars have explored the ways in which Chicago settlement leaders codified neighborhood service into new academic and professional fields, claimed a role for women in federal policymaking, and contributed to pragmatist philosophy and democratic theory. This dissertation uncovers the full “ensemble cast” of Chicago Progressivism by introducing two previously unexamined settlement constituencies: student volunteers from local universities, who drew on their interdisciplinary training in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to facilitate settlement pedagogy; and, most significantly, the neighborhood families who embraced settlement programming and made it their own. It joins an interdisciplinary scholarly conversation concerning how political, social, and artistic speaking genres have generated theories and practices of democracy, and it applies analytical frameworks drawn from book history, rhetoric, and theatre and performance studies. Combining archival research, interdisciplinary methods, and process-oriented theatre pedagogy, this project constructs a social and political history of spoken arts education, which adds to scholarly inquiry in urban history, gender history, and the history of childhood and youth and offers an actionable model for current practice. The dissertation tells the story of enfranchisement through cultural experiences and, in doing so, contributes a new conception of the role of the spoken arts in civic life.

The story begins with early settlement house founders diagnosing the lack of communal gathering spaces in industrial Chicago as a threat to the viability of democratic self-governance. The early chapters explore how settlement workers adapted traditional forms of domestic sociability and artistry to create a new piece of social infrastructure that invited equal participation from men, women, and children of all classes and cultural backgrounds. To explain how and why the spoken arts achieved such primacy in settlement programming, I analyze the formative experiences of a key yet previously unexamined subset of volunteer club and class leaders: students and graduates of Northwestern University’s Cumnock School of Oratory, who organized settlement programs with a conviction that through performance and pedagogy, they could speak a more inclusive and collaborative public sphere into being.[2]

The remaining chapters conduct an in-depth analysis of on-the-ground settlement programming, tracking the transition from arts education to political organizing from the perspectives of school-aged children, working young people, and whole families. The ability of working-class, immigrant, and Black schoolgirls and boys to engage in collective deliberation and semi-autonomous artistic production inspired settlement workers to theorize children’s club work as an apprenticeship for civic engagement. Working adolescents and young adults, meanwhile, utilized their skills in persuasive speech and organizational leadership to assert their voices in settlement administration and local reform. Experience with shared governance and extensive training in verbal expression enabled young people to transition from planning parties and staging plays to mobilizing in service of political change.[3] The participation of adult family members solidified the civic influence of the settlement project. When settlements inaugurated all-ages, mixed-gender governing bodies, fathers and sons were compelled to recognize their wives, sisters, and daughters as effective public actors. With the advent of municipal suffrage in 1913, neighborhood families began working to extend the vision of an activist, welfare-oriented local government they had devised in settlement clubs into formal electoral channels.

The idealism that accompanied whole-family politics shattered with the declaration of war in Europe in 1914. Global warfare abroad and racial violence at home exposed the challenges of bringing club ideals and methods into the world beyond settlement doors. “Democratic Ensembles” concludes by identifying postwar trends in settlement work and gesturing towards the subsequent evolution of settlement artistic methodologies, particularly their codification and widespread dissemination by mid-twentieth-century Chicago theatre practitioners and educators. Amidst the continued struggle to bring collaborative values and social consciousness into formal politics, Chicagoans’ persistent commitment to neighborhood arts programs as a force for grassroots change has emerged as one of the most hopeful legacies of the Progressive Era.

Although the dissertation phase of this project is ending, it is only the beginning for “Democratic Ensembles.” In the months and years to come, I intend to transform the dissertation into a book that has crossover appeal for scholars, practitioners, and the wider public. I look forward to continuing to mine settlement archives and sharing the stories they contain in a variety of formats, from academic writing to public performance.[4] The questions posed by settlement workers and participants over a century ago remain relevant today: as we continue to work towards more inclusive and equitable futures, how can engaging in everyday acts of cultural production help to foster common understanding, celebrate diversity, and provide the framework for an ensemble-based politics?

Fiona Maxwell is a final-year PhD Candidate in History at the University of Chicago. Her research and creative practice explore the connections between spoken performance and democratic social movements, with a focus on Progressive Era Chicago. In addition to her own writing and performance activities she collaborates with museums and arts organizations on content and program development. You can reach her at fmaxwell@uchicago.edu.

[1] I detail a key facet of this archive—club newspapers—in Fiona Maxwell, “Club Newspapers and Civic Collaboration at Chicago Settlement Houses,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Podcast, Season 8, Episode 3 (October 21, 2024). https://on.soundcloud.com/FY7sAtBt6ePA84pZ7

[2] For an article-length study of the gender dynamics of oratorical pedagogy at the Cumnock School, see Fiona Maxwell, “‘Expression is power’: Gender, residual culture and political aspiration at the Cumnock School of Oratory, 1870–1900,” Gender & History (2024): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12786

[3] For an example of this process, as illustrated by the Home Culture Club of young workingwomen, see Fiona Maxwell, “‘Talking lowd and laughing gay, Everyone has so much to say’: Working Girls’ Clubs, Spoken Art and Political Organising at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890–1920,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal (2025): 109-130. http://doi.org/10.22459/LFHJ.30

[4] I perform original, semi-fictional storytelling pieces based on settlement archival materials at universities, public history sites, and storytelling venues. Select appearances include Open House Chicago at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (2024) and Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square at the Newberry Library (2022).

March 27, 2025September 29, 2025

Presenting at the Chicago Women’s History Conference

Three smiling women stand indoors next to a life-size black-and-white cutout of a historical woman; two women wear name badges and one wears a shirt with a printed image. Ornate architecture is visible in the background.

The Jane Addams Papers Project represented at the Chicago Women’s History Conference this past Saturday. Cathy Moran Hajo, Stacy Lynn, and advisory board member Marilyn Fischer led a workshop devoted to the importance of Jane Addams, the digital edition, and how scholars and teachers can use it. Stacy talked about how influential Addams and the women of Hull-House were, and Cathy demonstrated the digital edition, while Marilyn discussed how she uses the digital edition to trace Addams’s word use in her three part book series about Addams as an evolutionary philosopher.

Our workshop was just one session in a day filled with really interesting work. The biggest challenge was choosing between them! And Jane Addams was everywhere! From the cardboard cutout at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s booth, to morning presentations by Sherryl Engstrom on Hull House Performs: A Description and Evaluative Study of the Performing Arts at Hull House, 1920-1937 and Fiona Maxwell on “We Women Would Rule the World of Politics”: Women’s Oratory and Activism at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920. In the afternoon, we delighted to Ann Keating and advisory board member Rima Lunin Schultz’s presentation, “Beyond the Second Wave: Working Class Women Activists and City Planning: Florence Scala and Chicago’s Near West Side.”

Keynote speaker Jamila Woods was inspiring and plenary session with Pinqy Ring and her amazing students ended with an emotional bang. What an amazing time.

November 4, 2024October 14, 2025

Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1932

In 1932, a great economic depression gripped America and the world, and from her homebase at Hull-House Jane Addams witnessed the devastation first hand. Chicago, a manufacturing city, was one of the hardest hit areas in the United States, and by 1933 half of the city’s factory workforce of 1927 was unemployed. Even white-collar workers and professionals struggled. When the country went to the polls in November 1932, the city of Chicago, for example, owed its public-school teachers more than five months of back pay. Even charitable organizations experienced hardships, pressed to exhaustion and financial collapse in their efforts to provide relief for the constituencies that were increasingly reliant upon them for survival. It was a time of great desperation for the Hull-House neighborhood made up mostly of poor immigrants.

For Jane Addams it was a time of great highs and lows. In December 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She learned the news of the award from her bed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where she had surgery to remove an ovarian cyst a few days later. In February and April of 1932, she suffered two devastating personal losses in her inner circle, when Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop died. In the month between their deaths, Addams published her tenth book. The Excellent Becomes The Permanent was a lovingly curated collection of memorials to some of the most inspirational people in her life and to her life’s work.

Relief efforts in Chicago and an intellectual focus on world peace kept Jane Addams moving, despite grief and poor health. Hull-House was “swamped with unemployment needs,” and Addams and her fellow settlement workers could think of little else. Addams drew a direct line between the economy and her ideals of world peace. In a radio interview in Chicago on June 5, 1932, she said:

“During 1931 the world spent five billion dollars on useless armaments. In that very year half the governments were bankrupt, millions of men and women were unemployed, with myriads of children under-nourished. It will be increasingly difficult to defend such folly, not only to those who are facing starvation but to every one of us.”

In the summer, both the Republican and Democratic parties held their conventions in Chicago. On June 14, Addams rode in a peace parade that ended at the venue of the Republican National Convention, where she delivered remarks on foreign relations and world trade. She offered similar remarks at the Democratic National Convention two weeks later. To both parties, she argued:

“Perhaps what the world needs more than anything else at this moment is an outbreak of goodwill and human understanding to overwhelm the suspicion and mistrust which has paralyzed trade and poisoned every relationship. Nothing could achieve this so quickly and so powerfully as a statement by the United States that war debts are being considered generously and impartially.”

Franklin Roosevelt sits at a large desk covered with papers, writing with a pen. He is in a wood-paneled room decorated with framed pictures and a lamp, appearing focused on his work. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, c. 1932-1933 (Library of Congress)

On behalf of the peace organizations she represented in her remarks, she urged political leaders that the cancellation of war debts, tax relief, reduction of military spending, and U.S. membership in the World Court were necessary for a brighter, more prosperous future for humanity.

On July 18, Addams left for the East Coast and a long and quiet summer vacation in Maine. She was in frail health and grieving and could make no plans for political stumping even if she had an inkling to do so. Addams’s surviving letters from the summer give no strong clues about her political thinking, but I suspect she simply lacked the physical and emotional stamina that had fueled her political engagement in previous campaigns. She would be 72 years old when she voted in the 1932 Presidential Election between the embattled incumbent Herbert Hoover, a Republican, and the Democratic challenger Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Addams might have also been somewhat disillusioned with politics—many Americans were disillusioned with politics during the Great Depression.

A man in a suit and a woman in a dark dress sit on wicker chairs outdoors. The woman holds a wide-brimmed hat on her lap, and both are looking toward the camera. There are flowers and bushes in the background. — President Hoover and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover (Library of Congress)

Addams did no political stumping for either national candidate when she returned to Chicago in early October. However, she was enthusiastic about one political candidate. Henry Horner, a Chicago probate judge, was the Democratic candidate for governor. He was running against Len Small, the notoriously corrupt former Illinois governor (indicted and acquitted for embezzlement and money laundering while serving as the state’s treasurer, eight jurors in the case later receiving state jobs). Addams was well acquainted with Henry Horner and had previously disavowed Small. It was more than personal connection and character, however. There was a vigor in Addams’s support for Horner, particularly in the context of the current economic crisis and the question regarding government’s role to address it. In an afternoon radio address on WMAQ Chicago on November 6, two days before the election, Addams endorsed Horner:

“I believe that Judge Horner, if elected Governor of Illinois, will lead us out of the indifference and false conceptions of government itself, which at the present time characterizes our people. Perhaps what we need now more than anything else is an outbreak of good will and human understanding, so genuine and so powerful, that it may change the direction of our political life, that we may remember that after all government may be tested by its reaction upon the humblest of us.”

A man in a suit and hat stands outside a building, petting three dogs—a Dalmatian, a poodle, and a small dog. The scene is set in a garden area with bushes and a stone wall. — Henry Horner, n.d. (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library)

I have not yet made a close study of Addams in 1932. We are only now getting all the 1932 documents into the Jane Addams Digital Edition, still transcribing, proofing, and editing them. However, I think by the time of the election, Addams had lost faith in Hoover’s policies to address the devastating economic depression. She was critical of his administration in an article published in A Century of Progress, a collection of essays edited by historian Charles Beard, in the summer of 1932. Two of Addams’s biographers assert (with no sources) that Addams voted for Hoover in 1932. Maybe she did vote for Hoover, and her very quick support of Roosevelt after his inauguration was just classic Jane Addams pragmatism. Or maybe she voted for Horner and Roosevelt on November 8, 1932. Maybe in Roosevelt’s campaign promises of a “New Deal” the wise Jane Addams saw ideas that would put the country back on the road to prosperity. Certainly, many of the New Deal policies would at their core sound very familiar to Jane Addams.

Regardless of Jane Addams’s vote, it was a landslide victory for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Hoover won Pennsylvania and its thirty-six electoral votes but only won five other (small) states. Illinois went for Roosevelt and elected Henry Horner as the state’s first Jewish governor (interestingly, at least to this former Lincoln scholar, Horner was a great collector of Lincoln documents and memorabilia, which today is the cornerstone of collections at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois).

I wish we knew for whom Jane Addams voted in the Presidential Election of 1932. Alas, we enjoy secret ballot in the United States and may never know for sure. Perhaps we will find the document that answers the question as we finish editing her papers. For now, I am leaning toward Roosevelt. I like the symmetry of it. Addams started her national political engagement with Theodore in 1912 and cast her last presidential vote for Franklin 1932.

Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 8, 1932

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 22.8 million
Electoral College: 472

Herbert Hoover
(Republican)
Popular Vote: 15.8 million
Electoral College: 59

Sources: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 231-39; Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 287-88; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 16-17; Louise W. Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 256-59; “Great Depression, Encyclopedia of Chicago; “Jane Addams Operated on at Johns Hopkins,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 13, 1931, 3 ; “Peace Parade of Women to Be Held Today,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1932, p. 8; Jane Addams Calendar, June 14-Oct. 2, 1932, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, 30:817-21; Jane Addams to Jeanette Rankin, Apr.12, 1932; Jane Addams to Mabel Vernon, Apr. 13, 1932; Interview with William Hard, June 5, 1932; Address to the Resolutions Committee of the 1932 Democratic National Convention, June 14, 1932; Address of Miss Jane Addams before Resolutions Committee, Democratic National Convention, June 24, 1932; Comments on the Republican Party Platform, June 24, 1932; Address on Welfare and Relief Mobilization, Oct. 30, 1932; Address on Henry Horner, Nov. 6, 1932; The Process of Social Transformation, 1932 (in Charles A. Beard, ed., A Century of Progress [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932], 233-52), all in Jane Addams Digital Edition; see also Democratic and Republican Party Platforms, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara.

October 28, 2024March 16, 2026

Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1928

Of all the presidential candidates Jane Addams ever supported, perhaps no other was more obvious to her than Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Yes, Herbert Hoover.

It is true that Herbert Hoover ranks very low among American presidents because the Great Depression happened on his watch and his administration’s policies were insufficient to address the crisis. However, his international humanitarian efforts during World War I were inspirational to folks like Addams. So, let’s back up in time for a minute.

When the war began in 1914, Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer based in London, led a private effort (with the support of the Wilson Administration) to aid Americans in war-torn Europe. After the German invasion of Belgium, Hoover, as chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, distributed its privately funded resources. Hoover was not a soldier, but he became an American hero. In one two-week period, for example, Hoover and his commission distributed over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Wilson appointed Hoover as head of the new U.S. Food Administration, an independent agency charged with the conservation and distribution of the nation’s food supply. Hoover’s role in European relief efforts was widely applauded and in this new post he earned additional respect.

Jane Addams was against American involvement in the war in Europe and had been a strong voice for American neutrality. In 1915, she became the founding leader of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and peace was a central focus of her work. In 1917, with the United States at war and the establishment of the U.S. Food Administration, Addams saw her opportunity to be a patriot and a help without violating her principles of peace. When Herbert Hoover asked Addams to be a prominent spokesperson for food conservation, she accepted his offer. As she wrote him on August 17: “It gives me much pleasure to be of any service in the great effort for food conservation so ably [led] by yourself.”

During World War I, Hoover’s name was synonymous with good works and patriotism. To conserve food for the war effort was to “Hooverize.”

Addams delivered her first food conservation speech in Traverse City, Michigan, on October 16, 1917. In that speech she expressed the daunting task at hand:

“Mr. Hoover thus defines the task which is set before America; to provide the Allies with at least 132,000,000 bushels of wheat above our apparent surplus, with twice as much meat as we think we can spare, with three times as much fat as seems available.”

Over the next two years Addams delivered at least thirty-five speeches—what she called “Hooverizing”—on behalf of the Food Administration in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. As she later wrote in Peace and Bread in Time of War, she felt a “great sense of relief when Congress finally established a Department of Food Administration for the United States and when Mr. Hoover, who had spent two and half years in Europe in intimate contact with the backwash of war, made his first appeal to his fellow countrymen in the name of the food shortage in the entire world, insisting that ‘the situation is more than war, it is a problem of humanity.’”

In 1928, after President Calvin Coolidge declined to stand for reelection, Herbert Hoover was the obvious candidate of the Republican Party. “Who but Hoover?” was the convention delegates’ refrain. Hoover, the humanitarian with a Quaker upbringing, made sense to Jane Addams, too. Addams’s decision to support Hoover and not the Democratic Party candidate Alfred E. Smith vexed her old Progressive Party friend Harold Ickes. He wrote Addams in October: “There seem to me to be so many reasons why Smith should be the preference of progressive and socially minded people and yet the preeminently progressive and socially minded person in all the world has declared for Hoover.” To which Addams replied: ” I may have been too much influenced by my personal acquaintance with Mr. Hoover during my various visits in Europe immediately after the War.”

Lillian Wald, one of Addams’s oldest and closest friends, was also “very much for Al Smith.” Still, Hoover made perfect sense to a wide range of reformers, as he did to Jane Addams. Addams had confidently endorsed Hoover in early August; and she remained firm in mid-October, writing in a lengthy public endorsement:

“It is significant that Herbert Hoover, the one American identified with the World War to be nominated to the Presidency, should have been distinguished not for his military prowess but for his conservation of tender lives menaced by war’s starvation. This is the more remarkable because the American people after [each] of their other great wars — the Revolution, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish War — have elected to the presidency a military hero whom they identified with victory. … Hoover’s restoration in Europe implied not only a knowledge of the world’s food material and an unparalleled skill in the use of all available transportation but even more a grasp of man’s moral resources. He dramatically utilized that sense of responsibility for the preservation of human life which brought to his gigantic undertakings a world wide response, from the governmental subsidies voted by hard-boiled politicians to the hot pennies carried in the fists of little children. He brought us in those dark years of war a moment of “release” from its chaos and horror and led our minds back to the familiar folk ways of patient nurture and protection.”

The humanitarian angle was important to Addams, but she was also acquainted with Hoover. For her politics had always been personal. Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Bob La Follette in 1924 were well-known to her, all men with whom she had a personal relationship. Al Smith had sent a nice tribute to her for a civic dinner in her honor, and she publicly acknowledged that his candidacy for President was “a great boon for the country” because it demonstrated increased religious tolerance among the electorate. However, Addams had no such relationship with Al Smith.

Much of the Presidential Campaign of 1928 was a contest of opposites. Al Smith, an Irish Catholic city boy from New York, was down-to-earth and wise-cracking. Herbert Hoover, a Protestant Midwestern farm boy, was serious and humorless. Hoover’s Republican platform called for maintenance of the economic status quo and enforcement of prohibition. Smith’s Democratic platform proposed tariff and farm relief and criticized Republican failures. Depending upon your economic status at this time, it was either the Roaring Twenties or an era of disillusionment. Wealth and glamour, technology and innovation, music and the movies dominated American culture, but gross income inequality kept many Americans from the benefits of the American economy. However, a majority of voters had enjoyed American prosperity under Coolidge.

Al Smith sits at a desk with papers, speaking into a candlestick telephone. He appears to be in an office with a tall-backed chair and a lamp in the background. — Al Smith, 1928 (Library of Congress)

The incumbent Republican Party held an advantage. Anti-Catholic prejudice did not help the Democratic challenger. One popular slogan was “A Vote for Al Smith is a Vote for the Pope.” Radio had become the most important medium in political campaigns. Smith was better in person and off the cuff, but Hoover brilliantly employed radio to reach voters.” In the November 6 Election, Hoover and his running mate Charles Curtis (U.S. Senator from Kansas) won easily, earning nearly 60 percent of the popular vote. Smith and his running mate Joseph T. Robinson (U.S. Senator from Arkansas) carried only 8 states, losing five southern states in which anti-Catholic Democrats (some cross-burning members of the Ku Klux Klan) turned against their party.

Addams supported Hoover in 1928 in good part because she knew him and trusted his heart in humanitarian concerns. She believed he was America’s “best bet.” Of course, we cannot know how a President Al Smith would have reacted to the stock market crash and America’s descent into a horrific depression. Perhaps Hoover was the best bet. Maybe no one person or policy could have mitigated the devastating reality just beyond the horizon.

Stacy Lynn,
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 6, 1928

Herbert Hoover (Republican)
Popular Vote: 21.4 million
Electoral College: 444

Al Smith (Democrat)
Popular Vote: 15 million
Electoral College: 87

Sources: Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964); Alfred E. Smith (1873–1944), both in American National Biography; Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 223-231; American National Biography; “Jane Addams, in Honolulu, Says She Is for Hoover,” Freeport (IL) Journal-Standard, Aug. 6, 1928, p. 2; “Hoover Greets Bert Hassell, Jane Addams,” Baltimore Sun, Oct. 17, 1928, p. 3; “Jane Addams, 27 Social Workers Indorce Hoover,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1, 1928, p. 15; Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 25, 74-75; Petition for Belgian Food Relief, November 22, 1914; Jane Addams to Herbert Clark Hoover, August 17, 1917; Food Conservation, October 16, 1917; Jane Addams to Stanley Ross Linn, December 3, 1917; Alfred Emanuel Smith to Jane Addams, January 20, 1927; Statement on Al Smith, April 25, 1927; Lillian D. Wald to Mary Rozet Smith, September 14, 1928; Jane Addams to Julia Clifford Lathrop, October 12, 1928; Statement Endorsing Herbert Hoover for President, c. October 13, 1928; Herbert Clark Hoover to Jane Addams, October 13, 1928; Hoover Indorsed by Jane Addams, October 17, 1928; Jane Addams, Graham Taylor, Julia Clifford Lathrop, et al. to Herbert Clark Hoover, October 23, 1928; Harold LeClair Ickes to Jane Addams, October 22, 1928; Jane Addams to Harold LeClair Ickes, October 26, 1928, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Side Note: The American Presidency Project at University of California Santa Barbara provides free access to documents of American political campaigns and the presidency. This useful archive includes, among other resources, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches, Presidential proclamations, and party platforms (such as the 1928 Republican and Democratic party platforms).

October 7, 2024September 29, 2025

Jane Addams and the Presidential Campaign of 1924

Black and white photo of an Jane Addams wearing a wide-brimmed hat decorated with a large, layered flower or bow on top. She has a neutral expression and is dressed in formal clothing.

Black-and-white newspaper photo of Jane Addams wearing a dark hat with a large decorative flower and a coat. The headline above reads Jane Addams Boosts La Follette. Text describes her speaking in Des Moines. — Des Moines (IA) Register, Oct. 26, 1924, p. 11.

On behalf of the Democratic Party, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Jane Addams on May 20, 1924. As chair of the party’s committee for platform planks of interest to women, she hoped to secure the action and support of the nation’s best-known woman. Jane Addams, however, had likely already decided to support her old friend, Progressive Robert La Follette, former governor and sitting U.S. senator from Wisconsin. Twenty days after Roosevelt penned her letter, Addams joined the Progressive Party’s national campaign for La Follette, whom she described as a strong and wonderful man, “the real leader of the Progressive Party.”

Theodore Roosevelt would have argued with Addams about that final assertion. But he was dead. And as far a Progressive Era leaders go, Robert M. La Follette Sr., known popularly as “Fighting Bob,” was an important one. As a Republican, La Follette, a lawyer, served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1885-1891), as Governor of Wisconsin (1901-1906), and in the U.S. Senate (1906-1925). He began his political career as a loyal Republican, but he emerged as a leader of the new progressive reform movement in the mid-1890s. Biographer David Thelen described La Follette as “perhaps the most popular and respected radical in modern American history.”

La Follette appealed to Jane Addams for a number of reasons, but perhaps none more obvious than his intellectual capacity. La Follette thoughtfully considered the social and economic problems facing Americans and the ways in which government could be deployed to address those problems. As a politician, he embraced the idea of utilizing academic expertise in the drafting of legislation, coming under the influence of economists and sociologists at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. Men like Professor Richard Ely, Jane Addams’s book editor and close friend, inspired La Follette’s critical thinking and evolution over time. The philosophical world views of Addams and La Follette overlapped and their paths began to cross in 1905, their relationship deepening in 1906 through Addams’s lobbying efforts in Washington on an immigration bill and her full entry into the woman suffrage movement in which she became a close colleague of La Follett’s wife, suffragist Belle Case La Follette.

Addams would not be as fully engaged in the 1924 Presidential Campaign as she had been in 1912 for Theodore Roosevelt. She did not attend the Progressive Party convention in Cleveland in July and she did not write a large body of campaign literature to disseminate the party’s platform as she had done for Roosevelt. However, when she returned in September to Chicago from her summer vacation in Maine, she jumped into the campaign. She raised campaign funds in Illinois (her partner Mary Rozet Smith made a $25 donation), she did a little campaign writing and a few interviews; and in October and November she delivered speeches across the Midwest.

Robert M. La Follette, 1924 (Library of Congress)

When Robert La Follette campaigned in Chicago, Jane Addams presided at a rally of 11,000 supporters. When she introduced the candidate, she said:

Thousands of women in Chicago bid him welcome and assure him of their convinced and unwavering adherence. They remember him as a pioneer advocate of woman suffrage, as the author of the extension of the eight hour law to governmental employees of which so large a portion are women, and of many another far reaching provision to protect women both in industry and in the home, and to make possible their fuller participation in governmental affairs. … It is for his courage in such matters, for his unblemished record of public service, for his rousing patriotism, and for his devotion to the interests of the common people that we gladly welcome him to this group of his enthusiastic followers, and pledge him our cooperation.

Addams delivered additional speeches for La Follette in Chicago, and she traveled to Grand Rapids and Detroit, Michigan; Des Moines, Iowa; and Cincinnati, Ohio. She believed in La Follette’s political approach to reform, she supported his Progressive Party’s platform, which included a plank for “Peace on Earth,” and she also favored a third-party presence in American political campaigns. Addams seems to have enjoyed her campaign work for La Follette. He was not as big a character as Theodore Roosevelt had been, but he was a charismatic fellow, especially in comparison to the Republican candidate Calvin Coolidge who was well-liked but terribly boring. Coolidge, who had been President since August 1923 when Warren Harding died of a heart attack, was the comfortable incumbent. His campaign slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge” did not mean cool as in swell (or hip, in more modern parlance) but rather it conveyed calm and conservative and conventional.

Jane Addams reserved her political energy for politicians who wanted to shake things up and enact change, despite their poor chances to win the presidency. Politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and “Fighting Bob” La Follette. Not “Silent Cal” or the Democratic candidate nominated on the 103^rd ballot whom nobody now remembers, John W. Davis, a New York lawyer whom nobody in 1924 knew, either, a man who did not have a snowball’s chance in hell to beat Coolidge. As for Robert La Follette, he was no Theodore Roosevelt—who had beaten the Republican candidate and come in respectable second place in 1912. Like Davis, La Follette had very little chance of winning the presidency.

In Bob La Follette, however, Jane Addams saw a principled man and a dedicated reform politician who was easy to support. Real change required bold leaders. Jane Addams respected innovate thinkers and courageous politicians. It is also clear that Addams believed that La Follette represented the type of modern leader necessary in an increasingly global world. Local and national reform was important, but an informed international outlook was equally critical in the modern world. In a New Republic article, published on September 10, 1924, Addams explained her reasons for supporting La Follette:

All America is familiar with Senator La Follette’s career … It was quite logical that the voters of Wisconsin should by an overwhelming majority send their Governor to the United States Senate, if only because so many of his policies required federal action for their consummation. Personally, I believe in time he will find the same necessity for action through an international body, both because of his sound political philosophy and because of his understanding of the far-flung problems of modern life. I once attended the meetings of a commission held in Geneva under the auspices of the International Labor Bureau connected with the League of Nations, when the matter under prolonged discussion was the protection of the seamen, who for many weeks every year find themselves remote from consular offices and courts of justice. The most successful protection ever offered to these men, the one achievement constantly quoted, was embodied in the La Follette Seamen’s Act, which because of its intrinsic worth, and because of the eloquent speeches made by its author when urging its passage on the floor of the United States Senate, has made the name of Robert La Follette beloved literally around the world.

Some of us who recall almost with a lump in the throat, the precious planks so enthusiastically put into a Progressive platform in 1912—many of these propositions are actually operative as laws at the present moment—rejoice in an opportunity to work for “progressive political action” under a leader who has, since 1898, successfully led a progressive moment inevitably expanding through a quarter of a century. At this moment under his trained leadership, is taking place for the first time in the United States … a welding together of the forward-looking voters, whether they have called themselves Socialists or liberals, proletarians or agriculturists. They all have many experiences to report with reasons for success or failure. They hope under the leadership of this wise man—who combines so remarkably the abilities of the expert with those of the statesman—to integrate their cooperating experiences into a progressively efficient political activity.

Addams did her part in the campaign, but she lost another election. And so did Robert La Follette, coming in a disappointing third. Coolidge earned more popular votes than both of his opponents combined. It was an easy, breezy reelection for Coolidge, and America roared onward.

Four days after the election, Addams wrote Belle La Follette:

You and Senator La Follette have been in my mind so constantly during the past months that I feel as if I must write to tell you what a pleasure and inspiration it has been and to send to both of you an assurance of my unwavering devotion and affectionate regard. Hoping to see you next winter in Washington, I am always devotedly yours Jane Addams.

Jane Addams had already dusted off her hems from the campaign trail and gotten back to work.

Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 4, 1924

Calvin Coolidge (Republican)
Popular Vote: 15.7 million
Electoral College: 382

John W. Davis
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 8.4 million
Electoral College: 136

Robert M. La Follette
(Progressive)
Popular Vote: 4.8 million
Electoral College: 13

Calvin and Grace Coolidge, June 1924 (Library of Congress)

A man in a suit and a woman in a vintage dress with a large hat and fur stole stand side by side on a lawn in front of a house, posing for a formal outdoor portrait. — John W. and Ellen Davis, 1924 (West Virginia & Regional History Center, West Virginia University, Morgantown)

Sources: Robert Marion La Follette (1855-1925), Richard Theodore Ely (1854-1943), Belle Case La Follette (1859-1931), all in American National Biography; Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 218-22; David P. Thelen, Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 184-85; “La Follette to 11,000 People; Stirs Campaign,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 12, 1924, p. 1; Progressive Party Platform of 1924, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara; Jane Addams Calendar, Oct. 11-Nov. 2, 1924, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, Reel 30:730-31; Jane Addams to George Platt Brett Sr., December 12, 1906; Belle Case La Follette to Jane Addams, June 26, 1911; Eleanor Roosevelt to Jane Addams, May 20, 1924; Jane Addams to Ada Lois James, June 11, 1924, Jane Addams to Emily Greene Balch, June 21, 1924; Comments in Toronto on International Affairs, June 23, 1924; Why I Shall Vote for La Follette, September 10, 1924; Jane Addams to Belle Case La Follette, September 18, 1924; Illinois La Follette-Wheeler Campaign Committee to Jane Addams, et. al., October 8, 1924; Introduction for Robert M. La Follette, October 11, 1924; Address on La Follette Campaign, October 20, 1924; Declaration of Support for Robert La Follette, ca. October 24, 1924; Herman Louis Ekern to Mary Rozet Smith, October 25, 1924; Interview with the Newspaper Enterprise Association, November 1, 1924; Speech to La Follette-Wheeler Meeting, November 2, 1924; all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

September 23, 2024October 14, 2025

Jane Addams and the Presidential Campaign of 1920

Spoiler alert: Jane Addams was not impressed with the Presidential Election of 1920, and neither am I.

Jane Addams, ca. 1920-1923 (Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

With the summer passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, all American women had the right to vote in the Presidential Election of 1920. This historic moment for women after a seventy-two-year fight for equal citizenship, which had begun at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, was the one bright side of a rather lackluster campaign season.

President Woodrow Wilson, whom Jane Addams had supported in 1916, had suffered a stroke in October 1919 and was not well enough to seek a third term. Just as well, probably, because a lot of Americans (and a big chunk of Congress) were sick of him and angry about his foreign policy to make the United States a force for democracy across the globe. Addams had agreed with Wilson’s support of the League of Nations, but she was disappointed with some domestic policies, particularly racial segregation in his administration. It is unclear if she would have supported his candidacy in 1920.

Jane Addams worked to get women to the polls in 1920, but she was underwhelmed by the candidates and refused to publicly support any of them. I wonder why. Let’s see:

Franklin Roosevelt and other men dressed in early 20th-century suits and hats pose together, smiling and standing closely; some hold straw hats, and one man in a light suit stands out at the front right. — The Democratic ticket of James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920 (Library of Congress)

To replace Wilson, the Democratic Party considered fifteen candidates at their convention in San Francisco and selected James M. Cox, the sitting governor of Ohio, on the forty-fourth ballot. Cox was a likable chap, supported woman suffrage, and had been a reformer-ish governor. He was a smart enough fellow and campaigned hard, covering some 22,000 miles, but he failed to garner much enthusiasm in the party or with the electorate. The most interesting fact of his candidacy was his selection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his running mate (but, of course, no one then knew what we know now about FDR). In the summer, Cox wrote to Addams seeking her advice on a speech. She wrote back from Colorado Springs where she was vacationing with Mary Smith:

“Your letter of July 21st was forwarded several times and finally reached me here ↑unfortunately↓ so late that it was impossible to avail myself of the suggestion which you so kindly made. May I thank you for your courtesy and will you permit me to express every good wish for a successful campaign.”

Warren Harding in a pinstripe suit, patterned tie, and straw boater hat stands outside near a building, looking slightly downwards with a neutral expression. — Republican candidate Warren G. Harding (Library of Congress)

At its convention, the Republican Party nominated Warren Harding on the tenth ballot. Harding, a U.S. Senator from Ohio, was a compromise candidate of the Progressive and conservative wings of the party. Harding was a cigar-chomping, hard drinking (this was Prohibition times, remember), and a notorious womanizer. Even some of his supporters called him a party hack, and he basically refused to campaign, assuming he had the election in the bag, which it turned out he did. He would win in a landslide.

Eugene Debs was running again on the Socialist ticket, from prison, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for sedition (giving socialist speeches).

The remaining candidates were:

Parley P. Christensen of the Farmer-Labor Party, a former Illinois Progressive.

Aaron S. Watkins of the Prohibition Party. He would get 188,709 votes, which I suspect represented the only people left in America who didn’t need a drink.

James E. Ferguson of the American Party (his own little racist party) was a former Texas governor, former because after he was indicted (and later found guilty) for the misappropriation of funds and impeached in 1917 he resigned. Interestingly, he served as the first First Gentleman of Texas when his wife Miriam “Ma” Ferguson served as governor (1925-1927, 1933-1935).

William Wesley Cox of the Socialist-Labor Party, who received 30,594 votes.

Robert Colvin Macauley, the one-issue, single-tax candidate, who received only 5,750 votes.

Too bad Theodore Roosevelt was dead.

It was an uninspiring slate of candidates and an uninspiring campaign.

In 1920, the United States was a little bit of a lost soul. Americans helped win a war, and then the country retreated into itself. They were still processing the horrific Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920. The population was politically divided. America was, as one presidential historian describes it, “seething with discontents.” Isolationists clashed with internationalists. Working people raged against the high cost of living and high unemployment. Industrialists and business people raged against government regulation. Progressives were frustrated by stalled reforms. Conservatives were mad about too much reform. All American women were now voting , and not everyone was happy about it. Racism was rampant in the north as well as the south, and immigrants from almost everywhere and Irish Americans, too, were blamed for America’s problems. People were, basically, at each other’s throats. Given the environment, the presidential campaign was mostly dull, although at one point opponents falsely accused Harding of having “Negro blood.” He brushed it off, probably with a shot of whiskey, and it didn’t make a difference at the polls. Harding suggested a return to normality (whatever that meant), and he gave some speeches in which he talked about normality, but he pronounced it normalty, which reporters changed to normalcy, so the campaign adopted the slogan “Back to Normalcy.” Some of the other campaign slogans that year were: “Down with Wilson,” “Convict No. 9653 for President,” and “America First.”

Some of this seems worlds away from now, and some of it sounds a bit too familiar. But no wonder Jane Addams kept her distance from the campaign. She had a settlement house and an international women’s peace organization to run. She decided that the best use of her power was to get women to exercise their right to vote. When asked about immigrant women and the vote, she offered this retort:

“There has been enough stirring up of political societies and prominent organizations interested in civic life. Stirring up more enthusiasm among these women leaders is not going to solve the problem of getting Chicago’s 600,000 eligible woman voters to the polls. The greatest number of Chicago women ever registered were 306,920 in the 1919 mayoralty election. We want the other 300,000 to show up at the polls.”

Jane Addams did not endorse a candidate in 1920. She did not campaign. But she made a plan to vote, and she voted (I’m guessing for Cox). And she helped get out the woman vote, too. We don’t always get the candidates we want. Sometimes the choices are lackluster. Sometimes distasteful. Sometimes the choice is crystal clear. ALWAYS, however, it matters that we exercise our right to vote in EVERY election.

Text reading Tues. Nov. 2, 1920 appears at the top, with a handwritten or cursive signature or note underneath enclosed in parentheses. — Jane Addams’s Calendar

By Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 2, 1920

Warren G. Harding
(Republican)
Popular Vote: 16.2 million
Electoral College: 404

James M. Cox
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 9.1 million
Electoral College: 127

Eugene V. Debs
(Socialist)
Popular Vote: 914,191
Electoral College: 0

Sources: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 212-17; Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 279; American National Biography; Harding and Cox, both in Biographical Directory of the United States Congress; James Middleton Cox to Jane Addams, July 21, 1920; Statement on the Foreign Women’s Vote, May 24, 1920; Jane Addams to James Middleton Cox, August 22, 1920, both in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

September 2, 2024October 14, 2025

Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1916

A group of men in suits gather outside a grand building, listening to Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, one of whom is wearing a hat with feathers, as they stand near a large column and ornate window.

What a difference four years and a world war made in the political opinions of Jane Addams.

In the Presidential Election of 1912, Jane Addams had supported Theodore Roosevelt and the new Progressive Party, in part because Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican William Howard Taft refused to add a plank for woman suffrage to their platforms as the Progressives had done. Jane Addams was also a member of the Progressive Party because it was pledged to social and industrial reform. When Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated on March 4, 1913, Addams was chair of the Department of Social and Industrial Justice of the Progressive National Service, an organization established to further the reform planks of the Party’s 1912 platform.

President Woodrow Wilson’s policies almost immediately rankled progressive reformers. For example, federal departments instigated segregationist policies that threatened the established civil service system which had employed Black Americans since reconstruction. Racial justice activists, organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and social justice advocates like Jane Addams were watching. Just five months into Wilson’s administration, Addams headlined a small group of Chicago NAACP members protesting “against the adoption or extension of a segregation policy in the treatment of United States civil service appointees.”

During the next four years, Addams would frequently challenge the policies of the Wilson Administration. She protested the deportation of famed British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, took Wilson to task for his refusal to support woman suffrage, and urged him to meet with striking workers. Jane Addams had earned a national reputation as a leading thinker in America, her opinions held widespread sway, and she had impressive power to influence politicians. Her role in the Progressive Party presidential campaign of 1912 had enhanced that influence, particularly in American politics, and Wilson was wise to keep his door open to Addams, through correspondence and face-to-face meetings.

In January 1915, Addams praised Wilson for his veto of a harsh immigration bill. She commended his early commitment to maintain U.S. neutrality, at one point calling him “a splendid man.” As the war in Europe escalated, Addams continue to urge the President to keep the United States out of the conflict and to negotiate for peace. Her establishment of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the spring of 1915 at The Hague gave her an international platform for her ideas about democracy, humanitarianism, war, and peace. And she used that pulpit to press her claims. When she requested a meeting with the President in March 1915, Wilson wrote:

“I need not tell you how glad I shall be to consider any suggestion with regard to a peace that you may care to submit to me, but I literally dare not seek an interview such as you suggest because I think I do not exaggerate when I say that requests of a similar sort come from different quarters at least every week and I should have to draw some distinctions which would become invidious before I get through with them, unless I granted interviews to all who applied for them in this matter. You will understand the delicacy this situation places me in. I should welcome a memorandum from you with all my heart.”

A vintage document titled Women Granted Right to Vote For Certain Officers, Etc. describes an Illinois law from 1913 granting women the right to vote in specific elections and outlines related procedures. — Laws of the State of Illinois (1912), 333.

In the spring and summer of 1916, as Republicans and Progressives considered strategies to defeat Wilson in the upcoming President Election, Jane Addams was convalescing (from an operation to remove a kidney) in Chicago and later in Bar Harbor, Maine. There would be no Progressive Party candidate for president, which likely dampened her appetite for the extensive campaigning she had done in 1912. But Addams would cast her first vote for president in the November election, as Illinois had granted women suffrage rights in June 1913. She would have to choose between Wilson, with whom she disagreed on a variety of issues, and Charles Evans Hughes, the compromise candidate of the progressive and conservative members of the Republican Party. Hughes was a former New York Governor (1907-1910), and President Taft appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910. He was a moderate and would make few of the social reform promises Theodore Roosevelt had made in the 1912 presidential campaign.

Many progressive reformers and friends of Addams, including Louise de Koven Bowen whose home in which Addams was recuperating, planned to vote for Hughes. Theodore Roosevelt also supported Hughes, although his endorsement was decidedly lukewarm. President Wilson had supported some progressive measures and had sent Addams sixty long-stemmed American Beauty roses and get-well greetings. Still, Addams was always guided by her own conscience (and not a woman to be bribed by flowers, not even roses!). Jane Addams was a pragmatist. She carefully considered the two candidates. Like we often have in our modern elections, there were two imperfect options. Like we often have to do in our modern elections, Addams had to chose the lesser of two evils or the best of the middling.

On October 4, 1915, she made a public statement: “I am ill and not able to do any political work. I do not think I shall make any statement formally declaring myself. When I am asked the direct question about my vote I reply that I shall vote for Wilson.” Upon hearing of her support, Wilson sent Addams another impressive bouquet of flowers!

In the end, Jane Addams answered public pressure for a more verbose statement. And on the eve of the election, she explained herself in an article published in newspapers across the country. Introducing her declaration for Wilson, the Cincinnati Post wrote: “Jane Addams, Hull House, Chicago, is one of the world’s greatest women. In 1912 she was one of the most enthusiastic delegates to the Progressive Convention that nominated Roosevelt, and she supported him with all her ardor. That Jane Addams, whose sincerity and disinterestedness in the cause of the plain people are beyond question, gives her approval of the progressive laws enacted during the Wilson administration is of great significance.”

In her typical, clear-headed fashion, Addams explained herself:

“In 1912 many of us became members of the Progressive Party, not only because we believed that the correction of abuses inevitably developed by an uncontrolled industrialism should become a vital issue in federal politics, but also because we were convinced this modern type of remedial legislation could be accomplished only [through] a new party.

“Because of this belief I, at least, was quite unprepared for the distinctive period in American politics developed under the brilliant party leadership of President Wilson, when important federal measures were constantly passed for the national adjustment of nationwide problems.

“The present administration comes before the country with a social program that carries assurance because of a record of pledges fulfilled and a series of legislative achievements not equaled by any other administration. Prominent among its contributions to social and industrial justice are these:

“It has been established as a matter of law that labor is not to be considered a mere commodity or article of commerce.

“The seamen have been made free men and have been given the right, previously denied, to leave their employment when conditions become intolerable.

“The products of child labor have been excluded from interstate commerce.

“The most liberal workmen’s compensation law in the world has been enacted, affecting 400,000 federal [employees].

“The principle of the eight-hour day has been recognized.

“The rural credits bill and the Federal Reserve Act are contributions to the welfare of the entire country.

“This administration has made certain distinct advances toward more rational international relations:

“(a) Treaties with 30 nations have been signed which provide for a year’s delay and investigation of matters at issue before diplomatic relations are severed.

“(b) The repeal of the toll exemptions for American ships in the Panama Canal was a recognition of the principle of fair dealing among nations, which may be a first tentative step toward the internationalization of such highways of the sea as the Dardanelles, the Panama, Suez and Kiel canals.

“(c) Determination, in spite of almost insuperable difficulties and obvious blunders, to permit the Mexicans to work their way to self-government without recourse to the old imperialistic method of sending soldiers into a weaker nation, first to police property and then to become an army of occupation.

“(d) During the past four years the Pan-American Union has been strengthened and made more genuine. The importance of this is not merely local, for this union has seemed to distressed and bewildered students of internationalism in Europe to offer an example of the kind of machinery for international action which is not inconsistent with a sound nationalism.”

After the election, Wilson wrote Addams: “I wish I felt more worthy of the great trust imposed in me.”

Addams would stay the Wilson course, at least for a while. In just five months the United States would enter the war in Europe and test her support. On April 10, 1917, ten days after the United States declared war on Germany, she signed a petition to the President to demand his promise to uphold free speech and democratic values for all Americans during the war:

“We are deeply concerned lest America, having declared a state of war, should sacrifice certain safeguards fundamental to the life of her democracy.

“Several bills are now before Congress, or may come before it, seeking to punish those who designedly use military information for the benefit of foreign governments.

“With this purpose we, of course, are entirely sympathetic, but the administration of such laws, purposely made comprehensive, so as to include a wide range of possible offenders, may easily lend itself to the suppression of free speech, free assemblage, popular discussion and criticism.

“We believe that you would deem it essential, perhaps more at this time than at any other, that the truth should not be withheld, or concealed from the American people whose interests after all are the most vital consideration.

“Even by this time, we have seen evidence of the breaking down of immemorial rights and privileges. Halls have been refused for public discussion; meetings have been broken up; speakers have been arrested and censorship exercised, not to prevent the transmission of information to enemy countries, but to prevent the free discussion by American citizens of our own problems and policies. As we go on, the inevitable psychology of war will manifest itself with increasing danger, not only to individuals but to our cherished institutions. It is possible that the moral damage to our democracy in this war may become more serious than the physical or national losses incurred.

“What we ask of you, Mr. President, whose utterances at this time must command the earnest attention of the country, is to make an impressive statement that will reach, not only the officials of the federal government scattered throughout the union, but the officials of the several states and of the cities, towns and villages of the country, reminding them of the peculiar obligation devolving upon all Americans in this war to uphold in every way our constitutional rights and liberties. This will give assurance that in attempting to administer war-time laws, the spirit of democracy will not be broken. Such a statement sent throughout the country would reinforce your declaration that this is a war for democracy and liberty. It is only because this matter seems of paramount public importance that we venture to bring it to you at this time for your attention.”

Jane Addams was still watching, and she would keep on watching. She did not vote and forget about it. She stayed informed. She held her leaders accountable. She did not take her vote nor her political power for granted.

Presidential Election: November 7, 1916

Woodrow Wilson (Democrat)
Popular Vote: 9.1 million
Electoral College: 277

Charles Evans Hughes (Republican)
Popular Vote: 8.5 million
Electoral College: 254

Black and white portrait of Jeanette Rankin wearing a wide-brimmed hat with flowers, a light blouse, and a subtle smile. Below the image is the handwritten name Miss Jeannette Rankin. — Jeannette Rankin, 1916

One resounding victory for women in 1916 was the election of Jane Addams’s friend Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) of Montana to be the first woman to serve in the U. S. Congress.

Addams sent this telegram to Rankin: “Heartiest congratulations on your election and appreciation of what it means to all American women.” Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress; Congratulatory Telegram for Jeannette Rankin, November 12, 1916, Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Sources: Louise W. Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 189-223; Neil Lanctot, The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams and Their Clash over America’s Future (New York: Riverhead Books, 2021), 206-10, 243-46, 485-87, 562-63; American National Biography. Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, August 26, 1913; Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, October 18, 1913; Summary of Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, October 19, 1913; Statements on Wilson Administration, December 16, 1913; Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, May 20, 1914; Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, January 29, 1915; Jane Addams and John A. Aylward to Woodrow Wilson, March 4, 1915; Frances Alice Kellor to Jane Addams, February 5, 1913; Woodrow Wilson to Jane Addams, March 8, 1915; Report of Department of Social Service and Industrial Justice, Progressive Service Committee, April 23, 1913; Comments on President Wilson, May 12, 1915; Statement on Addams’s Tuberculosis Diagnosis, April 6, 1916; Harriet Park Thomas to Jane Addams, August 8, 1916; Woodrow Wilson is Good Enough for Jane Addams, October 4, 1916; Manifesto Issued by International Congress of Women Envoys, October 15, 1915; Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, October 26, 1915; Jane Addams Sees Progressive Aims Attained Thru President, November 3, 1916; Woodrow Wilson to Jane Addams, November 23, 1916; Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, April 16, 1917, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

For an in depth analysis of Jane Addams’s ideas about peace in juxtaposition with those of Roosevelt and Wilson, see Neil Lanctot, The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and Their Class over America’s Future and his Jane Addams Papers Project blog post, “Jane Addams and the Great War.”

Note: This post is the second in a six-part series discussing Jane Addams’s political alliances and engagement in presidential elections from 1912 to 1932.

August 19, 2024September 29, 2025

Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1912

One of the most fascinating decisions Jane Addams ever made was to enter the fray of partisan politics and back Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party bid for the Presidency in 1912. She had endorsed political candidates before, but her participation as a delegate to the Progressive Party Convention in Chicago, her role in seconding Roosevelt’s nomination, and her stumping for and writing of a series of articles in support of the Progressive Party ticket and its platform was historic. It was a bold move for Addams. It raised many eyebrows. And although there is no evidence that it jeopardized Hull-House’s patronage, it went decidedly against the general philosophy of reform and charitable organizations whose livelihoods depended upon support from across the political spectrum.

When she stood on the stage of the Coliseum in Chicago at the Progressive Party Convention on August 7, 1912, Jane Addams explained to the cheering crowd why she supported Roosevelt and the Progressive Party:

I rise to second the nomination, stirred by the splendid platform adopted by this convention.

Cartoon drawing of Jane Addams standing on a platform decorated with stars and stripes, gesturing forward as if speaking; caption reads, Character sketch of Jane Addams on platform. — Pensacola (FL) News Journal, Aug. 13, 1912.

“Measures of industrial amelioration, demands for social justice, long discussed by small groups in charity conferences and economic associations, have here been considered in a great national convention and are at last thrust into the stern arena of political action.

A great party has pledged itself to the protection of children, to the care of the aged, to the relief of overworked girls, to the safeguarding of burdened men. Committed to these humane undertakings, it is inevitable that such a party should appeal to women, should seek to draw upon the great reservoir of their moral energy so long undesired and unutilized in practical politics—one the corollary of the other; a program of human welfare, the necessity for women’s participation.

We ratify this platform not only because it represents our earnest convictions and formulates our high hopes, but because it pulls upon our faculties and calls us to definite action. We find it a prophecy that democracy shall not be actually realized until no group of our people—certainly not 10,000,000 so sadly in need of reassurance—shall fail to bear the responsibilities of self-government and that no class of evils shall lie beyond redress.

The new party has become the American exponent of a world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action.

I second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt because he is one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to the social appeal and who has caught the significance of the modern movement. Because of that, because the program will require a leader of invincible courage, of open mind, of democratic sympathies, one endowed with power to interpret the common man and to identify himself with the common lot, I heartily second the nomination.”

The following day, Roosevelt sent a long telegram to Addams:

“I wished to see you in person to thank you for seconding me. I do it now instead. I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolized for the new movement. In this great national convention starting the new party women have thereby been shown to have their place to fill precisely as men have, and on an absolute equality. It is idle now to argue whether women can play their part in politics, because in this convention we saw the accomplished fact and more-over the women who have actively participated in this work of launching the new party represent all that we are most proud to associate with American womanhood. …”

The week was a whirlwind, but Addams was, perhaps surprisingly, enjoying herself. She was all in on the campaign, writing her sister Alice Haldeman on August 9:

“You may have seen by the papers that I have become a full fledged ‘bull moose’ and this morning accepted a place on the National Committee. I am sending you a copy of speech of acceptance which really explains my attitude better than anything else does.”

On the surface, Jane Addams’s quick jump into partisan politics made a great deal of sense. The Progressive Party’s Platform was in alignment with her reform work and her values. In a series of syndicated articles she published in the fall campaign, she explained in great detail to the American public why the Progressive Party was right for women, workers, immigrants, and Black Americans. In one of those articles, Addams attempted to explain her conversion to partisan politics:

“When I try to write down the steps by which I became a Progressive, I am inclined to trace them first to the gradual discovery that philanthropic effort everywhere, is merging into civic effort. In fact the line between philanthropy and politics is so constantly changing that it is very difficult to know when the given step has been taken, which carried one from the first field into the second.”

Addams had come to understand that philanthropic work was, indeed, political work. By necessity, real reform required legislative force. Her alliance with the Progressive Party was rooted in that belief and, in her eyes, this new national political party stood soundly upon a foundation of reform. However, could Addams have supported the Progressive Party’s platform without jumping in with both feet? What made her go all in on Roosevelt, a man she had just two months prior called “wabbly” on woman suffrage? She had never before been involved in a presidential campaign. What was different in August 1912?

I cannot get into Jane Addams’s head, but I believe that the extensive woman suffrage campaigning Addams had done all spring in Kansas and Wisconsin inspired her decision to become a “Bull Moose.” She was frustrated and losing patience. As she wrote in an article in The Survey on June 1, 1912:

“The comfortable citizen possessing a vote won for him in a previous generation, who is so often profoundly disturbed by the cry of ‘Votes for Women,’ seldom connects the present attempt to extend the franchise with those former efforts, as the results of which, he himself became a member of the enfranchised class. Still less does the average voter reflect that in order to make self-government a great instrument in the hands of those who crave social justice, it must ever be built up anew in relation to changing experiences, and that unless this readjustment constantly takes place self-government itself is placed in jeopardy.”

It is true that when Theodore Roosevelt agreed to support an equal suffrage plank in the Progressive Party Platform and to personally support woman suffrage, Addams was willing to lend her reputation, her writing talent, and her valuable time to the presidential campaign. She recognized this historic opportunity to be part of a new reformed-minded national party that had a chance to win the election. Behind a seasoned politician like Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party would put the issues she cared about most deeply on the national stage. The party platform included fifteen distinct social justice issues that Addams had championed, from the prohibition of child labor to support for the eight-hour workday to the favor of labor organization. Most critically, however, was the Progressive Party’s pledge: “to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.” For Addams, the plank of equal suffrage was more than icing on the cake, it was the imperative to ensure all the rest of the party’s aims. And so, even as she could not vote, she became a political animal, a dedicated Bull Moose for the presidential campaign of 1912.

A newspaper clipping titled Plank on Equal Suffrage states the Progressive Party supports equal political rights and suffrage for men and women, pledging to secure this equality regardless of sex. — Progressive Party Suffrage Plank, 1912

It is also true that Addams surprised herself by the excitement the campaign roused for her. A day at Progressive Party headquarters in New York City in late September, making campaign telephone calls, was particularly fun for her. To put ala Teddy, Addams was deee-lighted to be a Bull Moose. En route to Indianapolis for a campaign speech, she wrote her sister on October 14: “I am quite enjoying my campaigning and especially my trip [to] N.Y.”

A black-and-white, grainy photo of a Jane Addams on a telephone — New-York Tribune, Sep. 26, 1912.

In addition to spending her summer vacation in Maine writing campaign articles, Addams served as chair of a Progressive party women’s committee in Chicago and as a member of the Cook County Progressive Committee. She delivered speeches and attended campaign rallies in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin. She wrapped up a western campaign swing in Kansas City on November 4 and was back home at Hull-House for election day.

On the night of the election, when the results were in, Roosevelt wrote Addams from Oyster Bay:

“Now, my dear Miss Addams, I wish to tell you how very much your support in this campaign has meant to me personally. We have fought a good fight; we have kept the faith; we have gone down in disaster. Yet I certainly feel that it would have been wrong for us not to have fought exactly as we did. At any rate, you may be sure of one thing: I shall conscientiously do my best so to act in the future that you shall not feel regret that you supported me in this campaign.”

Jane Addams had no regrets. She wrote Roosevelt on November 20 that she hoped to see him the following week at a Progressive Party Meeting in New York City:

“Perhaps I may have an opportunity to tell you then the tremendous impulse the campaign has given to social reform measures in which I have been interested for many years, but which have never before seemed to become so possible of fulfilment as at the present moment. I had never dared hope that within my lifetime thousands of people would so eagerly participate in their discussion. I am sure you have been in a large measure responsible for this outcome, and I shall hope to have a moment to discuss the subject with you in New York.”

Theodore Roosevelt had lost the election, but Jane Addams had had one hell of a ride.

Results of the Presidential Election: November 5, 1912

Woodrow Wilson
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 6.3 million
Electoral College: 435

Theodore Roosevelt
(Progressive)
Popular Vote: 4.1 million
Electoral College: 88

William Howard Taft
(Republican)
Popular Vote: 3.5 million
Electoral College: 8

Eugene V. Debs
(Socialist)
Popular Vote: 901,551
Electoral College: 0

Progressive Party Campaign Articles by Jane Addams (all available in the Jane Addams Digital Edition):

The Progressive Party and Safeguards for Working Girls, August-September, 1912

The Progressive Party and the Protection of Immigrants, August-September 1912

The Progressive Party and Woman Suffrage, September 1912

The Progressive Party and Organized Labor, September 1912

The Progressive Party and the Disinherited, August-September, 1912

The Progressive Party and the Negro, November 1912

The Steps by Which I Became a Progressive, September-October 1912

My Experiences as a Progressive Delegate, November 1912

Be like Jane Addams, phonebank for your candidate. Get informed. Get involved. And don’t miss out on the opportunity Jane Addams did not have in 1912, VOTE!

Other Sources: Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Sidney M. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); “‘Lady Moose’ Ready for Real Campaign,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Aug. 13, 1912, p. 4; “Progressive Women Campaigners in Town; Miss Jane Addams at Bull Moose Headquarters,” New-York Tribune, Sep. 26, 1912, 7; Jane Addams Diary, Statement on Theodore Roosevelt, May 11, 1912; Votes for Women and Other Votes, June 1, 1912; Progressive Party Pamphlet, ca. August 5, 1912; Nominating Speech for Theodore Roosevelt, August 7, 1912 (version published in the Congressional Record, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Appendix), vol. 48, pt. 12, 564-65); Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, August 8, 1912; J ane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, August 9, 1912 ; Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, August 9, 1912; Jane Addams to Harold LeClair Ickes, September 27, 1912; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, November 5, 1912; all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Note: This post is the first in a six-part series discussing Jane Addams’s political alliances and engagement in presidential elections from 1912 to 1932.

July 17, 2024September 29, 2025

Assistant Editor for the Jane Addams Papers Project Job Listing

We are hiring! The Project seeks a full-time, grant-funded Assistant Editor to join our work on the Project’s digital edition and on the Selected Papers of Jane Addams. Please share this opportunity with potential candidates in your networks.

The successful candidate will work in-person at Ramapo College of New Jersey, in Mahwah, NJ. This position is not eligible for remote work. The assistant editor’s responsibilities will primarily support work on the Jane Addams Digital Edition. Under the supervision of the Project Director, the Assistant Editor verifies transcriptions and metadata, supervises and trains student employees, conducts research, and assists in all phases of implementing editorial practice at the project. The Assistant Editor also assists with grants and project promotion.

For more information about the position see the posting linked below or email Cathy Moran Hajo chajo@ramapo.edu.

Application information: https://www.schooljobs.com/careers/ramapo/jobs/4583980/assistant-editor-jane-addams-papers-project?pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs

April 17, 2024October 14, 2025

Hull House and Benny Goodman

Black and white portrait of Benny Goodman wearing glasses, a suit with a patterned tie, and a herringbone jacket. He is smiling slightly and looking to the side, with his hair neatly combed back.

Because of Hull-House’s strong association with social and political causes, it can be easy for many to overlook the settlement house’s invaluable contributions to the arts. In bustling early 20th century Chicago, Hull-House served as a prime location for artistic expression and development. The experimental art classes of Dorothy Loeb at the settlement allowed students to express themselves in free and abstract ways. Enella Benedict provided nearly fifty years of service for Hull-House’s Art School, which served as an educational beacon. The Hull-House Boys’ Band, as it turns out, would have a hand in producing some of Chicago’s greatest musicians, the great Benny Goodman chiefly among them.

While most know Benny Goodman for defining an entire era of American music and helping to popularize jazz for mass audiences, his story begins like that of many other Chicagoans born during Hull-House’s heyday. “The King of Swing” was just one of twelve children born to Jewish immigrant parents. The family was defined by severe poverty, living in a slum neighborhood not too far from Hull-House. Goodman would later say “Judging from the neighborhood where I lived, if it hadn’t been for the clarinet, I might just as easily have been a gangster.”

This escape through music was exactly what Goodman’s father sought to provide. He enrolled ten year old Benny and his brothers Harry and Freddy in the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue’s music lessons, but this quickly fell through. Luckily for the Goodmans, the Hull-House Boys’ Band, returning after a hiatus during WWI, had just reopened its doors.

A black-and-white photo shows a marching band of young men in uniform, holding instruments, standing in formation on a city street, with buildings and onlookers in the background. — Hull-House Boys’ Band
[Hull-House Year Book, 1925]

Excitedly playing in his new uniform, Goodman developed his musical skills under the direction of James Sylvester, the Boys’ Band’s leader and educator. Despite the band’s repertoire being far from the sounds of jazz that would soon envelop Goodman, he received additional lessons from Franz Schoepp, a well-respected Chicago clarinet teacher. Goodman quickly reached the advanced classes of Hull-House’s music program, and was subsequently chosen by Sylvester to play in his 124th Regiment Field Artillery band. This marked a pivotal point in Goodman’s musical journey, as it allowed him to play with professional musicians and make money in the process.

As his musical abilities exponentially improved, Goodman also relished in Hull-House’s other activities. He was an enthusiastic member of the settlement’s summer camp at the Joseph Tilton Bowen Country Club, gladly taking part in the two-week retreat every summer with his brothers. The woodlands of Waukegan, Illinois were in stark contrast to the dingy conditions of the Chicago ghetto which the boys were exposed to for most of the year.

Goodman went on to work with the likes of Bix Beiderbecke and Ben Pollack, as his music career reached even greater heights. The “King of Swing” never forgot his experiences at Hull-House, however, even returning to the settlement in 1940 to perform a free concert despite grueling sciatica pain in his leg.

Ultimately, it’s clear that Hull-House provided an invaluable service to Benny Goodman’s life, supplying him with music, education and socialization at a time when the difficult social and economic conditions of Chicago may have led him on a much different path. It’s crucially important to remember that Goodman was just one of countless individuals who benefited from the settlement’s services, and that organizations like Hull-House continue to have a hand in producing some of the world’s most distinguished artists and leaders.

— James La Forge, Editorial Assistant

Sources: Benny Goodman – The Official Website of the King of Swing. “Biography.” Estate of Benny Goodman. Accessed April 17, 2024; Firestone, Ross. “Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman.” Norton, 1993; Wilson, John S. “BENNY GOODMAN, KING OF SWING, IS DEAD.” New York Times, June 14, 1986. p. 1;

April 4, 2024October 14, 2025

Reconsidering Jane Addams: A Portrait of Anti-Imperialism?

Jane Addams (1906) Oil on canvas, by George de Forest Brush. National Portrait Gallery.

Last July marked another passing of the Association for Documentary Editing’s yearly conference, this time taking place in Washington, D.C. Our nation’s capital has endless museums, attractions, and performances to explore, but there was only one woman I wanted to meet: Jane Addams, of course. The National Portrait Gallery houses the only known full-color image of Addams, painted by George de Forest Brush in 1906, the process of which was detailed in many letters that can be found within the digital edition. It took some work getting to her – the front desk claimed Addams’s portrait was not currently on display even though I had pulled up a location on the Gallery’s website. Not one to be told “no,” I scoured the nooks and crannies of the museum, looking for Jane nestled among peace activists, child or immigrant welfare reformers, or suffrage protesters. Instead, I found her with what I believed to be a sort of motley crew in a section titled “Republic or Empire?” that detailed America’s thoughts on Spain’s involvement in the destruction of the USS Maine. Her fellow portrait sitters included Samuel Clemens, W.E.B. Du Bois, Benjamin Tillman, Moorfield Storey, Queen Lili’uokalani, and Theophilus Gould Steward, gathered together under the roof of “anti-imperialism.” Since visiting the Gallery, I’ve been wondering: Does Jane Addams truly belong among these figures, or would she be better represented elsewhere?

A formal painted portrait of a regal woman with dark hair, wearing a black gown, blue sash, and sparkling jewelry, standing beside a red curtain and ornate chair against a soft, cloudy background. — Queen Lili‘uokalani (c. 1892) Oil on canvas, by William F. Cogswell. Hawai’i State Archives.

Imperialism was a weighted topic during the early Progressive Era. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 was convened specifically to regulate European colonization and trade in Africa, and to which the United States sent three diplomats to represent the American colonial empire. In 1887, the US renewed the Hawaiian Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, further increasing American economic influence in Hawaii. This renewal set the stage for the overthrowing of Queen Lili’uokalani, the last reigning sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom, in 1893. In the 1890s, the “Scramble for Africa” continued, with Egypt overtaken by the British in 1882, and Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda subjugated in the 90’s and early 20th century. These global events culminate in the Gallery section’s primary focus, the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine, then stationed in Havana Harbor, Cuba to protect American interests during the Cuban War of Independence.

Admittedly, I am not an expert in Progressive Era imperialism, but I like to think I know Jane Addams quite well. During the events discussed above, Addams was dutifully creating and strengthening Hull-House, a settlement house in Chicago modeled after Toynbee Hall of London. While she would go on to become active in global circles like peace and disarmament, Addams began her reform work locally, ensuring that marginalized citizens of the Nineteenth Ward were given uplifting amenities and a space to gather and learn. By our records, in the 1890s Addams wrote speeches and articles primarily about Hull-House, working women, and labor strikes – issues that stopped at the state level. Her interest in international affairs wouldn’t manifest fully until the onset of the first World War. Yet, despite all of this, Addams joined the Anti-Imperialist League in 1899.

It was in this same year that Addams gave her first signs of anti-imperial sentiments, with an article for the Central Anti-Imperialist League titled “Democracy or Militarism.” In it, she shows contempt toward countries with “an increased standing army, the soldiers of which are non-producers and must be fed by the workers.” She goes on to scorn the idea of “protecting the weak” as the excuse of a ruler to invade and subjugate outside nations, and shows disapproval toward the recent Spanish-American War. Even so, the last three paragraphs relate the then current state of Spain to events going on in Chicago rather than referencing any national affairs. After this, Addams didn’t discuss imperialism, anti or pro, much, if at all. The next time it was brought up in any meaningful way was a letter from Erving Winslow, Secretary of the Anti-Imperialist League, dated August 12, 1912 in which he chided Addams for supporting Theodore Roosevelt, a known imperialist, in the 1912 Presidential election.

A sepia-toned portrait of a man with a mustache and goatee, wearing a suit with a high-collared white shirt and tie, looking slightly to the side. The photo has a decorative border at the bottom. — W. E. B. Du Bois (1907) Gelatin silver print, by James E. Purdy. National Portrait Gallery.

The men Addams was grouped with were, from all accounts, more entrenched in the anti-imperialist scene than Addams ever was. Samuel Clemens was shown to be in favor of imperialism until about 1900. From then until his death in 1910, Clemens spoke and wrote often about his thoughts on the Treaty of Paris and the burgeoning Philippine-American War, and he was vocally critical of foreign countries’ imperialism as well. Du Bois extensively advocated for anti-imperialism, especially in Africa where, he argued, the Scramble for Africa was the foundation for World War I. Tillman was a staunch anti-imperialist, though his sentiments stemmed from the belief that white American lives were being wasted in the pursuit of militaristically subduing Filipino natives after the Spanish-American War. Moorfield Story was the Anti-Imperialist League’s second and last president from 1905-1920, and believed in a connection between America’s imperialistic endeavors and the country’s persecution of minority races. Queen Lili’uokalani had the most direct impact of the Age of Imperialism, deposed in 1893 by a group of sugar and pineapple businessmen. If Lili’uokalani was the most directly impacted, Steward was the least involved. Theophilus Gould Steward was primarily a clergyman, author, and educator, serving as a chaplain in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a racially segregated regiment, from 1891-1907, including serving in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and later in the Philippines. Steward wrote about the experience of the African American soldier, which did touch on their struggle for freedom and citizenship, but he did not directly compare their strife to Filipinos resisting American colonial rule.

Pencil portrait of Alice Hamilton with short hair and a layered necklace, wearing a high-collared top. Below the drawing, Alice Hamilton is written twice in script. The background is plain and light-colored. — Alice Hamilton (1947) Charcoal and chalk on paper, by Samuel Johnson Woolf. National Portrait Gallery.

If not here, then where would Jane Addams belong? The National Portrait Gallery holds over 20,000 pieces in their various collections – certainly some of those could fit better with Addams’s narrative. To represent women building Chicago, they own a portrait of Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve on a cabinet of a US President and a Hull-House volunteer, Alice Hamilton, a Chicago doctor and Hull-House volunteer, or Nettie Fowler McCormick, a Chicago philanthropist. In a wider perspective, outside her Chicago colleagues, there is Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, Martha Carey Thomas, second president of Bryn Mawr College, and Julius Rosenwald, co-owner of Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and philanthropist.

At the end of the day, Jane Addams’s portrait is no longer on display. Neither Clemens’s, Du Bois’s, Tillman’s, Storey’s, Lili’uokalani’s, or Steward’s portraits are currently available to view in person. I suppose that is the nature of a large collection of works with limited space to display them. Even so, this also means that Addams could be displayed along with any number of her peers at any point in time, perhaps to help tell an entirely different story about America’s elaborate history.

Victoria Sciancalepore

Assistant Editor

Other Sources: “Berlin West Africa Conference.” Encyclopædia Britannica, February 19, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/event/Berlin-West-Africa-Conference; Hixson, William B. Moorfield Storey and the Abolitionist Tradition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1972; Jane Addams. “Democracy or Militarism.” Liberty Tracts, no. 1 (1899): 35–39; “Joint Resolution to Provide for Annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States (1898).” National Archives and Records Administration, February 8, 2022. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/joint-resolution-for-annexing-the-hawaiian-islands; Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois. New York: H. Holt, 1993; “Maine Blown Up at Havana.” New York Tribune. February 16, 1898; Steward, Theophilus Gould. The Colored Regulars. Philadelphia, PA: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1904; Tillman, Benjamin. “Policy Regarding the Philippine Islands.” Congressional Record 32, no. 2 (February 21, 1899): 1529–33; Twain, Mark. “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” The North American Review 172, no. 531 (February 1901): 161–76.

February 29, 2024October 14, 2025

The Persona of Jane Addams

Jane Addams wearing a dark coat and hat stands by a railing, looking thoughtfully into the distance while holding light-colored gloves in one hand. The background appears blurred and softly lit.

In 1908 when Jane Addams was speaking at a dinner in Chicago, she expressed her frustration with women who ridicule suffragists:

There are women who will laugh at us for our interest in the ballot, and who will then give absorbed hours, in the privacy of their rooms, to great electrical massage machines, face-steaming engines, curious masks and huge flesh-reducing mechanisms. An elderly woman of this type, after an afternoon’s struggle with all sorts of beautifying devices, dyed her hair a bright gold. “Do you think it makes me look younger?” she asked me. “Yes,” said I. “About three weeks.” — Jane Addams’s Retort, June 7, 1908, Jane Addams Digital Edition (JADE).

Historic black-and-white photo of Jane Addams and others in early 1900s attire standing in a car draped with a Votes for Women banner, participating in a suffrage parade, with a crowd and building in the background. — Jane Addams and other serious suffragists in fabulous hats, 1912. Image courtesy of Swarthmore College.

Jane Addams had a sense of humor, but she rarely made such public jibes as she did in telling this story, which was reported in newspapers across the country. It is understandable, however, that the frivolous, gold-haired woman mocking the suffrage movement would annoy her. Jane Addams was a serious woman who devoted her time to making the world a better place; she had no time to worry that her hair was turning gray and that lines were forming on her face. In fact, it was her assertion that as the social health of the nation was concerned “gray-haired women” needed to “become a part of it.”

By personality in 1908 Jane Addams wanted to appear to the world as a well-groomed, modest, serious woman in sensible shoes. Yet it is also true that Jane Addams likely curated a persona designed to make her a credible witness to the social ills she sought to remedy, to make the public feel at ease with her, and to convince people in power to be more open to her ideas. She struck a brilliant balance that allowed her to be approachable to her working-class Hull-House neighbors and to fit in among her middle-class peers and wealthy patrons. She dressed to blend in, not to stand out; she presented a gentle, serious, thoughtful demeanor in order to convey authority.

She was simply dressed. Her attire was a soft gray in deep harmony with the woman. Her hair was combed straight back from her high forehead, and made into a knot on the back of her head. Her eyes are large and soft, and continually there is a little light flickering in them, which seems to bid children welcome to her side. She radiates kindness and a big heart’s offerings would inspire any child to do better. — Dedication of Bomberger Park, June 30, 1908 (The Dayton Herald), JADE.

What this large and visibly impressed crowd saw was a woman of medium height, with hair well streaked with gray, and dressed in a plain dark dress relieved only by a white lace collar. In a clear, well-modulated voice that carried to every corner of the room she started in, without preliminaries, to tell the story of the condition of the starving children of the European countries. — Feed the World and Have a League of Nations, February 19, 1921 (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle), JADE.

Recently, I read a 1915 Washington Times interview with Jane Addams, which at first made me start and then made me consider this idea that Jane Addams wore a mask she designed for the successful female Progressive reformer she became. Florence Yoder, the young journalist conducting the interview, who was perhaps wearing her own mask as a woman in a newspaper world of men, described Addams this way:

Unlike any other person in the world whom we have ever seen, Miss Addams regulates her facial expressions by exactly the opposite method employed by the average person. When speaking of something in which she is very much interested, there is little or no animation, her face becomes a mask, she looks in one direction only, glancing occasionally full into the eyes of the listener. Her voice is pitched very low, almost a monotone, yet one never misses a word. Then when something trivial comes up, something of almost childish interest, her face brightens she relaxes into a smile, and the mask does not slip on again until the more serious subject is revived. It is almost as if she were trying to subjugate her own personality entirely, eliminate herself entirely from the discussion, and let only the ideas with which she wishes to impress her listener, register on the brain. — Interview with Florence E. Yoder, Jan. 8, 1915 (Washington Times), JADE.

Until I read that description of her, it had not occurred to me that Jane Addams might have subdued her own personality for effect. I have long understood her as a shrewd debater, a calm mediator, and a respectful listener, all skills she practiced in order to obtain her reform objectives. I have studied her ability to form coalitions and build networks, which required humility as well as strength. But did Jane Addams regulate her demeanor and her appearance to strike an expected pose for the public?

Jane Addams in a late 19th-century dress with puffed sleeves sits on an ornate chair decorated with carved lion heads and eagle figures, looking to the side with a composed expression. — Jane Addams, c. 1896. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Yes, I suppose she did. I missed it before, for reasons (or gendered perceptions of my own) I may need to explore later. But now the truth of Jane Addams as a public persona seems clear. The more I have thought about the idea, the more I think I understand the woman behind the persona. It is always rewarding for a historian to pinpoint moments in the lives of their subjects that suggest a shifting perspective, particularly exciting when it reveals a blooming of wisdom. I think it is possible Jane Addams learned the power of appearance in July 1896 when she met Leo Tolstoy. Although the thirty-five-year-old Addams was already a serious woman with seven years of leading Hull-House and a social settlement movement in America to her credit, it was her fashionable 1890s frock that Tolstoy noticed. Addams remembered the meeting in a 1911 article:

Tolstoy, standing by clad in peasant garb, listened gravely, but, glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my traveling gown, which, unfortunately, at that season were monstrous in size, took hold of an edge and, pulling out one sleeve to an interminable breadth, said that there was enough stuff on one arm to make a frock for a little girl, and asked me directly if I did not find “such a dress a barrier to the people.” — A Visit to Tolstoy, Jan. 1911, JADE.

Jane Addams probably did not return to Hull-House after her trip to Russia and immediately begin constructing a persona more in keeping with her humanitarian work than those voluptuous sleeves. However, Tolstoy’s comments penetrated her psyche. That she told the story fifteen years after the meeting might be enough evidence to prove it. She admired Tolstoy and continued throughout her life to be inspired by his plain-clothes and calloused-hands example of living. Jane Addams was moved at that moment in time of her meeting with an idol to be mindful of the image she portrayed.

Jane Addams, 1914. Image courtesy of the Jane Addams Collection, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.

At the Jane Addams Papers, we are often frustrated by the quiet, guarded language Addams employed in her correspondence, which makes it hard to know her. Given the care she seems to have always taken with her language, it should not surprise me that by the time Jane Addams became a nationally known figure, a successful reformer and inspirational leader on the public stage, she would understand and make good use of a curated public persona. I had falsely assumed Jane Addams was naturally unassuming instead of shrewdly navigating public expectations about what a female reformer could be and should be and what a credible female reformer must look like. Today, the physical appearance and demeanor of public women is still fraught with gendered assumptions, therefore imagine the dilemma for educated, working women of Jane Addams’s generation. Given the success Jane Addams enjoyed as a reformer, particularly her ability to bridge gaps as wide as the difference between rural clubwomen and American presidents, of course she crafted a persona that paid the proverbial bills.

That there was a Jane Addams persona is not to say that Jane Addams the woman was not a genuine human being. Far from it. Jane Addams was, indeed, motivated by true empathy and real intentions to save the world. That she crafted a public persona simply means that Addams had a private self and a public self, and as a woman the divide between her two selves required special caretaking, especially as success in her line of work required the open hearts and wallets of others. In order to take her compassionate heart and radical ideas out into the world, she had to package that heart and those ideas for public consumption.

So how did the public view Jane Addams? Reformers and scholars and philosophers of her day respected her humanitarian experience, her intellect, and her ideas. Publishers clamored to sell her words and philosophy of reform. Politicians sought her support. Women’s and men’s organizations of all types across the country and around the globe wanted her to speak to their memberships. But how did people see her? What was it about the visage Jane Addams presented to the world that drew people in close enough to hear the important messages she wanted to convey?

After spending some time searching through the documents in the Jane Addams Digital Edition looking for descriptions of Jane Addams’s physical appearance, I was struck not only by the similarity of gendered language to describe her over the years but also by the ways in which those descriptions reflected what the observers themselves defined as appropriate for a woman like Jane Addams in the twentieth century’s first three decades.

Often the descriptions evaluated the womanliness of Jane Addams. As this Washington Herald noted:

These words were spoken in a singularly soft yet vibrantly earnest voice—the voice of a woman dressed in gray, with a face softened by the beauty of tenderness and hair becoming silvered by time. From the face glowed eyes magnetic and prophetic. — We Must Go Man Hunting, Apr. 26, 1908, JADE.

The Birmingham News in 1914 described Addams’s meeting with national suffrage leaders in Alabama as “very human and feminine,” and wrote of Addams:

Simply attired and her graying hair gathered into a loose coil at the back of her neck, this venerable woman was distinctly one of the plain people whom she champions, and the essence of American naturalness. — Speech on Woman Suffrage, Mar. 9, 1914 (The Birmingham News), JADE.

Last night at the Santa Fe railway station, any one observing the passengers who arrived from the west, might have failed entirely to see a motherly looking woman of medium height, with iron gray hair, descending from a Pullman, but once one saw the woman one knew that there was an individual who has been and is, the center of many big things. That person is Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago. — Speech to the Shawnee County League of Women Voters, Jan. 13, 1922 (Topeka State Journal), JADE.

Jane Addams is gray but she is not masculine nor is she old. Certainly she is not hard. She smiled when the strange thought was told her. “I don’t get enough physical exercise to be hard. No, I’m afraid I’m rather much too soft.” — Interview with Jane Addams, Jan. 30, 1925 (New York Times Magazine), JADE.

Warmth, understanding, keen judgment, shine from her blue eyes; warmth, motherliness, sympathy, strength, mark the face of this American woman who has been a pioneer in social service work and in work for International Peace. The thing which amazes a stranger who meets her is that she, while so many human problems are brought to her, can be so calm, so very calm. — Interview with Jane Addams for the Public Ledger Sunday Magazine, Dec. 1933.

Descriptions of Addams often reduced her, even while praising her:

Miss Addams is not a lecturer, but she is a very interesting talker. While she seemed perfectly at home on the platform her hands were busy all the time toying with her watch and the chain by which it was suspended from her neck. When she spoke she was forceful and energetic but her voice was almost lost in the bigness of the Auditorium. — Speech on Hull-House Work, Dec. 8, 1905 (Topeka Daily Capital, Dec. 9, 1905), JADE.

They offered convoluted or backhanded complements:

A woman so completely wrapped in her work that her other side of life is forgotten, a trifle hardened by the nature of her work, which has brought her in contact with every kind of suffering, are the first impressions gained of Miss Addams, but as talk progresses the softness coming from a big heart creeps into her eyes, about her mouth and a charming elderly woman is revealed. — Interview with Baltimore Evening Sun, Apr. 21, 1922, JADE.

Or they shamelessly judged her physical appearance:

She is a most satisfying person, even in appearance. She has a wonderfully strong face, square as a man’s, and her hair, parted simply and combed back into a low knot, does not conceal a line of the finely modelled head. Her eyes, gray and set wide apart, meet one with an impassive directness even when her straight, firm lips are smiling. Her mouth belongs to a compassionate woman, her eyes to one who is not readily deceived. As for her chin, it is [chiseled] determination. — Interview with Jane Addams, Jan. 30, 1911; (Washington Evening World), JADE.

She is a medium-sized, rather stout, but quick-moving woman. Her manner is brusque but kindly. The blue eyes which have looked upon so much of want and misery, wretchedness and desolation, are sweet in expression and win you to the woman as she talks in her quick, direct manner. Her hair, the style of wearing which she never has changed since she began to coil it up from girlhood’s braids, is parted, and drawn back loosely from a finely shaped forehead. She smiles easily with her eyes, but not with her mouth. Her mouth is grave and rather sad. — Interview with Jane Addams, Sept. 24, 1913 (Pittsburgh Press), JADE.

It is no wonder Jane Addams shunned the camera, relied on a couple of profile pictures for promotional images, and worked so hard to remain in character. No wonder either that observers were so keen to define her and to understand the extraordinary success of this incomparable woman. The St. Louis reporter who wrote this description in 1910, when Addams was serving her historic presidency of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, leaned toward the poetic:

Miss Addams has a strong personality, that makes itself felt at once through her vital intellectuality and her warm, genial manner. She is of medium stature with bright, luminous penetrating eyes of a blue-gray shade, which are keen and searching. An intense love of mankind pervades Miss Addams’ every word and look. Her prominent cast of features are accentuated by the soft gray with which her hair is just beginning to be sprinkled, and there is a certain nobility and distinction about her carriage which would mark her a central figure in any assemblage, even though her name and fame had not preceded her. It is easy to be led by such a woman, and in the great work to which she has dedicated her life, there is a special field for the qualities with which she is so richly endowed, in the uplifting and betterment of her fellow-beings. — Interview at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, May 22, 1910 (St. Louis Star & Times), JADE.

In 1928, Jane Addams wrote to an old friend: “I am sending you two pictures, one taken in Rockford in 1881 and one during the first years at Hull-House in 1891. You see I have always worn my hair the same way. A great lack of imagination.”

There was no lack of imagination about it.

Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Other Sources: Need a Woman Over Fifty Feel Old?, October 1914; Interview with Donna Risher, Jan. 12, 1920 (Des Moines Tribune); Jane Addams to Margaret Drier Robins, Mar. 6, 1928, all in JADE.

January 17, 2024September 29, 2025

Jane Addams and the Roosevelts

Three women stand outdoors in a garden, dressed in 1930s-style clothing. Two wear dark skirts and tops, while one wears a patterned dress. They pose together in front of blooming flowers and trees.

Few families in the history of American politics have reached the acclaim and historical scrutiny bestowed upon the Roosevelts. From Theodore Roosevelt uttering the phrase “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose” after an assassination attempt at a speech — which has now been immortalized into American legend next to the likes of Washington crossing the Delaware — to the high-stakes World War II meetings between Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, seemingly every detail from this prestigious family has been extensively documented and analyzed.

The historical legacy of the Roosevelts is largely associated with progressive change and reform. Theodore Roosevelt’s administration marked the turn of the century with reforms such as the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a new national park system, and support for labor unions. FDR’s new deal, though the subject of heavy debate among historians, ushered in Social Security for elderly Americans, provided direct federal relief for a struggling American public, and attempted to ensure labor rights through the Wagner Act. Eleanor Roosevelt, aside from her work as First Lady, would go on to serve an important role in the United Nations and assist in the creation of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A man with a mustache, glasses, and a wide-brimmed hat, dressed in a suit and vest, raises his arm and smiles while speaking outdoors. The photo appears historical, with a building blurred in the background. — Theodore Roosevelt on the campaign trail, 1912. Roosevelt’s candidacy brought out strong feelings, both for and against him. (Library of Congress).

Jane Addams’ relationship with Theodore Roosevelt, or “The Colonel” as he humbly preferred to be addressed, is well understood. Although Addams’ direct participation in politics was sparse, she supported and campaigned for Roosevelt’s Progressive Party bid for president in 1912. Addams didn’t shy away from disagreeing with The Colonel, however, such as over the treatment of African American delegates at the Progressive Party Convention. Despite these disputes, Addams greatly admired Theodore Roosevelt, declaring he “embodied the best things in American citizenship” upon his death.

But what about those other Roosevelts? One would infer that Addams would follow a similar path with Theodore’s distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), but the puzzle pieces are less clear. With her health on the decline by the 1930’s, Addams no longer embarked on the large speaking tours of previous decades, which makes some of her opinions difficult to dissect. Despite this fact, she did still offer a healthy handful of writings and statements on the issues of the day, such as the Great Depression and the Roosevelt Administration’s response.

A young man in a bowler hat and overcoat smiles at the camera, standing outdoors among a group of people in early 20th-century attire. The background shows a brick building and an arched doorway. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1912 (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery).

For starters, Addams and FDR knew of each other, at the very least, for many years. Way back in 1912, State Senator FDR invited Addams to speak in Albany about her social work, though it’s unclear if she ever took him up on the offer. FDR would climb the political ranks in the New York State Senate and the United States Department of the Navy before setting his eyes on New York Governorship in 1928. This same year, Addams would endorse Herbert Hoover for President — one of her few presidential endorsements throughout her lifetime. This was largely a result of Hoover’s relief work in Europe a decade prior. It’s unclear who Addams supported in 1932, but one can assume that the Democratic platform of repealing prohibition put Roosevelt in weaker standing in Addams’ esteem. To nobody’s surprise, Addams disapproved of this action from FDR once he assumed office, stating in July 1933 that the eighteenth amendment’s repeal would be “nothing short of a calamity.”

She did, however, write to President-elect Roosevelt in December of 1932 endorsing Frances Perkins for Secretary of Labor. FDR’s appointment of Perkins would make her the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet and eventually one of the longest serving presidential cabinet members in US history.

An older woman with gray hair sits at a desk, holding a pen and looking at the camera. There are papers, a lamp, and a clock on the desk. The setting appears to be an office or study. — Jane Addams, at her desk. Miss Addams established the social settlement, Hull House, in Chicago in 1889 and founded the American Civil Liberties Union. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Addams had positive things to say about the National Recovery Administration (NRA), one of the most noteworthy programs from FDR’s “New Deal.” She praised its efforts to end unemployment and ensure minimum wages, and spoke to the value of business practices being placed on a higher standard as a result of the NRA. Addams described the struggles of the average city workman during the Great Depression, and hailed “That the NRA has come to his rescue fills many of us with sincere gratitude.”

Despite this praise, Addams always maintained a critical eye. She asserted that the NRA “demands careful study” and that the issue of unemployment was complex, requiring greater effort than federal relief alone. While Addams generally supported government assistance, she was always quick to stress the additional importance of the work from community members, private citizens, and social workers. Addams described the importance of this supplementary social service in another writing from the same year, stating “The public relief work is concerned largely with food and clothing and, unhappily, not always with shelter. Our supplementary social services are, perhaps, more necessary simply because people’s lives have been saved by governmental funds and they are distressed about it.”

The New Deal also established the Social Security program, providing welfare and benefits to senior citizens as well as additional unemployment insurance. Addams wrote considerably in favor of old age security in the later years of her life and certainly would’ve had praise for the Social Security Act. Sadly, Addams died three months before the legislation was passed.

Eleanor Roosevelt in a dark, formal dress sits beside a chair in an indoor setting, looking slightly to the side with a calm expression. Another person sits blurred in the background. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt had immense mutual respect for one another and offered the highest praise and flattery for each other. In January 1933, Addams introduced Eleanor before a speech at Orchestra Hall, Chicago, and sang endless praises for the incoming First Lady. Addams commended her work with the Women’s Trade Union League, the Foreign Policies Association of New York City, and the Woman’s City Club in New York. She also praised her work in education and her Hyde Park furniture and crafts shop, Val-Kill Industries. Addams aptly added in her remarks “I am sure that some of you listening to my even incomplete list of Mrs Roosevelt’s interests and activities must have been reminded of the abounding energy and unflagging concern for human affairs exhibited by another distinguished Roosevelt, and that you rejoice with me that such a spirit is once more to be domiciled within the White House.”

Eleanor Roosevelt would go on to have a pioneering and invaluable career in the White House and with the United Nations, breaking gender barriers and becoming one of the most influential women of her time. By helping to establish the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in many ways she continued and honored the work which Addams devoted so many years of her life to.

In the final month of her life, Addams was the guest of honor at a Washington D.C. dinner. Here, Eleanor Roosevelt labelled Addams “the greatest living woman.” She also reflected on Addams’ life years later, stating “Miss Addams served humanity so well she should never be forgotten. Anyone who knew her, will remember the inspiration of her presence, but her spirit went far beyond the individuals who knew her. It affected the thinking and living of people all over the world.”

While Addams and the Roosevelts played small roles in each other’s lives and history, they collectively played large roles in the ever-ongoing duty of creating a better world through progressive change.

–James La Forge, Editorial Assistant

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine. “The Speech That Saved Teddy Roosevelt’s Life“. Smithsonian Magazine. Accessed January 16, 2024; PBS. “Teddy Roosevelt and Progressivism.” PBS. Accessed January 16, 2024; Addams, Jane, “Statement on the Death of Theodore Roosevelt, January 6, 1919,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed January 16, 2024; Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, “Papers As New York State Senator.” 1910-1913; Addams, Jane, “Statement Endorsing Herbert Hoover for President, October 1928,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed January 16, 2024; Addams, Jane, “Statement on Prohibition, July 8, 1933,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed January 16, 2024; Addams, Jane, “Statement Endorsing The Appointment of Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor, December 8, 1932,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed January 16, 2024; Addams, Jane, “Second Draft of Address on the National Recovery Administration, September 1933,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed January 16, 2024; Addams, Jane, “Women’s Part in Revealing Human Needs, October 30, 1933,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed January 16, 2024; Addams, Jane, “Remarks Introducing Eleanor Roosevelt at Orchestra Hall, Chicago, January 20, 1933,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed January 16, 2024; United For Human Rights. “CHAMPIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (1884 –1962)” accessed January 16, 2024; Barber, Elizabeth. “Jane Addams, world’s ‘best-loved woman,’ honored with Google doodle.” The Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2013.

December 7, 2023October 14, 2025

Jane Addams on Television

During her lifetime, Jane Addams was famous throughout the United States and around the world. Known for Hull-House and as the leader of the American social settlement movement, respected for her wide-ranging reform activities, and beloved for her commitment to economic, political, and social justice for all, Addams became a household name. Reformers, educators, politicians, and the public looked to her for inspiration and for answers to the social and economic problems of the Progressive Era.

However, although she won the Nobel Peace Prize, published eleven books and hundreds of articles, and led consequential movements to restrict child labor, gain suffrage for women, improve the lives of immigrants, and change America ideas about poverty and the role of government in the protection of society’s most vulnerable people, she is grossly underappreciated today. I have stopped counting the number of people who ask me who Jane Addams was when I tell them I edit her papers and study her life. Although I take these opportunities to tell them about her or share a great story about her work, it makes me sad that Jane Addams is not a household name today. It is depressing that Americans can name the Kardashian sisters but have never heard of Jane Addams.

In our time of increasing inequality, rising hostility toward immigrants, and rampant civil discord, we need Jane Addams. We need inspirational figures who live or have lived in the service of others, not to themselves. Every day as I edit her papers, I am struck by how applicable the work and words of Jane Addams are today. Her dedication to equality and peace and her philosophical understanding of the connection of democracy and humanitarianism are still relevant, as is her talent to see need and suggest solutions, to mediate vast distances between cultures and ideas, and to inspire people to join her efforts to make a city, a country, or the world a better place. Her world view and ideas and her commitment to democracy are still imperative. As Charlene Haddock Seigfried writes: “The need to make democracy a vital way of life was a constant theme for Addams and one that challenges us yet again.”

The words of Jane Addams are still relevant:

Like what she wrote in defense of Russian Jews in Chicago in a 1908 article in Charities and the Commons: “In fact the more excited and irrational public opinion is, the more recklessly newspapers state mere surmises as facts and upon these surmises arouse unsubstantiated prejudices against certain immigrants, the more necessary it is that some body of people should be ready to put forward the spiritual and intellectual conditions of the foreign colony which is thus being made the subject of inaccurate surmises and unjust suspicion.”

Like the question she asked in 1913 of white Americans about what they had done or failed to do in pursuance of equality for Black Americans: “How far are we responsible that their civil rights are often rendered futile, their political action curtailed or frustrated, their equality before the law denied in fact, business and industrial opportunities withheld from them and, above all, that for twenty-five years they have been exposed to the black horrors of lynching?”

And the alarmed observation she shared in a speech at an American Sociological Society meeting in Chicago in 1919: “… for there is no doubt that at the present moment one finds in the United States the same manifestation of the world-wide tendency towards national dogmatism, the exaltation of blind patriotism above intelligent citizenship, as that evinced elsewhere.”

I do not meet historians of American history who are ignorant of her wide-ranging reform work. Illinois school children learn about Jane Addams when they study the state’s history; and Jane Addams is a popular subject for history students who participate in National History Day. The Jane Addams Papers Project is making her correspondence and writings freely available (Jane Addams Digital Edition) and has created Jane Addams lesson plans for high school teachers as well as AP history and National History Day resources (Jane Addams Exhibits). All of Jane Addams’s books are in print and/or available online. There is also a growing number of books about her life and her work, written from myriad perspectives, most notably Erik Schneiderhan’s The Size of Others’ Burdens: Barack Obama, Jane Addams, and the Politics of Helping Others (2015); Neil Lanctot’s The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams and Their Clash over America’s Future (2021); and The Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams (2023).

There is no excuse to be ignorant of Jane Addams.

Especially now.

Because Jane Addams is now on television.

In October, WTTW, a PBS member television station in Chicago, premiered a Chicago Stories episode on Jane Addams. Jane Addams: Together We Rise examines the importance of Jane Addams in Chicago and of Hull-House as a laboratory for reform. It also chronicles the significance of Jane Addams as the leader of an incomparable group of women who became leaders in their own rights of a variety of Progressive Era organizations and activities to improve the lives of children, women, immigrants, and the working poor. When the producer Rachel Ruiz contacted the Jane Addams Papers Project about the documentary, we were thrilled and happy to assist. Our Project is based in New Jersey, but I live in Illinois and work remotely. It made sense for me to be the editor on camera for the film, although I was, at first, apprehensive.

Jane Addams was shy about having her picture taken, and I am shy about appearing on camera.

As an editor of historical documents, I spend much of my professional life in solitude, reading letters and speeches, straining over handwriting, solving the mysteries of vague references, and contextualizing the words of my subjects. I do not teach and have little interaction with students. And, since Jane Addams is under appreciated, there are few opportunities for me to interact with the general public. During the twenty years I edited Abraham Lincoln’s papers, I gave numerous public presentations every year, hosted a long parade of visiting scholars, attended untold Lincoln events, and appeared in several Lincoln documentaries. It was often a bit much, especially in February for Lincoln’s birthday. I cannot lie. I prefer the quiet and the anonymity of my life as an editor of the Jane Addams papers.

But because I cannot lie, I also have to admit it was pretty cool to have a film crew in my Jane-Addams-era bungalow and spend the day talking about Jane Addams. The novelty of the experience for me (and my two little dogs, one of whom made it into the film!) calmed my nerves about being under the blazing (unflattering) lights in front of a camera. Although it was terrifying a year later to preview the documentary the day before it aired, I am so proud and honored to have been part of it.

Jane Addams allowed photos of herself to be taken and dispersed for the good of her causes; and so, I was happy to participate in a documentary about her life for the good of our cause at the Jane Addams Papers Project: to make her work and her words accessible to a society that needs her now more than ever. Jane Addams’s life was consequential, her work was historically significant, and she still matters. Her extraordinary example of compassion, tolerance, civility, and the belief in the promise of democracy to lift up all people, is still relevant nearly eighty years after her death. We need American heroes right now, and few are more perfect for our troubled times than Jane Addams.

Therefore, dear readers who already know the worth of Jane Addams, go forth and spread the Jane Addams word. Watch the documentary, read her books, and tell your friends, family members, teachers, students, and community leaders to do the same.

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Books by Jane Addams (with links to first and early editions of them online)

Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902); reprinted with introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1907); reprinted with introduction by Berenice A. Carroll and Clinton F. Fink. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909); reprinted with introduction by Allen F. Davis. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910); reprinted with original illustrations by Norah Hamilton and introduction and notes by James Hurt. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912); reprinted with introduction by Katherine Joslin. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1916); reprinted with introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York: Macmillan), 1922); reprint with introduction by Katherine Joslin. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House. (New York: Macmillan, 1930).

The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (New York: Macmillan, 1932).

My Friend, Julia Lathrop (New York: Macmillan, 1935); reprinted with introduction by Anne Firor Scott. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Forty Years at Hull-House; being “Twenty Years at Hull-House” and “The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House.” (New York: Macmillan, 1935).

Sources: Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Foreword,” in Patricia M. Sheilds, Maurice Hamington, and Joseph Soeters, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), xvi; Neil Lanctot, “Jane Addams and the Great War,” Jane Addams Papers Blog, Dec. 21, 2021; from the Jane Addams Digital Edition: Jane Addams, “Chicago Settlements and Social Unrest,” Charities and the Commons, 20 (May 2, 1908): 155-66; Jane Addams, “Has the Emancipation Act Been Nullified by National Indifference,” The Survey, 29 (Feb. 1, 1913): 565-66; Jane Addams, “Americanization,” Dec. 29, 1919.

November 1, 2023October 14, 2025

Guest Post: Hearing Addams Speak

Jane Addams with neatly styled hair sits at a desk, writing on paper with a pen. She wears a dark dress with a lace collar and cuffs, and appears focused on her work in a softly lit room.

This is a guest post by Marilyn Fischer, Professor Emerita at the University of Dayton, who specializes in political philosophy and American pragmatism. She has edited Jane Addams’s writings on peace and is the author of Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing Democracy and Social Ethics (2019). She is currently working on two additional volumes that examine Jane Addams’s writings. She is a member of the Jane Addams Papers Advisory Board.

If you want to know how Addams wrote her books, ask her relatives. Her nephew, James Weber Linn, tells us Addams would begin with her speeches, and then revise, expand, or contract the material into a coherent whole.[1] Addams’s niece, Marcet Haldeman-Julius, reminisced, “I can still hear my mother’s infectious laugh as she watched Aunt Jane initiate me into her method of ‘pins-and-scissors’ writing.”[2] Addams would have loved word processing software. Copy and paste is so much simpler than scissors and pins.

Does it matter how Addams wrote her books? There are many ways to interpret a text. One can compare Addams’s ideas to those of John Dewey or Charlotte Perkins Gilman or even Dorothy Day. One can ask if Addams’s ideas are still relevant today to solving environmental problems, revitalizing democracy, ending discrimination against women, immigrants, the poor, or the disabled. These are all worthy uses of Addams’s ideas, and have been carried out without considering how Addams constructed her texts. Yet, knowing the characteristics of Addams’s speech-making can also shift readers’ interpretations of her written texts, and is thus worth examining.

Addams gave thousands of speeches in Chicago and on lecture tours throughout the country and abroad. Her public reputation rested in large part on her speeches.[3] Manuscripts of some of her speeches are in the digital archives and the Jane Addams Papers Microfilm edition. From early in her career, Addams’s speeches were widely covered in the national press and throughout the English-speaking world. This was a world on which the sun never set, as the British Empire was at its height. News coverage typically included lengthy excerpts of what she said. Sometimes Addams spoke for up to an hour; often she shared the platform with multiple speakers who were each allotted a mere ten minutes. Addams’s challenge was to engage the audience so they didn’t fall asleep or walk out, while saying something substantive enough to provoke new ways of thinking and imagining. Here I focus on three characteristics of Addams’s speech-making with which she engaged her audiences: orality, compression, and “circling round and spiraling out.” She carried these techniques into her written articles and books.

Orality: Consider how Addams’s initial audiences heard her and the spaces in which she spoke. These ranged from intimate gatherings of a few dozen, to packed auditoriums that seated thousands. At the time, before radio and television, commentators spoke of the power of public addresses as “a mystical form of electricity.”[4] The electricity began with the speaker, whose diction, movements, and tones amplified her words’ meanings. Its power went out to the audience who felt its voltage reverberate in others’ murmurs, cleared throats, cheers, or hoots.[5] Hearing is intimate, as another’s voice enters one’s own body.[6] As a result, speaker and audience think and feel and respond together, all at once.

The age of eloquence and oratory had not yet closed.[7] Public addresses educated, entertained, and built—or maybe fractured—communities, all at the same time. Addams’s audiences took part in many of these practices. They participated in religious revivals, attended politicians’ hours-long debates, and cheered or booed labor agitators. They were practiced at listening to and absorbing eloquent speech. Students memorized poetry and great speeches; their repertoire could include thousands of lines of poetry and orations.[8] Addams was ready for them. She had studied oratory and rhetoric in college, when, as historian Carolyn Eastman notes, “training in oratory was indistinguishable from training as an actor.”[9] In college, Addams was on the debate team and participated in oratory contests.[10] Because Addams constructed her books around her speeches, we can think of her books as “undelivered speeches,” best approached through the ear, as well as the eye.[11]

Addams’s audiences felt her power. Of her talk, “Philanthropy Won’t Do,” the reporter for the Indianapolis Journal wrote, “Miss Addams’s personality is an immediate bid for the interest of an audience; and the sympathy in her face, voice and manner would warm the cockles of the most unaltruistic heart.”[12] The Times of Oswego, New York reported that no one was bored by Addams’s hour-long talk on settlements, stating, “She is a fluent speaker, with a crisp, vigorous, incisiveness of style that makes her speech a delight; and her broad culture, warm humanitarianism and keen insight into social problems impart a most convincing air to her words.”[13] Addams used her presence on stage to create relations with her audiences that would engage their emotions and imaginations, as well as their intellects.[14]

Speech is more powerful when it is vivid and concrete. Addams used stories to accomplish this. Now she could cite statistics as well as any sociological data-collector, and she usually tucked several of them into her texts. But statistics send little electricity from speaker to audience. Addams clothed the data with faces and bodies in particular situations. Addams did not begin her speech, “Child Labor and Pauperism,” with a catalog of data, or even with scenes inside exploitive workplaces. She began by placing her listeners where they often were, on the streetcar at six p.m., as men, women, and children poured out of factories at end of shift. Addams remarked, “The boys and girls have a peculiar hue, a color so distinctive that any one meeting them on the street even on Sunday in their best clothes and mixed up with other children who go to school and play out of doors, can distinguish almost in an instant the children working in factories. There is also on their faces a something indescribable, a premature anxiety and sense of responsibility which we should declare pathetic if we were not used to it.”[15] Her audience members had likely seen these children often, without ever really seeing them. The story startled them into recognizing that evidence of child exploitation was all around them, written on the faces of children they saw.

Black-and-white photo of children and adults working in a crowded cellar, filling and handling bottles near large barrels and wooden crates. The environment appears busy and cluttered with bottles and supplies. — Young children working in a bottle factory in Chicago– https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/theodore-dreiser-s-sister-carrie-and-the-urbanization-of-chicago/sources/1639

Addams aimed deeper than to increase her audiences’ sense of duty toward others. She aimed to change their fundamental moral and perceptual sensibilities, their ways of perceiving the world and themselves, and of their sense of relationship with others. These sensibilities are the soil out of which opinions and duties grow, or wither. Commenting on a speech by suffragist Anna Howard Shaw, Addams said, “It was a wonderful lesson in speech-making, not to desire to make an exposition of what you believed or did not believe, but absolutely to persuade your audience from one point of view, if you possibly could, to another point of view.”[16] For Addams to do this, she needed to enter each audience’s mode of perception, and use what they knew and valued and believed, so as to open them to others ways of knowing, valuing and believing. Appealing to their emotions, their sympathies, and imaginations was just as important as appealing to moral codes or their capacities for logical reasoning.

A woman in a floral dress with a white bonnet carries colorful flower baskets on a pole across her shoulders. The cover reads The Ladies Home Journal, January 1910, price fifteen cents. — Cover of the January 1910 Ladies Home Journal issue in which “Why Woman Should Vote” appeared.

Knowing all this complicates the interpretive task for scholars today. We read Addams’s writings to find out what she thought. Her writings contain her thoughts, but not directly. A good example is the opening paragraph of her widely read essay on suffrage, “Why Women Should Vote.”[17] Addams begins by stating how people had long believed that a woman’s “paramount obligation” was to the home, and that was unlikely to change.[18] Recent scholars have used that statement to locate Addams in the maternalist, conservative wing of suffrage advocates.[19] However, good rhetor that she was, Addams began her talks by identifying common ground with her audience, and using that as a springboard to lead them to different ways of imagining the world. Addams wrote “Why Women Should Vote,” for the Ladies Home Journal, the most widely read magazine in the U.S. at the time. Its primary audience was middle and lower-middle class women, generally homemakers, and likely opposed to women’s suffrage, who saw women’s place as in the home, not in the dirty world of politics.[20] Addams didn’t lie; but she made her opening statement capacious enough that most everyone could find room for themselves inside it.[21] She then led her readers step by step into the lived realities of women like her immigrant neighbors who desperately needed the vote in order to provide their families with clean water, untainted food, and streets that were not fouled with garbage.

Compression: The second characteristic of Addams’s speech-making and writing, is compression. When speakers have only a short time to be substantive, what do they do? They leave out whatever they can, and rely on the audience to fill in the gaps. Because Addams and her audiences lived at the same time and place, they shared a great number of associations. The briefest mention could bring all that to mind. When Addams addressed an anti-imperialism protest rally in April 1899, she could simply say, “We suddenly find ourselves bound to an international situation.”[22] She did not need to tell the audience that the U.S. was deep in the muck of the Philippine-American War, or that the U.S. economy and their own economic well-being were deeply dependent on international trade, or that the navies of the European imperial powers were hungrily circling the Philippines, in case the U.S. should pack up and leave.[23] To Addams, these facts made the typical response of others in the American Anti-Imperialist League untenable, as they counseled the U.S. to just pull out.[24] Regardless of what the U.S. did with the Philippines, it would still be entangled in the international situation. And when Addams threw in the line, “Government is not something extraneous, consisting of men who wear gold lace,” her audience immediately knew she was mocking British and American imperialism.[25] At the time, the amount of gold lace on a military uniform marked the wearer’s rank. This was a sign of hierarchy and on order maintained by force, rather than through democratic egalitarianism. Addams’s image, now obscure, was a potent element in her protest against the U.S. becoming an imperial power.

A cartoon-style drawing of a grinning navy officer in a blue uniform stands on a ship deck, holding a telescope. A flag and crossed sabers appear in the top right corner. The background shows water and distant land. — “A is an Admiral. observe his gold lace. He is fond of good things, you can tell by his face.” (The Comic Military Alphabet: Army, Navy, National Guard, by DeWitt C. Falls, 1894 (Hathi Trust).

Compression gives space for the audience to think along with the speaker. Alexander Bain, author of Addams’s college rhetoric and composition text, praised brevity and devoted a whole chapter to how to achieve it.[26] He included the pointer that “things well-known [can be] recalled by brief allusion.”[27] Bain also stressed the power of indirect speech noting, “The device of suggesting, instead of openly expressing, . . . give[s] a starting-point to the thoughts.”[28] Compression engages listeners’ and readers’ imaginations to fill in what is omitted. They become active participants in the event, rather than passive receptors. In effective speech-making, “nailing it down” is a weakness, not a strength.

Compression is a technique used by literary writers and especially by poets, the most aural of literary artists. Addams’s writings were considered poetic. A portrait of Addams in Collier’s National Weekly notes, “She writes hardly a paragraph but is shot through with poetry.”[29] Settlement resident, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, wrote in her review of The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets for Political Science Quarterly, “Miss Addams’s recent book continues the note of realism suffused with imagination which characterizes all her utterances, whether oral or written. . . . [It] is her most lucid and poetical expression.”[30] If this be true, then Addams’s writings should be approached as works of art, as much as works of philosophical and sociological analysis.

Circling Round: The final characteristic of how Addams spoke and wrote I’ll call “circling round and spiraling out.” The image comes from William Hard, a journalist with the Chicago Tribune who heard Addams’s convocation address at the University of Chicago. He wrote to her, “I seemed to stand in the center of the subject and to revolve slowly round with a philosopher at my side.”[31] James Weber Linn, Addams’s nephew, commented that among the clashing opinions held by the many strong characters residing at Hull House, “only Jane Addams, perhaps, [could see] everything from everybody’s point of view.”[32]

A young girl stands between long rows of spinning machines in a textile mill, wearing a dress and apron, with loose cotton scattered on the floor in a dimly lit industrial setting. — Girl working at the Globe Cotton Mill in Augusta, GA. (National Child Labor Committee, Lewis Hine Photographs, Library of Congress)

Addams turned circling round into a style of speaking and writing. She could circle round multiple viewpoints in a brief paragraph, a chapter, or an entire book. Because Addams primarily addressed white, middle-class audiences, the demographic to which she herself belonged, she did not have the credibility, or “ethos,” as Aristotle called it, to denounce white, middle-class conventions as Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Frederick Douglass did, both of whom were born enslaved.[33] By circling round, though, Addams could spell out the hypocrisies of the people she was addressing. She demonstrates this in her speech, “Child Labor and Pauperism,” mentioned above. Addams uses this topic to charge her middle-class audiences with grotesque levels of moral irresponsibility. The cumulative weight of her circlings is far heavier and more densely layered than saying, “Those poor children. Let’s help them.”

Addams does this by identifying herself with the audience, “we” do this, “we” neglect that. On each circling round, she inserts personal stories and research data to demonstrate the following stack of conclusions: 1) Child labor robs the future of what belongs to it—the potential future strength and capacities of today’s children. 2) Today’s child laborers are tomorrow’s paupers—adults incapable of holding a job who must depend on agencies and local governments to support them. Addams reinforces her claim with the salvo, “No horse trainer would permit his colts to be so broken down.” 3) By allowing industries to underpay children and adults, you allow your industries to be “parasitic on the future of the community,” creating “the pauperization of society.” 4) Finally, child labor “pauperizes the consumer” (i.e., her audience members), by flipping the roles of giver and recipient of charity. For, as she states in the most personal of tone: “If I wear a garment . . . for which the maker has not been paid a living wage . . ., then I am in debt to the woman who made my cloak. I am a pauper and I permit myself to accept charity from the poorest people of the community.” All of this, Addams charges, “debauches our moral sentiment, it confuses our sense of values.”[34] By noting Addams’s circling round, one sees that Addams’s speeches say less about the ostensible topic of child labor and pauperism, than builds a case, step by step, for middle-class Americans’ utter failure to take responsibility for the kind of society they live in.

Four women in early 20th-century clothing and hats walk together on a cobblestone street, smiling and chatting, with a vintage streetcar in the background. — Young girls leaving a shoe factory in Chicago, 1910.

In some passages the compressing and the circling round happen so fast, today’s readers hardly see it. In The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, a book largely derived from speeches, Addams gives a vivid portrait of young adolescent girls giggling as they walk down the street, wearing “preposterous clothing.” One has on a “huge hat, with its wilderness of bedraggled feathers.”[35] Why, one might ask, is Addams bothering about adolescent fashion? Why is she being so stuffy and moralistic? First, the compression: Addams omits to say what her readers already knew, that concerned citizens immediately identified the huge hat as advertising the girl’s sexual availability, and the fact that she walked down the street unchaperoned was a sure sign she was looking for johns.[36] Instead of sharing the moralistic concerns of these citizens, Addams uses the hat as a device to lay a heavy charge against them.

Immediately before describing the girl with the hat, Addams mentions the “unrestrained jollities of restoration London” that broke out as soon as “the soldiers of Cromwell shut up the people’s pleasure palaces.”[37] She didn’t need to tell her readers that the mid-seventeenth century “jollities” were disastrous days of chaos and disorder that broke out just after Oliver Cromwell (literally) lost his head. Addams immediately followed her description of the hat with its bedraggled feathers, saying, “the variation from the established type is at the root of all change,” an allusion to Darwin’s theory of how new species are generated. She quickly adds, “It is only the artists who see these young creatures as they are—the artists who are themselves endowed with immortal youth.”[38] This was a common trope, that artists have privileged access to reality’s underlying truth.

Addams, without being pedantic, uses the girl with the hat to celebrate adolescent sexual energy as a fount of renewal for a society grown weary. By circling round the hat, she uses the collective weight of history, biology, and artistry to chastise concerned citizens for wanting to suppress a vital source of life. By leaving her texts incomplete, Addams invites her readers to construct them with her. And they—the texts and the readers—are more powerful because of it.

Does all of this matter? To better interpret Addams should we start listening to audiofiles of Addams’s speeches and writings, uncompress her passages, and map her circlings round? I think it does matter, though more for some questions than others. To begin with, following these patterns reveals Addams’s character. She had a rapier wit, a delicious sense of irony, and at times was blazingly sarcastic. All of that is right there, on the page, though seldom seen.

Many people today are interested in Addams because they see her activism and her ideas as resources for bringing about social change. Addams was a first-rate public intellectual. Addams’s attention to selecting her vocal register, vocabulary, images, and examples so as to communicate most effectively with each specific audience she addressed is a worthy model to emulate.

Finally, attending to Addams’s use of orality, compression, and circling round leads to profound interpretations of Addams’s thought that are otherwise missed. Hearing Addams speak as well as studying what she wrote will enable us to enter into her thought and life more deeply.

—Marilyn Fischer

——————-

[1] Linn, Jane Addams, 116.

[2] Marcet Haldeman-Julius, Jane Addams as I Knew Her, 16.

[3] Louise W. Knight, “An Authoritative Voice,” 221; Linn, Jane Addams, 242.

[4] Eastman, “Conclusion: Placing Platform Culture,” 187.

[5] Eastman, “Conclusion: Placing Platform Culture,” 187.

[6] John Dewey made this point, writing, “The connections of the ear with vital and out-going thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator” (The Public and Its Problems, 371.)

[7] See Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement, Chapter 1.

[8] Eastman, “Conclusion: Placing Platform Culture,” 190-191.

[9] Eastman, “Conclusion: Placing Platform Culture,” 191.

[10] Knight, Citizen, 87, 95, 98.

[11] The notion of an “undelivered speech” comes from Arnold, “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” 170.

[12] “Philanthropy Won’t Do.”

[13] “Settlement Work and Its Results.”

[14] In other words, Addams made use of ethos, pathos, and logos, as called for in classical rhetoric.

[15] Addams, “Child Labor and Pauperism,” 115.

[16] Addams, “Address on Anna Howard Shaw,” 7.

[17] A google search for “Why Women Should Vote” shows that it is still widely read today, as it is posted on many history websites and academic websites.

[18] Addams, “Why Women Should Vote,” 21.

[19] For scholars who regard Addams as a maternalist, and among the more conservative of the suffrage advocates, see Schultz, “Introduction,” xli; Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, 1-13. Nackenoff claims that Addams used maternalist rhetoric for strategic reasons (“New Politics for New Selves,” 131). Hamington regards “Why Women Should Vote” as “the most conservative of her appeals for women’s enfranchisement” (The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, 69).

[20] Waller-Zuckerman, “‘Old Homes, in a City of Perpetual Change,’” 717.

[21] Addams was following the principle articulated by Bain, “As in argument, so in oratory generally, there must be some common ground to work upon” (English Composition and Rhetoric, 214). Addams’s introduction and line of argument in “Why Women Should Vote” is startlingly different from the ones she used in suffrage addresses to very different audiences. See “Women’s Clubs and Public Policies,” an address to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs; and “The Larger Aspects of the Woman’s Movement,” for the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

[22] Addams, “Democracy or Militarism,” 35-36.

[23] For a succinct summary of the Spanish-American War and the war in the Philippines, see Herring, The American Century and Beyond, 11-31; Trask, “Introduction”; see also Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 97, 221-234, 241-247.

[24] For a discussion of the Anti-Imperialist movement see Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States. For transcripts of the speeches given with Addams’s address, see The Chicago Liberty Meeting. Addams’s address, “Democracy or Militarism,” is on pp. 36-39.

[25] Addams, “Democracy or Militarism,” 38.

[26] Bain, English Composition and Rhetoric, 66-73.

[27] Bain, English Composition and Rhetoric, 67.

[28] Bain, English Composition and Rhetoric, 62.

[29] “Portrait of a Woman,” 11.

[30] Simkhovitch, Review of The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 555.

[31] William Hard to Jane Addams, January 15, 1905.

[32] Linn, Jane Addams, A Biography, 135.

[33] Bryan, Slote, and Angury, The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide, 95; Knight, “Looking In from the Outside.”

[34] Addams, “Child Labor and Pauperism.”

[35] Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 8.

[36] The Chicago Vice Commission included several examples of girls engaging in sexual acts in order to buy hats costing many times their weekly salaries. See Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago, 78, 204, 210.

[37] Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 7.

[38] Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 8, 9.

References

Addams, Jane. “Address on Anna Howard Shaw,” Nov 13, 1919, typed manuscript, digital edition.

Addams, Jane. “Child Labor and Pauperism.” National Conference of Charities and Correction, Proceedings (1903): 114-21. Digital edition.

Addams, Jane. “Democracy or Militarism,” in The Chicago Liberty Meeting, 35-39. Chicago: Central Anti-Imperialist League, 1899.

Addams, Jane. “The Larger Aspects of the Woman’s Movement.” American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 56 (1914): 1-8. Digital edition.

Addams, Jane. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. New York: Macmillan, 1909.

Addams, Jane. “Why Women Should Vote.” Ladies Home Journal 27 (January 1910): 21-22. Digital edition.

Addams, Jane. “Women’s Clubs and Public Policies,” General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Biennial Convention Official Report (1914): 24-30. Digital edition.

Arnold, Carroll C. “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40 (2007): 170-187.

Bain, Alexander. English Composition and Rhetoric, a Manual. American Edition, Revised. New York: D. Appleton, 1867.

Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, Nancy Slote, and Maree De Angury, editors. The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Chicago Liberty Meeting. Chicago: Central Anti-Imperialist League, 1899.

Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. 1927. In John Dewey: The Later Works: 1925-1953: vol. 2, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. 235-372. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.

Eastman, Carolyn. “Conclusion: Placing Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century American Life.” Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Angela G. Ray and Paul Stob. 187-201. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2018.

Haldeman-Julius, Marcet. Jane Addams as I Knew Her. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1936.

Hamington, Maurice. The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Hard, William to Jane Addams, January 15, 1905. Digital edition

Herring, George C. The American Century & Beyond: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1893-2014. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. New York: Hill and Wang. 2000.

Knight, Louise W. “An Authoritative Voice: Jane Addams and the Oratorical Tradition.” Gender & History 10 (August 1998): 217–251.

Knight, Louise W. “Looking In from the Outside, or A Few Angles on Rhetoric and Change.” Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric’s Change, edited by Jenny Rice, Chelsea Graham, and Eric Detweiler. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press and Intermezzo, 2018. (an ePub; no pagination)

Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Linn, James Weber. Jane Addams: a Biography. 1935. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Mink, Gwendolyn. The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Nackenoff, Carol. “New Politics for New Selves: Jane Addams’s Legacy for Democratic Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century.” in Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy, edited by Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, and Wendy Chmielewski, 119-142. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

“Philanthropy Won’t Do.” Indianapolis Journal, July 5, 1900, p. 3.

“Portrait of a Woman,” Collier’s: The National Weekly 43 (April 10, 1909): 11.

Schultz, Rima Lunin. “Introduction.” In Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast. xix-lx. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

“Settlement Work and Its Results.” Times (Oswego, New York), March 28, 1905, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, reel 55, frame 1306.

Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury. “Review of The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Political Science Quarterly 25 (Sept 1910): 555-556.

Stob, Paul. William James and the Art of Popular Statement. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.

Tompkins, E. Berkeley. Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890-1920. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 1970.

Trask, David F. “Introduction.” The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, edited by Spencer C. Tucker. xxix-xxxiii. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2009.

Vice Commission of Chicago. The Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions with Recommendations by The Vice Commission of Chicago. Chicago: The Vice Commission of Chicago, Inc., 1911.

Waller-Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. “‘Old Homes, in a City of Perpetual Change’: Women’s Magazines, 1890-1916.” The Business History Review 63 (Winter, 1989): 715-756.

August 15, 2023February 11, 2026

Guest Post: What B. R. Ambedkar Wrote to Jane Addams

Black and white portraits of two people side by side: on the left, an older woman with short hair and a serious expression; on the right, a man with glasses in a suit and tie, looking to the side.

This is a guest post by Scott R Stroud, an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction (2023), which has also been published by HarperCollins India as The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B.R. Ambedkar (2023). This post was originally published on August 3 by the South Asian American Digital Archive and we thank them for permission to reprint here.

The Indian politician and anti-caste activist Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956) was heavily influenced by his experiences in the U.S. and England. He was partially shaped by his expansive education there, studying at institutions such as Columbia University, London School of Economics, and Gray’s Inn. Of this set of institutions, his time in New York perhaps had the most influence on him. It was at Columbia that he was exposed to a range of progressive thinkers, not the least of which was the American pragmatist, John Dewey. While there are many ways that Dewey’s pragmatism mattered for Ambedkar’s thought over the following decades, there is another figure in the pragmatist tradition that has an overlooked connection to Ambedkar: Jane Addams (1860-1935).

It is often thought that Ambedkar left New York in the summer of 1916 for London and that he did return to the U.S. until much later in his life—in 1952 when Columbia bestowed upon him an honorary degree. This is not accurate, however. On December 5, 1931, a few days after the conclusion of the second Round Table Conference, Ambedkar left London and sailed for New York. The exact purpose of this visit is hard to divine, but he ended up spending much of his time near Columbia University until he left for London on January 4, 1932.¹

It was during this month in New York that Ambedkar penned a letter to Jane Addams on December 15, 1931.² The letter is written on Ambedkar’s own stationary, and its return address reveals that Ambedkar was staying at the International House at 500 Riverside Drive near the Columbia campus he roamed as a student. This building was constructed in 1924 with the funding of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to create a diverse learning and living environment for the growing numbers of international students at Columbia. In all likelihood, Ambedkar was able to stay there for the duration of his short visit given his status as an international alumnus.

Image used with permission of Prakash Ambedkar and the Jane Addams Papers Project.

Why did Ambedkar write Addams in 1931? His ostensible purpose was to wish her “a full and speedy recovery from your distressful illness.” Perhaps Ambedkar was reminded of her importance to causes parallel to his own given that she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1931. On the day of her receiving this award, she was also admitted to a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, to deal with her continuing ill health. She had been battling to regain her health ever since she suffered a heart attack in 1926. Both news of her health and her award made the papers around the globe, so Ambedkar surely heard of Addams through the media.

Ambedkar also knew of Addams from John Dewey’s classes at Columbia. In John Dewey’s 1915-1916 classes, Philosophy 131-132 “Moral and Political Philosophy,” Ambedkar and his fellow students (including the Chinese reformer, Hu Shih) heard their professor praise Addams’ 1902 book, Democracy and Social Ethics, in support of his claim that democracy implicated a wide range of community relationships beyond the political.³ Addams was an important part to the diverse tradition of American pragmatism, and she was set apart by the unique endeavor of running the settlement Hull House in Chicago. Settlement houses were part of a social movement that started around 1890 to alleviate poverty and suffering brought on by rapid industrialization. Social workers and activists would establish community centers in which they lived side-by-side with poor local residents and tried to improve the living conditions of the surrounding community. Addam’s Hull House is one of the most successful American instances of this movement. It was when Dewey was in Chicago that he became friends with Addams and familiar with Hull House. Addams was not simply working for the improvement of the condition of women, immigrants, the poor, and those who might suffer from the violence of war; she also wrote and thought about the philosophy that stands behind such activism.⁴ Addams’ thoughts on nonviolence and democracy influenced Dewey, as Dewey’s ever-growing body of work influenced Addams in turn.

When Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, he remained friends with Addams and a supporter of the settlement movement. Addams continued with her work and expanded into international peace advocacy. Her decades-long efforts against international conflict, as unpopular as they were during the Great War, earned her the Nobel recognition in 1931.

Ambedkar’s letter, however, focuses on her illness and makes no overt mention of her award. It does seem implied however, since he tells Addams “Your life of devotion to the submerged of the world has been the inspiration and encouragement for us all even in darkest India.” Ambedkar seems aware of her settlement work to alleviate the burdens of the poor in Chicago at Hull House, as well as the care for those in other nations evinced by her peace-building work in America and Europe. Perhaps he also knew of her trip to India in 1923, a visit where Addams was largely exposed to the figures and movements fixating on Indian self-rule, and not on the battle against untouchability. Addams was a friend and correspondent of Gandhi’s, but the two were unable to meet on this trip because he was imprisoned at the time.

Addams did not seem to prioritize, or even know much about, the social evils of caste. Ambedkar seemed motivated in his letter to not only wish her improved health, but to introduce himself and his anti-caste cause. Indeed, he starts the letter referring to himself “as a representative of the sixty-millions of downtrodden untouchables in India.” Ambedkar seemed motivated to put the social issue of caste on Addams’ mind with his references to the size and state of the mass of humans oppressed by these long-rooted and oppressive matters of social custom. Caste limited and dehumanized most of those caught in the grips of its hierarchy, but this function was often missed by Americans like Addams.

What do we make of this letter? In archives in the U.S. and in India, I have found no evidence that Addams sent a reply to Ambedkar’s letter of December 15. Nor is there any record of future correspondence between these two thinkers. Addams, of course, was deluged with congratulatory letters and telegraphs after her receipt of the Nobel Prize; combined with her uncertain health and hospitalization, it’s no surprise that she did not write back to the Indian civil rights leader.

From this letter, however, we can see something of Ambedkar’s motivation. He not only introduced himself and his cause in the letter, he hoped for a personal audience with Addams. “I devoutedly [sic] hope,” he writes at the end of the letter, “that your recovery will come within the limits of my short stay in America to permit me to present my humble respects in person.” There’s no evidence that they ever met, and Addams’ health and residence elsewhere lead us to think she did not meet Ambedkar in New York. But we can guess that Ambedkar sought a meeting with Addams not only to congratulate her, but also to build bridges between her settlement and peace work and his struggle against untouchability and caste oppression. We know that Ambedkar would later (in the 1940s) try to build similar bridges to leaders in the civil rights movement such as W.E.B. Du Bois.

Perhaps Ambedkar wanted to convince Addams that eradicating untouchability was an overlooked part to the Gandhian quest for Indian self-rule or swaraj that she was so taken by.⁵ Or perhaps Ambedkar wanted to compare strategies on settlement houses and their use in the Indian context. After all, he had most likely long known about settlement houses—the settlement house figure, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, was married to Ambedkar’s economics professor, Vladimir Simkhovitch. Mary Simkhovitch directed Greenwich House in New York and was friends with Addams. She and Vladimir lived at the Greenwich Village settlement during the week, and often brought Vladimir’s students to visit it. Ambedkar may have heard about her settlement activities or even visited it during his enrollment in one of his five courses from Vladimir at Columbia. In any case, we see Ambedkar initiate a series of hostels and educational organizations that similarly aimed to educate and support the lower classes (and castes) in India upon his return in the 1920s. Like Addams and Simkhovitch, as well as Dewey, Ambedkar saw the power in a holistic education that involved classes, books, as well as edifying social activities outside of formal education.

The pragmatists are a diverse lot. But one of the themes that drives Addams, Simkhovitch, and Dewey is vitally important: life was educative and intelligent action could further shape the course of experience to maximize its effects on our habits and communities. Ambedkar felt the power in this commitment, and he would often argue in his writings for a view of democracy as a way of life or a matter of our habits of associated living with our fellow humans. Addams’ ideas of social reform were a noteworthy attempt to refine harmful social habits and customs, and Ambedkar surely saw her as a fellow traveler. This overlooked letter to Addams highlights Ambedkar’s drive to internationalize his mission and to connect the battle of caste to the oppression of women, the poor, and to peace-making in general.

§§§
The author would like to thank Prakash Ambedkar, Kishor Walanju, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Marilyn Fischer for their assistance with this article.

Footnotes
1. These dates are derived from the account in K. N. Kadam, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Significance of His Movement (Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1991) and Vijay Mankar, Life and the Greatest Humanitarian Revolutionary Movement of Dr B.R. Ambedkar: A Chronology (Nagpur, Blueworld Series, 2009). I have found no evidence of meetings between Ambedkar and his Columbia contacts (including Dewey) during this time.
2. This letter can be found in the Jane Addams Papers. It was brought to my attention by the Addams scholar, Marilyn Fischer, who knows this massive set of documents very well. No biographies note the existence of this letter.
3. For information on the courses with John Dewey and their content, see Scott R. Stroud, The Evolution of Pragmatism in India (University of Chicago Press & HarperCollins India, 2023).
4. For more on Addams as a philosopher, see Marilyn Fischer, Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics” (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2019).
5. Addams would continue to advocate for Gandhi’s movement in her correspondence and writings after 1923, and Gandhi would write her about various matters. Gandhi reprinted some of her work in edited volumes. For more on the relationship between these two thinkers, see Elizabeth N. Agnew, “Jane Addams, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Promise of Soul Force,” Peace & Change, 45 (4), 2020, 481-512 and Tim Gilsenan, “Peacemakers & Friends: Jane Addams & Gandhi,” October 6, 2013.

June 27, 2023September 29, 2025

Get a Clew: Changes in Word Spelling

A classical painting of a woman in a flowing dress sitting and gesturing toward a man in ornate armor and a red cape; they appear to be in conversation next to a large window with a distant landscape.

I have always been a prolific reader, engrossed in anything from a geometry text book, fantasy novel, or whatever I could get my hands on. After absorbing so many words, I think it only natural that I eventually wondered where our words began, how they must have evolved, and when they could have changed. My yearning to explore this new fascination and my need to spend as little money possible on this endeavor culminated in the discovery of my long-time favorite podcast: The History of English Podcast (THEP), written, produced, and hosted by Kevin Stroud.

Stroud, a practicing attorney, began THEP in 2012 by discussing Indo-European, a language that would branch off and evolve into many European languages, including modern English, spoken before any alphabets were created to express its unique set of sounds and grammar. This was the perfect recreational listening for me; not only was I surrounded by words, but learning the complex history behind those words gave me a feeling of appreciation for the English language I had not previously known. The podcast successfully guided me away from my work day, filling me with knowledge about a topic so far removed from Jane Addams and 20th century Progressive politics that I could only be amused when Episode 12 pulled me right back to her papers.

Just a week prior to listening to Episode 12, I had come across Pleads for Suffrage, April 17, 1906, an article written by Addams in support of women’s suffrage. Near the end of this article, she states:

“So many of the stumbling blocks against which we fall are the opportunities to which we have not adjusted ourselves. We keep hold of a convention which no longer squares with our genuine insight into life and we are slow to follow a [clue] which might enable us to solace and improve the life about us because it shocks an obsolete ideal.”

In this paragraph, we the editors have bracketed the word “clue” to express an effort to regularize unusual spelling for the sake of readability and searchability in our digital edition; the word was originally spelled “clew.” At the time I read this article, I bracketed the unorthodox spelling without a second thought. Addams incorporated several unconventional spellings in her correspondence and other writings, such as “inclosed” instead of “enclosed”, or “altho” instead of “although”, and I believed this instance to be another drop in this bucket of the quirky, irregular 20th century spellings she employed.

Map showing the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age, with land and sea trade routes connecting Mycenaean Greece, Crete, Troy, the Hittite Empire, and Egypt, labeled with major cities and regions. — Map Prepared by Louis Henwood for The History of English Podcast, Episode 12. This map shows the flow of renewed migration of Indo-European tribes in the region north of Greece in and around the Balkans.

Episode 12: Early Greek, Hittite and the Trojan War of THEP, originally released in August of 2013, set out to discuss the Minoan civilization living on the island of Crete, just south of modern day Greece, and their mythical king, Minos, for whom the society was named after. According to legend, Minos was in possession of a powerful half man, half bull creature called a Minotaur which he kept in a purposefully complicated cave, or labyrinth, as a prison. Eventually, a Greek prince, Theseus, offered to kill the beast. In order to avoid becoming lost in the maze of the labyrinth, he used a ball of thread, given to him by King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, and tied one end to the cave’s door. After defeating the Minotaur in the center of the maze, Theseus used the thread to find his way back to its entrance, left Crete without Ariadne, and sailed back to his home in Athens. This thread used by Theseus to escape the labyrinth, or any ball of thread or yarn, was historically called a “clew.”

According to Stroud, this story became wildly popular in the Middle Ages, during the time Old English was spoken. Authors used the idea of a “clew” being employed to solve a maze or a puzzle so often, eventually the word could mean either a ball of thread or yarn, or a figurative hint or guide depending on the context. In modern English, beginning around the late 16th century, two separate spellings emerged for the seemingly unrelated definitions, with writers eventually substituting the Middle English ending of “ew” with the French associated ending of “ue” for the latter meaning. Today, the word “clue” has lost its figurative status, and fully refers to an actual hint to a solution of a problem.

Looking back at Addams’s usage of the word “clew” with this newfound knowledge, we can make some guesses as to her choice of spelling. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling “clew” was being used to refer to a figurative hint or guide as late as 1855. There is a real possibility that Addams, born only five years later in 1860, may have picked up the word’s earlier usage and incorporated it into her lexicon. In either case, the meaning of the word leans heavily toward a hint or guide, no matter how figurative it may be, leading editors to choose “clue” over “clew.”

The battle editors face between fidelity and accuracy when transcribing a text is often fought on a delicate rope. We can only hope that the choices we make help bring Addams’s ideas to a larger audience, and give some kind of [clue] into the world of Progressive era activism.

By Victoria Sciancalepore
Assistant Editor

Sources: About the Host, The History of English Podcast; Episode 12: Early Greek, Hittite and the Trojan War, The History of English Podcast; Jane Addams to Miss Leppo, December 28, 1907, Jane Addams Papers Project; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, May 19, 1902, Jane Addams Papers Project; Pleads for Suffrage, April 17, 1906, Jane Addams Papers Project

March 16, 2023September 29, 2025

The Tense of Historical Editing (Or, The Death of Jane Addams)

When you edit the documents of a historical figure, you live with them as their life progressed, chronologically. They are alive with you, day in and day out, as you edit their correspondence and other papers, sometimes paused in a very concentrated place and time in their lives. As a result, I have an odd habit of thinking and speaking about the subjects of my work in the present tense. Jane Addams has been dead eighty-eight years, yet here I am in the present, for example, recording in the detailed life chronology I am creating for her: “takes the train from Paris to Marseilles.”

As I type that entry for Jan. 11, 1923, Jane Addams, in my mind, is stepping on that train. Right now she is finding her seat and beginning a conversation with her traveling companion Mary Rozet Smith. Perhaps they are talking about the RMS Kaisar i’Hind, the steamship they will meet in the Port of Marseilles that will sail them to India. Maybe they are already thrilling at the prospect of the white marble of the Taj Mahal glinting in the moonlight.

See, even my tense construction in the previous paragraph writes Jane Addams alive, at a moment in her life when she is anticipating an exciting vacation in her immediate future. And I am right in there with her on that train, dreaming of the Arabian Sea, Darjeeling and Mt. Everest, and the markets of New Delhi. I cannot wait to see what she will see. Now that I think about, maybe what my unusual problem with tense really means is that I am the one out of time. Jane Addams is not alive in my present. Rather, I am alive 100 years in the past with her.

You might think I need therapy. Maybe you just need to borrow my time machine: the editing of historical documents.

Anyway. I digress.

When I joined the Jane Addams Papers in 2017, I began working on documents from 1901 when Jane Addams was 41-years-old, in her prime, younger than I am, and with so much important work and life ahead of her. At first, her death never occurred to me at all, like it probably never occurred to her in 1901, either. She was too busy to die then, and I was too busy getting to know her for her to die.

I am now working in the 1920s and recently began proofreading transcriptions of documents from late 1922 to early 1923, when Addams was setting off on a grand tour of Asia. During that trip, she experienced a serious health scare. A lump in her breast and emergency surgery in Tokyo reminded the world and Jane Addams (and me) that she was a mortal woman. The tumor was benign, and she recovered, but I did not. I was coming on fast to her death, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the acknowledgment of it grew a lump in my throat. For me there is an empathy for a subject that I develop in the day-to-day examination of a life, and I am the kind of historian who has been known to cry over death or tragedy that happened to people who were long dead before I was even born.

I suspect there are at least a few other editors or biographers or historians like me who feel a human connection with the past, but I will admit such an emotional reaction is probably quite strange. Perhaps even ridiculous, and so I swallowed the lump in my throat and decided to face Addams’s death and get over it. I jumped ahead to May 1935 and spent a couple hours looking at Addams’s calendar and reading the documents we have for the last month of her life.

Three women sit together at a table, engaged in conversation. They each have glasses of water in front of them and appear to be at a formal event or gathering. The image is in black and white. — Eleanor Roosevelt, Rose Hull (the wife of Secretary of State Cordell Hull), and Jane Addams at the WILPF dinner, May 2, 1935, Washington, DC. [Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1935]

On May 1, Jane Addams arrived in Washington, DC, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). As the founding president of the League, she was the honored guest at luncheons, participated in two international radio broadcasts, and attended a gala dinner hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt.

She was in frail health at this time, her heart still weak from a heart attack and the grief of losing her life partner, Mary Smith, who died of pneumonia in February 1934. Yet in Washington, she appeared radiant. In photos of these events, Addams is lovely, a silver-haired woman of seventy-four years commanding all audiences. In one photo, she has the undivided attention of the First Lady, and in another she is depicted with a rare smile upon her lips, enjoying a conversation with a gaggle of female reporters.

Four women sit on a sofa, engaged in conversation. Three of them wear hats and coats, while the woman in the center wears dark clothing. Two women are holding notepads and pens, appearing to take notes or interview. — Jane Addams, with Anna Wilmarth Ickes (daughter of old friend Mary Wilmarth and wife of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes) on her right, and surrounded by journalists in Washington. [The Springfield (OH) Daily News, May 2, 1935]

Jane Addams returned to Chicago on May 5 and holed up at her friend Louise de Koven Bowen’s home to complete the book she was writing about Julia Lathrop, her deceased friend and fellow reformer. In the following days, she presided over a Hull-House dinner for about sixty residents to tell them about her trip to Washington, worked on the manuscript and some correspondence, visited with friends, and attended a meeting and a lunch at Hull-House. On May 14, Addams went to Mercy Hospital to see an ailing Hull-House employee, penned her last known letter, and enjoyed her final dinner at Hull-House.

At 2:45 a.m. on Wednesday, May 15, Jane Addams awoke with a sudden, severe pain in her abdomen, but she did not call for help. When Louise Bowen woke up a few hours later, she found her friend quite unwell. Addams was running a fever, the doctors arrived, Addams felt a little better, failed again, and still more doctors. At 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, May 18, an ambulance delivered Jane Addams to Chicago Passavant Hospital, her dear friend Dr. Alice Hamilton traveling with her. When Louise Bowen arrived at the hospital soon afterward, Addams, who was sitting up in her bed reading a book, said to her worried friend: “Don’t look so solemn, dear.”

Later in the morning, Addams underwent surgery to remove a blockage in her bowel. She survived the surgery, but she would not survive the cancer. Over the next forty-eight hours, Addams was in and out of consciousness. On May 19, Weber Linn, Addams’s nephew, wrote his brother Stanley Linn, who lived in California: “Aunt Jane is old, she has done a great work, and she has never been the same since Mary Smith died.” The next day, Alice Hamilton wrote to Grace Abbott: “There is something I have told only Mrs. Bowen and Weber Linn and nobody is to be told of it, for all of JA’s doctors are agreed that she herself is not to know. She will not get well, she may have a few months of comparative comfort but if she lives on, it can only mean pain, it is quite hopeless.”

At 3 a.m. on Tuesday, May 21, Hamilton telephoned Weber Linn to come to the hospital immediately. By the time he arrived, his beloved aunt had slipped into a coma. Louise Bowen arrived at the hospital at 7 a.m. to join the daylong vigil. At 4:14 p.m., Bowen sent a telegram to Stanley Linn: “Your aunt is dying cannot last more than an hour would not advise coming much sympathy.” Bowen, Hamilton, Weber Linn, and a few Hull-House residents kept to the bedside for two more hours, until 6:15 p.m., when the good heart of Jane Addams stopped beating.

Jane Addams was dead. I could now return to where I was when I went off on this odd little death tangent. January 1923. I add the next entry in the chronology for Jan. 12: sails at 5 a.m., bound for the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, and onward to India.

By Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Sources: Evening Star (Washington), May 2, 1935, 3, 22; “Peace Leader Honored at Dinner,” Evening Star, May 3, 1935, 3; “First Lady at Dinner for Jane Addams,” The Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1935, 11; “Jane Addams, [74], Undergoes an Operation,” Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1935, 1; “Jane Addams Gains; Hope for Recovery,” Chicago Tribune, May 20, 1935, 1; Alice Hamilton to Grace Abbott, May 20, 1935, in Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 353; Jane Addams to Esther Loeb Kohn, Jan. 11, 1923, Jane Addams Digital Edition; from Jane Addams Papers Microfilm: NBC International Broadcasts, Celebration of WILPF, May 3 and 4, 1935 (26:1519-20); Jane Addams to Grace Abbott, May 14, 1935 (26:1547); James Weber Linn to Stanley Linn, May 19, 1935 (45:1249); Louise de Koven Bowen to Stanley Linn, May 21, 1935 (45:1251); Certificate of Death (cause: intestinal obstruction from cancerous lesions), May 21, 1935 (27:1049); and Alice Hamilton, Account of Jane Addams’s Last Days, May 1-21, 1935 (45:1279-80). Addams’s book, My Friend Julia Lathrop, was published posthumously in November 1935.

February 12, 2023September 29, 2025

Jane Addams and Abraham Lincoln

On June 27, 1923, Jane Addams had a mastectomy, and the world held its breath. She was the most beloved woman in the United States and was respected worldwide for her reform work and efforts for international peace. News about this serious threat to her health spread rapidly in newspapers across the globe, and telegrams and letters filled with get-well wishes poured into Tokyo, where she and her partner Mary Smith had been traveling when the tumor in her right breast was discovered.

Newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane published a syndicated article on the day of her surgery, closing with: “If pure goodness, unselfishness and devotion count in Heaven as we believe they will do, Jane Addams will have a seat in front of Washington, Jefferson and many others, and very likely next to Lincoln.”

Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and Jane Addams in 1914, both at the age of 54. Images courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Addams’s recovery was painful and long, but the tumor was benign and she would live another twelve years, publish three more books, preside over two more international women’s congresses, and win the Nobel Peace Prize. However, already in 1923 the historical significance of Jane Addams was under consideration. Her name could sit comfortably in a sentence with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And she was on the level with Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln and Jane Addams were worlds apart. He a man of the nineteenth century. She a woman of the twentieth. Yet their stories are connected. Their lives overlapping, their experiences across 126 years of American history were lived in the midst of revolutionary political, social, and economic change, his old-world nineteenth-century contexts evolving into her modern twentieth-century contexts. Both Lincoln and Addams were inspired by books and craved knowledge. Each of them had compassionate hearts and carried the weight of their country’s problems upon their shoulders. Both were shaped by historical events while at the same time making history by their own determined actions.

In accepting an invitation to speak on the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 1909, Addams wrote: “I have always been a Lincoln enthusiast.” Classic Jane Addams understatement. Abraham Lincoln was, in fact, a figure who rooted her, who guided her work to define her place and her purpose. She drew inspiration from Lincoln’s life for the entirety of her own. She was born in Illinois exactly one month before Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Her father John Addams knew Lincoln well and supported his candidacy. One of Jane Addams’s earliest childhood memories was of the gate in front of her home in Cedarville draped in black crepe and her father weeping over President Lincoln’s death. So important the spirit of Lincoln in her life and her chosen path of social settlement work that in her autobiography Twenty Years at Hull-House she included a entire chapter entitled “The Influence of Lincoln,” in which she wrote:

Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.

In her reform work, Jane Addams connected democracy to human progress. Like Lincoln, she understood that the betterment of society meant the expansion of democratic institutions and the full inclusion of a growing number of the nation’s citizenry. She believed that equality was the answer to modern society’s most pressing problems. She saw her settlement work and efforts for social justice as an extension of the ideals Abraham Lincoln articulated.

Let [the law] become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.—Abraham Lincoln, Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum Address, Jan. 27, 1838.

That the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom.—Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19, 1863.

With malice toward none and charity for all.—Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1865.

Addams studied Lincoln, drew inspiration from his words, expanding their purpose to meet the challenges of her rapidly changing world. She applied the underlying ideals of democracy Lincoln articulated into her philosophy of social ethics to include women and immigrants. She developed those ideals into her own creative and ambitious brand of humanitarianism.

Perhaps it is woman who can best testify that the honor of women is only secure in those nations and those localities where law and order and justice prevail.—Jane Addams, “Respect for Law,” The Independent, Jan. 3, 1901.

Most immigrants have come to America because they wanted more opportunity for themselves and their children; because they believed that this was a land of freedom and equality. It is a grave matter to [willfully] destroy the ideal with which they came to us…—Jane Addams, “The Immigrant and Social Unrest,” speech in New Orleans, Apr. 19, 1920.

Our various charitable and benevolent societies and institutions, our laws for the preservation of life and health, all work to teach us the value of human life, and when this new, this broader humanitarianism, is spread worldwide, war will be a moral impossibility.—Jane Addams, “Newer Ideals of Peace,” syndicated newspaper article, Spring 1904.

Some of the activities in which Jane Addams participated were directly related to Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. After the devastating race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, Addams was the following year one of the signers of the Lincoln Birthday Call for racial equality that established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At Hull-House, there was an Abraham Lincoln Club and a large mural of Lincoln painted on the wall of the settlement’s theater. In 1913, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Addams published a scathing critique of America’s failure to live up to the promise of racial equality. And in 1920, Lincoln Memorial University, charted as a living memorial to Abraham Lincoln, conferred on Addams an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Over the years, Addams quoted Lincoln and connected his political positions to her reform ideas. She spoke at numerous Lincoln birthday events and put on some of her own, inviting W. E. B. Du Bois to deliver a lecture about Lincoln at Hull-House in Feb. 1907. She frequently evoked Lincoln’s legacy, like she did in 1921 in her remarks at the dedication of the woman suffrage statue of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. The suffrage statue had been placed in the U.S. Capitol next to the one of Abraham Lincoln, which had been sculpted by a woman, the artist Vinnie Ream. Addams could not resist drawing a direct line to history: “It is fitting that they should stand next to the great emancipator of another group, who has also long since transcended national boundaries,” she said.

Most of the time, however, I think that Abraham Lincoln was in the background, quietly reinforcing all that Jane Addams knew was honest and right. Her interpretation of the past, her work for a better present, and her aspirations for a brighter future world were all her own. Knowing history gave Addams confidence in her own convictions. Whether she was arguing for child labor laws, better working conditions for women, justice for immigrants or Black Americans, freedom of speech, world peace, or woman suffrage, her perspective and her ideas for improving the lives of America’s most vulnerable citizens were always rooted in a long view of history. Jane Addams was a woman who understood the past, but she was a woman who faced forward, pressing toward the future.

Yet during times when the weight of the world was too heavy, she was not afraid to draw inspiration from her idols. When she doubted herself and felt helpless to answer the big human troubles right in front of her, she glanced back over her shoulder, to Abraham Lincoln. She did just that in the violent summer of 1894, when the Pullman Strike was tearing Chicago apart. In her autobiography Twenty Years at Hull-House she wrote:

I recall during a time of great perplexity in the summer of 1894, when Chicago was filled with Federal troops sent there by the President of the United States, and their presence was resented by the governor of the state, that I walked the wearisome way from Hull-House to Lincoln Park—for no cars were running regularly at that moment of sympathetic strikes—in order to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently placed at the entrance of the park. Some of Lincoln’s immortal words were cut into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted town more sorely need the healing of “with charity [for] all” than did Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who had won charity for those on both sides of “an irrepressible conflict.”

It is a romantic reflection, I know. But there is profound truth in it, too. I often visit the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield or the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to find my own magnanimous council in an effort to soothe my sorrows or to silence my doubts. Like Addams, I have also experienced the solace of a quiet visit with Mr. Lincoln in the form of that magnificent statute in Lincoln Park to which Jane Addams was drawn 129 years ago. There is a magic in communing with our admired spirits of the dead. Thinking about Jane Addams making that four-mile, sultry-summer walk from Hull-House connects me to her and to Lincoln in a very human way that anchors my own study of the past. I can imagine Addams making that journey, walking at an ambling pace, her mind thinking about and her heart breaking over the striking workers and their families, the people feeling most keenly the unrest and uncertainty in Chicago. Perhaps she walked north most of the way up Halsted Street, through immigrant neighborhoods and by tenements and storefronts and quiet streetcar platforms, all the way to North Avenue, before turning right, eastward toward Lake Michigan. Arriving then at the extreme southwest corner of Lincoln Park, she made her way into the urban oasis of green space and to the twelve-foot bronze statute. It was a purposeful, meditative walk back to the past to clear the cobwebs of the present.

The threads of history are ties that bind us across the generations, and the best leaders view history as a teacher, making meaning from the past and drawing inspiration from the human beings who went before us. It is a pleasing harmony to me the spirit songs of Abraham Lincoln and Jane Addams, linked to each other, and it is my honor and privilege as a historian to have studied them both.

By Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Other Sources: Louise Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 357-58; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 52-56; Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 162-65 The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 1:3-4; Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1:112, 7:18, 8:333; Lincoln Memorial University, Honorary Doctor of Laws, May 1920, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, 45:863; Documents in Jane Addams Digital Edition: Respect for Law, Jan. 3, 1901; Newer Ideals of Peace, Feb. 19, 1904; Jane Addams to W. E. B. Du Bois, Jan. 26, 1907; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Jane Addams to Joseph A. Bache, January 9, 1909; Address at Abraham Lincoln Center, Feb. 9, 1909; Call for a Lincoln Conference on the Negro Question, Feb. 13, 1909; Autobiographical Notes upon Twenty Years at Hull-House: A War Time Childhood, Apr. 1910; Has the Emancipation Act Been Nullified by National Indifference, Feb. 1, 1913; The Immigrant and Social Unrest, Apr. 19, 1920; Jane Addams to William Edward Dodd, May 12, 1920; Address at the Presentation Ceremony of the Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, Feb. 15, 1921; Mary Rozet Smith to Esther Linn Hulbert, June 2-27, 1923; Heaven Wide Open, June 27, 1923. Image of the Lincoln statue in Lincoln Park, courtesy of Ron Schramm, Lincoln in Illinois (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Assoc., 2009), 3.

Speakers at the dedication of the suffrage statue in the U.S. Capitol, Feb. 15, 1920: Speaker of the House Frederick H. Gillett, Jane Addams, and poet Sarah Bard Field. I love it that the statue of Abraham Lincoln is looking on. He was in favor of woman suffrage, you know, advocating for it in an 1836 speech when he was campaigning for reelection in the Illinois House of Representatives (Collected Works, 1:49). Image courtesy of the Records of the National Woman’s Party, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

November 9, 2022September 29, 2025

Say, What?!!!

Black and white portrait of Jane Addams with a neutral expression, wearing a large, elaborate hat and a dark outfit. The image appears old and has a grainy texture.

One day I was proofreading transcriptions of Jane Addams documents, spending a typical day at my desk, when I came across this paragraph in a letter from a Swiss man named Alfred Kammermann:

As I have no relations, where I could find a young lady, who would give me her heart, I respectfully request you to bring me in connection with [an] intelligent serious, kind-hearted young lady, if possible with a certain fortune, who is [prepared] to become my wife. I was thirty yesterday.

Say, what?!!!

Yes, Jane, I made that face, too; and I read the letter again because I could not believe it said what I thought it said. But it did, indeed, say precisely what I thought it said. This male correspondent, writing from Bern, Switzerland, on Dec. 27, 1921, was asking Jane Addams, a world-renowned reformer, to hook him up with a woman. I have been working at the Jane Addams Papers Project for nearly six years, and I have proofread nearly 7,000 documents and read a few thousand more (FYI: we currently have 14,608 documents in our online database!). People wrote Jane Addams asking for all kinds of things—for advice or for money, to speak to their groups, to use her name in a particular cause, or to give them an introduction to someone; and there was one request from a man asking Addams to talk his wife into reconciling with him. But this is the first letter I have seen asking Jane Addams to find a man a wealthy wife.

Good Grief. What kind of a fella writes such a letter?

Well, Alfred Kammermann, who was born in Bern, Switzerland, addressed his letter to Addams as the President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), so this is likely how he knew who she was. Addams had been writing about the food crisis in Europe and lecturing widely on serious problems Europeans faced after the World War. Kammermann was, presumably, following international relief work and was an informed person. He had written to Addams before about a plan he had to educate war orphans; and although we don’t have a reply to his first letter, Jane Addams’s secretary Anna Lloyd apparently wrote Kammermann on Oct. 20, 1921, that he should see Emily Balch, the Executive Secretary of the WILPF, in Switzerland to further discuss his educational scheme. Kammermann was clearly concerned about and interested in the conditions of war-torn Europe.

Kammermann’s full letter of Dec. 27 offers some additional clues. He was currently unemployed and looking for meaningful work. He was eager to “leave in earnest the business line,” which he had taken up to support himself, but for which he had no “real interest.” He told Addams that since his early youth it was his longest wish to work for the benefit of mankind.” Kammermann also mused that some other such “project of education” might be acceptable to him or, perhaps, Addams could just give him a job with the WILPF.

After discussing himself and his reform interests, Kammermann then set up the big request:

I have still a very great, delicate and especially unpolite request, which you however will certainly understand and therefore kindest excuse, if I tell you that I work without success since then years for social problems. If I shall not [lose] soon all my energy to combat further on, I must have somebody on my side, who encourages me. Having lost my beloved mother fifteen years ago at Xmas, I have no body, to whom I can have fullest confidence.

Ooo, boy.

And then he wrote the sentence that prompted this blog post, which I will repeat because it is so good in its unusualness:

As I have no relations, where I could find a young lady, who would give me her heart, I respectfully request you to bring me in connection with [an] intelligent serious, kind-hearted young lady, if possible with a certain fortune, who is [prepared] to become my wife. I was thirty yesterday.

Kammermann then apologizes (as well he should!):

Please do not consider it as an unpolite request, but please try to understand my feeling.

The end of the letter reads like a thousand other letters I’ve read: polite and not at all weird:

May I by this opportunity offer you, though too late, my sincerest congratulations for a happy New Year, trusting that you may always enjoy of best health and of a happy futurity. Trusting to be honoured with an early and favourable reply, and thinking you in advance very sincerely for your great kindness, I have the honour to be, dear Madam, Very respectfully Yours, Alfred Kammermann.

Apparently, Jane Addams did not answer Kammermann’s Dec. 27 letter, because he wrote her again on Jan. 18, 1922, asking her to confirm receipt of his letter of Dec. 27. In his January letter, Kammermann asked for help in obtaining a loan to begin his educational scheme. He does not mention his previous request for a wife. Whew. Maybe he took better hold of his senses.

There is no evidence at all Jane Addams helped this poor lonely guy find a wife because, of course, she would not have done so. For the purposes of this quick blog post, I was unable to do the kind of research necessary to figure out if Alfred Kammermann ever realized his goals to educate war orphans or ever married. Quick searches in a few online databases yielded nothing but a Swiss document indicating Kammermann was born in Bern in 1891 and traveled to Shanghai in February 1920. Not enough information to understand him. From the ten letters related to Kammermann in the Jane Addams Digital Edition (JADE), we know that in late 1922 he put together a fairly detailed proposal for educating European orphans and shopped it around. In the proposal he argued:

The whole world is in duty bound to adopt and support a scheme for the education and well-being of the thousands of unfortunate war orphans, many of whom suffered great hardship and untold misery, from which they have not yet been able to escape.

Kammermann was, it seems, a caring man, concerned for the welfare of humanity. On Sep. 23, 1922, Emily Balch wrote Kammermann:

Miss Addams and I read your proposition about the education of war orphans with great interest, but as we are obliged to restrict our work very strictly to the programme of our league as defined in the enclosed leaflet, we are sorry not to be able to deal with it officially or in public. We keep your letter filed among our documents and shall be glad to show it to any of the guests of Maison Internationale interested especially in this nation.

I don’t know if Kammermann ever got his project to educate war orphans off the ground. Nor do I know if he ever found a wife (I hope so). Part of me wishes I did know the answers. Part of me suspects he failed on both counts. Drawing from the phrasing of his letters and reading between the lines, to me he seems to have been something of a lost soul, groping for purpose. Kind of like this blog post, groping for purpose beyond being amused by this poor lonely guy hoping Jane Addams would introduce him to a good woman.

Sometimes the incoming letters we collect lead to significant stories that illuminate fascinating historical contexts, and sometimes they offer only mildly interesting vignettes that make us smile.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Swiss Overseas Emigration, 1910-1953, Records on ancestry.com; letters from the Jane Addams Digital Edition: Alfred Kammermann to Jane Addams, Nov. 23, 1921; Dec. 27, 1921; Jan. 18, 1922; Aug. 23, 1922; and Oct. 6, 1922; Alfred Kammermann to Emily Greene Balch, Aug. 23, 1922; and Oct. 4, 1922; Alfred Kammermann, “Proposition for the Education of War Orphans in Europe,” Aug. 1922; Emily Greene Balch to Alfred Kammermann, Sep. 23, 1922; Adolf Finkler to Jane Addams, July 9, 1921, and Sep. 16, 1921. Image of Jane Addams looking weary, courtesy of Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1905, 3.

August 31, 2022October 14, 2025

“A Reasonable Request”

Two women in white dresses march in a parade pulling a cart with boxes and a sign reading Woman Suffrage, while people watch from the sidewalk and a streetcar is visible in the background.

I am an impatient woman, which makes me feel particularly indebted to patient women like Jane Addams who struggled year after year after year to convince men to give them the right to vote. I salute those women and whisper to their spirits that I am grateful for their patience and that it is lucky good they didn’t have to count on me. I would have wanted to bonk upside their heads those men in power who looked on, made fun, and kept saying “NO!” That the suffragists stayed the persistent course in the face of persistent rejection in order to gain a right so obvious (yes, even back then it was obvious) is heroic to me. I would have found it quite impossible to maintain for decades the energy it took to keep advocating, educating, marching, lobbying, writing, and coming up with new arguments and new nonviolent activities to bring awareness to the injustice of men denying women the right to vote, only to fail in that effort over and over and over again.

Suffragists were superheroes. They are my superheroes.

However, I must admit that it is a challenge sometimes to study the woman suffrage movement knowing how many freaking years it was going to take to be successful. It is hard to see some of the suffrage activities through the long and winding history of the movement as anything other than futile. But, thankfully, there are some suffrage efforts so inspired, so bursting with wisdom and enthusiasm that I wish I could have been there fighting with those goddesses of persistence.

Take the 1909 suffrage train from Chicago to Springfield as one shining example.

In the spring of 1909, there were three suffrage bills bouncing around like playground balls in the Illinois State Capitol, because there were a few suffrage supporters among the men in the Illinois General Assembly (Senators William M. Brown and Charles L. Billings, along with Rep. James M. Kittleman, all of Cook County, for example, each introduced suffrage bills). One such measure was a long-shot constitutional amendment to grant universal suffrage to Illinois women. There was also a Senate bill to allow Illinois women to vote in city and state elections, which had little-to-no support in the House. And there was the Chicago Municipal Suffrage Bill to give women in Chicago the right to vote in city elections. Illinois suffragists understood that the constitutional measure was on par with “when pigs fly,” but they were hopeful for the third measure and praying for the second, which would render the third measure moot.

Enter Superhero Catharine Waugh McCulloch.

A black-and-white portrait of an older woman with light hair, styled up, wearing a high-collared lace blouse and an embroidered jacket. She looks calmly at the camera against a dark background. — Catharine Waugh McCulloch, c. 1907

McCulloch, a lawyer and justice of the peace in Evanston, Illinois, was chairman of the Legislative Committee of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association. In order to raise public awareness of the suffrage bills and hit members of the Illinois legislature with reasoned arguments, coming at them from every angle imaginable, she spearheaded a star-studded, public spectacle, suffrage extravaganza. The event was to start in Chicago with a special suffrage train filled with the “wisest and most influential women” in Illinois, continue with whistle-stop suffrage speeches in six cities on the way to Springfield, and culminate in a public hearing of joint committees of the Illinois Senate and House of Representatives at the State Capitol Building. It would be the biggest, boldest lobbying effort of the Illinois suffrage movement to date, a giant push to collect new converts to the cause.

A typed document titled The Opening Week details logistics and objectives for a Woman Suffrage event in Springfield, Illinois, including hotel info, a reception, and three measures for advancing womens voting rights. — Illinois Equal Suffrage Association Flyer, c. April 1909

Superhero Jane Addams was one of the other women leading the charge.

Addams was a member of the municipal suffrage committee in Chicago. In January the committee set up headquarters in the Stratford Hotel and “began the work of canvassing the entire city for the right to vote.” They held Saturday morning meetings and covered the city with posters. In February, Addams sent a suffrage postcard to her sister, writing: “Doesn’t this look as if our new movement was coming on?” The suffragists in Illinois were turning up the heat, as Addams declared in March: “There are plenty of things we need in this country for the protection of the health and the morals of our people. We could have them if we would ask for them, but the men won’t ask for them, and the women cannot.”

A vintage flyer shows a woman holding a Votes for Women banner, promoting a lecture by Ethel M. Arnold on The Progress of Women in Europe at Music Hall on February 27, with ticket prices listed.

A black and white scan of a vintage postcard from 1909. The postcard features handwritten text and addresses, with postmarks from Chicago, Illinois and Girard, Kansas visible. — Postcard, Jane Addams to Alice Haldeman, Feb. 23, 1909

The women would, therefore, descend upon Springfield to make the case. On Tuesday, April 13, the special train, costing $5.50 for the round-trip fare and with a reported 150 suffragists on board, left Chicago on the Chicago & Alton Railroad at 10:30 in the morning. The train arrived at the first whistle stop in Joliet an hour later. Leading a group of four women who addressed a crowd at the Alton Depot of several hundred from a platform at the rear of the train, Jane Addams said:

“For many years the women have gone to Springfield, and in fact to all the capitals in the United States, asking for the right of voting. Their enfranchisement is no longer considered a radical move. The adherents of the move have steadily grown in numbers until today the movement has assumed an important position throughout the world. The women of today are treated in many ways the same as men. They have equal responsibilities and should be enfranchised. In Finland, which is a part of Russia, there are women in the parliament. It is hard to believe that America would be behind such a country in a matter so important. Belgium, England, and English colonies are giving more and more rights to women, and Illinois should not be in the rear. We ask reasonably for your sympathy in this movement. You have representatives in the legislature. Those men are anxious to please their constituents. A delegation of women is not going to have much weight with them, but your wishes will. We ask you to use what influence you have for our cause. It is but a reasonable request.”

A reasonable request, indeed.

A group of people in vintage clothing stands beside a train car, posing and waving for the camera. The scene appears to be from the early 20th century. — Suffrage Train, leaving Chicago for Springfield, April 13, 1909

After the rousing stop at Joliet, the suffrage train continued on, stopping in Pontiac, Lexington, Bloomington, Atlanta, and Lincoln. Greeted by large crowds at each depot, the women took turns on the rear platform making their case for the vote. The Joliet News called them the “Conquering Heroines.”

At the hearing the next day, Senator Kittleman gave the chair and gavel to Jane Addams, who introduced each of the nineteen suffrage speakers, all women except for one. Each of the speakers made their unique arguments in favor of woman suffrage grounded in their own particular experiences. The sheer magnitude of this brilliant lobbying effort was inspiring. By way of celebrating all the superheroes who took part I offer the full roster of speakers and the titles of their speeches:

Ella Stewart

“Increasing Evidence that Women Want the Ballot,” Ella Stewart (1871-1945), President of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, married to Oliver Stewart, a former member of the Illinois legislature
“Changing Public Opinion toward Municipal Suffrage,” Elia W. Peattie (1862-1935), Chicago Tribune literary editor
“The Indirect Benefits of the Ballot,” Anna Nicholes (1865-1917), settlement worker and clubwoman
“The Ethics of Equal Suffrage,” Prof. Herbert L. Willett (1864-1944), University of Chicago Professor of languages and literature
“The Lack of the Ballot the Handicap of the Working Girl,” Agnes Nestor (1880-1948), a trade union organizer representing the International Glove Worker’s Association
Agnes Nestor, 1914
“The Need of the Ballot for Working Women,” Margaret Dreier Robins (1868-1945), President of the Chicago branch of the Women’s Trade Union League
“The Woman Official and the Ballot,” Catharine Waugh McCulloch (1862-1945)
“The Farmer’s Wife and the Ballot,” Norah Burt Dunlap (1856-1932) a clubwoman from Savoy, Illinois
“The Professional Woman and the Ballot,” Marjorie Gomery of Rockford, Illinois
“The Foreign Woman and the Ballot,” Lilian Anderson, (b. c. 1883), a librarian at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois
Julia Lathrop, Jane Addams, and Mary McDowell in Washington, D.C., lobbying for woman suffrage, 1913
“The College Associations for Equal Suffrage,” Harriet Grimm (b. c. 1886), who earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1908
“Church Interests and Suffrage for Women,” Eugenia Bacon (1853-1933), a clubwoman from Decatur, Illinois
“The Ballot for Women and Progressive Legislation,” Mary McDowell (1854-1936), director of the University of Chicago Settlement
“The Experiences of the Chicago Municipal Suffrage Campaign,” Mrs. William Hill
“Improved Sanitary Legislation and the Ballot,” Dr. Caroline Hedger (1868-1951), a Chicago physician
“The Justice of Equal Suffrage,” Rev. Kate Hughes (b. 1854), minister of a church in Table Grove, Illinois, and former president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association
Elizabeth Hawley Everett, c. 1909
“The Attitude of the Illinois Club Woman toward Equal Suffrage,” Elizabeth Hawley Everett (1857-1940), President of Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, Highland Park, Illinois
“Modern Philanthropy and the Ballot for Women,” Flora Witkowsky (1869-1944), President of Jewish Chicago Women’s Aid
“The Ballot for Woman and Legal Protection of Children,” Harriet Park Thomas (1865-1935), Secretary of the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago

None of the measures about which the speakers hoped to inspire legislative action that day passed into law. However, the suffragists won some allies and shifted momentum in their favor. They showed up and they proved they were in it to win it. They were determined to persevere, and just because I know it would take another four years until Illinois women would win voting rights does not render that suffrage train and hearing futile. The superhero suffragists did not get what they wanted in April 1909, but they made some serious noise and changed the game. The suffrage train of 1909 and the hearing orchestrated by the dynamic Catharine Waugh McCulloch and conducted by the cool and collected manner of Jane Addams was the dramatic beginning of the final push.

Nineteen cheers for these nineteen superheroes. And a hundred cheers for their persistence.

The legislative suffrage campaign in Illinois had begun in 1891 with a failed vote on a constitutional amendment to grant woman suffrage, continuing with more failed bills in 1893, 1895, 1897, 1901, 1903, 1905, 1907, and 1909. Finally in 1913, the Illinois legislature voted on S.B. 63 to grant women aged 21 and older full presidential and municipal suffrage and partial state and county suffrage. The vote in the Senate was 29 to 15 in favor of passage. In the House, the successful vote was 83 to 58. The suffragists had never wilted in the face of rejection. They were persistent. They kept on asking for the vote. And on June 26, 1913, when the bill became law, Catharine Waugh, Jane Addams, and all the other suffrage heroes finally got the answer they deserved.

Four women in white dresses and hats march in a suffrage parade, carrying a large banner and boxes labeled votes for women on a stretcher, while a crowd and a streetcar are visible in the background. — Men watching women marching for suffrage in New York City, Oct. 23, 1915

Sources: Steven M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 1850-1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 174-82; Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 560-65, 623-26, 634-36, 846-49; Martha G. Stapler, ed., Woman Suffrage Year Book (New York: National Woman Suffrage Association, 1917), 16, 29; 46^th Illinois General Assembly, listed in John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 265-67; Laws of the State of Illinois (1913). 333; “An Act to confer the right to vote at municipal elections upon women citizens of the city of Chicago,” Mar. 23, 1909; Journal of the House of Representatives of the 46^th General Assembly of the State of Illinois (Springfield: State Printers, 1909), 324; “An Act granting women the right to vote at certain elections,” Jan. 11, 1910, Journals of the Senate and House of Representatives, Special Session of the 46^th General Assembly (Springfield: State Printers, 1910), 86, 218; “Petticoat Diplomacy,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 17, 1908, p. 7; “Chicago Suffragettes to Stop in Joliet Thirty Minutes,” The Joliet Evening Herald-News, Apr. 8, 1909, p. 3; “Crowds Gather at Stations,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 14, 1909, p. 3; “Critic Fires Hot Blast at Suffragists,” The (Chicago) Inter Ocean, Apr. 14, 1909, p. 1, 3; “The Conquering Heroines Came,” The Joliet News, Apr. 15, 1909, p. 3; Illinois Equal Suffrage Association Flyer, c. April 1909, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm Edition, 41:1082; and from the Jane Addams Digital Edition (JADE): Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, Feb. 23, 1909; Jane Addams Says that American Women are Slower, March 19, 1909; Woman Suffrage Is Needed in Chicago, March 24, 1909; Jane Addams to Agnes Nestor, April 9, 1909; Jane Addams to Agnes Nestor, April 9, 1909; Address to Women’s Suffrage Rally at Joliet, Illinois, April 13, 1909.

Images: Elizabeth Hawley Everett in Illinois Club Bulletin 1 (Oct. 1909): 2; Lathrop/Addams/McDowell, Nestor, Ella Stewart, and NYC parade, all from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs; Suffrage Train from The (Chicago) Inter Ocean, Apr. 14, 1909, p. 3: Postcard, JADE.

August 18, 2022September 29, 2025

Powering the Jane Addams Papers!

Black and white portrait of Jane Addams with light hair pulled back, wearing a high-neck lace blouse. Text at the top reads Jane Addams copyright by E.F. Waters 12-2-22.

We are delighted beyond words to announce that the Jane Addams Papers has received two major grants.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission awarded us $160,000 in support for 2022-2023. The NHPRC’s program in Publishing Historical Records in Collaborative Editions has been a stalwart supporter of the Project and has published many papers projects that document the lives of women. Funds from this grant help support the salaries of editors working on the Jane Addams Digital Edition.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded us a three-year $300,000 grant (2022-2025). The NEH’s program in Scholarly Editing aids in the publication of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams as well as our work on the digital edition. The NEH’s support for historical editions has enriched the study of our nation’s heritage tremendously.

Black and white portrait of Jane Addams with light hair pulled back, wearing a high-collared lace blouse and a dark dress, looking to the left. The photo appears vintage and formal. — E. B. Waters portrait of Jane Addams (1902) Library of Congress

A Challenge: How You Can Help

Our new NEH Grant offers a way for you to help power the Addams Papers. The NEH will provide us with an additional $150,000 in matching funds if we can raise $150,000 from private sources. These much needed funds are needed to support the salaries of our student workers, research costs, and the editorial salaries that aren’t covered by the NEH and NHPRC.

We are currently short-staffed, with fewer student assistants than usual. Your support will ensure that we meet our goals for 2022-2023:

Entering over 1,000 new Addams documents with descriptive metadata in the Jane Addams Digital Edition.
Transcribing over 1,000 new Addams documents for the digital edition.
Proofreading student work to ensure quality before publication.
Submitting Volume 4 of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams to the University of Illinois Press.
Continuing research on Volume 5 of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams.
Working with high school teachers to develop AP resources.
Researching and writing biographies and descriptions of the people, organizations, events and publications mentioned in the Jane Addams Digital Edition.

So, if you can, please donate now. Your contributions will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the NEH and will power the students whose work makes all of this possible.

Thanks for your support!

July 27, 2022October 14, 2025

Guest Post: A Tale of Many Cultures: Clara Landsberg’s Experiences at Hull House

Black and white portrait of a woman with dark hair pulled back, wearing a light-colored top. Above her head is a large handwritten signature that reads Clara Landsberg.

This article in its entirety was published in Volume 46, No. 3 Summer 2022 edition of Chicago Jewish History, a quarterly publication of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society and is being reprinted with the permission of the Society.

A Tale of Many Cultures: Clara Landsberg’s Experiences at Hull House with Eastern European Jewish Immigrants and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Social Workers

by Cynthia Francis Gensheimer

Clara Landsberg, a Jewish-born teacher, social worker, and pacifist, lived at Hull House in the room directly adjacent to Jane Addams’s for roughly 20 years and made significant contributions to the Chicago settlement house. However, scholars have paid scant attention to her story until now, perhaps because she never sought prominence during her lifetime.[1] While researching her connection with Bryn Mawr College as part of a larger project on early Jewish women students at the Seven Sisters schools, I have discovered that shortly after graduating in 1897, Landsberg left Judaism to become Episcopalian. Afterward, she maintained ties with her influential Jewish parents but also became a member of the nation’s Protestant elite and of an international sisterhood of pacifists. Like many leading women intellectuals and social workers of her day, Landsberg lived with her lifelong partner—a woman—in a predominantly female world. This article will provide an overview of Landsberg’s biography, with a focus on her role at Hull House.

Clara was the daughter of a Jewish power couple: Rabbi Max Landsberg and Miriam (Isengarten) Landsberg, leading Jewish intellectuals and nationally known experts on charity administration, with 30 years of hands-on experience in helping the less fortunate in Rochester, New York.[2] Clara’s parents had close working relationships with luminaries Jewish and non-Jewish, including Chicago’s Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, and Jane Addams.[3] Closer to home, Susan B. Anthony attended the Landsberg congregation’s annual interfaith Thanksgiving services and, in 1892, recommended Miriam Landsberg for a statewide position—although that position was ultimately filled by Anthony herself.[4] The Landsbergs helped lead efforts for social good in Rochester with their closest friends: the Unitarian minister William Gannett and his wife, Mary T. L. Gannett. Clara Landsberg followed her parents’ example in many ways.

Clara can be taken as a case study in the difficulties that many Jewish women of her generation would have faced in attempting to achieve the Landsbergs’ highest ideals. Clara graduated from the most intellectually rigorous women’s college on the East Coast and, through her partner, Margaret Hamilton, became a member of one of the country’s most elite Protestant families. Yet even after graduating from college and becoming Episcopalian, she was denied a job at a girls’ preparatory school because she was still considered Jewish. This discrimination against Jews, even those who had left the faith, was leveled against a young woman of eminent qualifications and impeccable manners. It belied her own parents’ fervent wish that Judaism should be considered only a religion, not a race, and that Jews should find full acceptance in American society.

Born in Rochester in 1873, Clara—and her two younger sisters, Rose and Grace—attended Miss Cruttenden’s School for Girls, which offered a rigorous college preparatory curriculum, but also equipped its students for lives of simple refinement. Although their social world was predominantly Jewish, they had Christian friends as well. At Rose’s confirmation, Rabbi Landsberg enjoined the teenagers coming of age in his Reform congregation to take a rational approach to religion and to determine their beliefs for themselves without feeling bound by tradition.[5] As the Landsberg children would have known, Susan B. Anthony and Mary T. L. Gannett had done exactly that by becoming Unitarians after growing up as Quakers.

At Bryn Mawr College, Clara met her future life partner: Margaret Hamilton, daughter of an upper-class WASP family in Fort Wayne, Indiana.[6] Clara also became acquainted with Margaret’s sisters: Alice Hamilton, who would later establish the field of industrial medicine, and Edith Hamilton, who would famously popularize classical Greek and Roman mythology.[7] Bryn Mawr, founded by Quakers, advertised itself as “pervaded by a simple and practical Christianity” and required daily chapel attendance.[8] Clara, the only Jew of the nearly 50 students in her graduating class, lived on campus and studied classical and modern languages, with a concentration in Latin and Greek.[9] After their 1897 graduation, Clara and Margaret studied abroad at the Sorbonne and the University of Munich.[10]

Around 1900, Clara Landsberg moved to Hull House, where she would room with Alice Hamilton for the next two decades.[11] By the time Clara arrived, three-quarters of Hull House’s clientele consisted of Jews from Chicago’s Near West Side and other neighborhoods.[12] These Jews—mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe—came to learn English, attend lectures and concerts, and participate in drama, music, and debate clubs.[13] Despite their apprehensions with respect to Christian proselytizing, they predominated among the 9,000 people who visited Hull House each week.[14] Clara Landsberg earned her living by teaching German and history at a local girls’ school; in her free time, she taught—and later supervised—the evening classes at Hull House.[15]

Jane Addams mentored Clara, who was initially in the unique position of being the only resident who had been born and raised Jewish. Jane Addams called her the “dean of our educational department”—in other words, supervisor of one of the settlement’s core activities.[16] In 1908, a paragraph in the Bryn Mawr Alumnæ Quarterly—likely written by Clara herself—reported that she was living at Hull House to familiarize herself with the problems of immigrants living in “crowded” quarters. Rather than describing her students as Catholic or Jewish, Clara identified them by their various nationalities: “Italian, Greek, Russian, Roumanian, Polish, Armenian, and German.”[17] She explained that they wanted to learn English not only to get good jobs, but also to “study subjects more or less remote from their daily work for much the same reasons that induce people of more fortunate neighborhoods to study Browning, Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Bernard Shaw.”[18] During her early years at Hull House, Clara introduced her students—primarily Eastern European Jews—to some of the classic works of English literature.[19] According to Jane Addams, Clara possessed “an unusual power” as a knowledgeable teacher with an unassuming, quiet presence.[20] In addition, Landsberg had “many friends among the poor people of the neighborhood who are devotedly attached to her.”[21] Two of those friends were Hilda Satt and Morris Levinson.

Hilda Satt’s life was transformed through her long association with the settlement and its residents. Hilda, who had first visited Hull House as a young teenager in 1895, later became a member of one of Clara Landsberg’s reading groups. Certain her mother would disapprove, Hilda had initially declined an Irish friend’s invitation to attend that year’s Hull House Christmas party. In her posthumously published autobiography, Hilda recalled her fear that she would be killed if she attended, because in Poland it had been dangerous for Jewish children to play outside on Christmas. She later wrote, “There were children and parents … from Russia, Poland, Italy, Germany, Ireland, England, and many other lands, but no one seemed to care where they had come from, or what religion they professed … I became a staunch American at this party.”[22]

In one of the first reading groups Clara conducted at Hull House, she ignited a love of English literature in Hilda, who spoke Yiddish at home and had left school after fifth grade to work days sewing shirt cuffs. In addition to the books Clara assigned, Hilda was soon reading “every book I could borrow.”[23] Only a few years earlier, Hilda’s English vocabulary had been so limited that she did not yet know the word “mushroom.” During a meal at Hull House, she had been served a mushroom omelet, of which she would later recall, “I was tortured with the question of whether the mushrooms were kosher.”[24] Soon, however, Hilda counted authors like Dickens and Louisa May Alcott among her friends. Months after meeting Hilda, Clara presented her with a Christmas gift of a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Hilda would later recall this as her fondest memory of “Miss Landsberg, … a fragile, ethereal, gentle woman … [who] opened new vistas in reading for me.”[25] With Clara Landsberg’s help, Hilda Satt became an exemplar of the path to Americanization and upward mobility that the settlement aimed to encourage.[26]

Another of Clara’s students, Morris Levinson, was, like many immigrants, eager to learn English and become an American citizen in the cultural as well as the political sense of the word. With Clara Landsberg as his mentor, he aspired to learn much more than basic skills of vocabulary, grammar, and usage.[27] Landsberg saved two letters that he wrote to her in 1905, while she was home in Rochester convalescing after a serious illness. In broken English, Morris expressed his concern that “Miss Landsberg” was “too sweet, and delicate, to be confind to bed of illness [sic],” reassured her that Ellen Gates Starr had taken him on as a pupil, and told her that he was studying a book she had given him to read: The Boys of 76, a collection of first-hand accounts of soldiers in the American Revolution:

I bolive I should have to know the history of this Country … I have resolved to read it over agan, so that I will remember everything better … Miss Landsberg, I bolive this history will make me a throught citesin.[28]

Morris also confided in Clara. He planned not to live solely seeking fun, “as a great many of people do,” but rather to “try to egicat [him]self as much as poseble” in order to “see the mining of this beautiful world and of the real uman life.”[29] Clara was not only a teacher but a role model for Morris Levinson: someone he admired and to whom he felt a deep sense of gratitude.

Although Hilda, Morris, and Clara had all been raised in Jewish homes, their similarities ended there. Clara’s highly educated, German-born parents spoke fluent English and shunned Yiddish. Like other Reform rabbis, Rabbi Landsberg jettisoned “superstitious forms and antiquated dogmas,” eliminating rituals he considered outmoded, such as Bar Mitzvah.^[30] He endorsed the principles adopted by the Reform movement in its Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, but, like Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch of Chicago’s Sinai Congregation, he saw them as only the beginning rather than the end. In 1893, Rabbi Landsberg spoke in Chicago at the World Parliament of Religions, endorsing an expanded role for Jewish women in congregational life.[31]

Clara’s approach to Judaism was virtually the antithesis of that of many of the Jewish immigrants at Hull House. Her father decried Orthodoxy as well as Jewish nationalism. The Jewish immigrants—familiar and comfortable only with Orthodox Judaism—rejected Reform Judaism. Even those atheists, anarchists, and socialists who spurned all religion felt a connection to Yiddishkeit and Jewish peoplehood, concepts rejected by the Landsbergs and most Reform Jews. Did these immigrant Jews nonetheless recognize Clara Landsberg as ethnically Jewish, or did they see her as one of many Protestant residents of Hull House? Might they have accepted her precisely because they had no idea she was Jewish?

Addams and her cohort respected religious differences and tried hard to make Hull House welcoming to all.[32] Yet Jane Addams was motivated by her Protestant faith—especially by the literature and culture of social Christianity, which she described as a “renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism … with a bent to express in social service and in terms of action the spirit of Christ.”[33] Addams has been criticized for failing to grasp that for many Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Judaism was far more than a religion. On the other hand, features of Hull House that Orthodox Jews would have found off-putting—the Chi-Rho cross Addams always wore, the Christian artwork on display, the lack of kosher food—would not have offended the most liberal Reform Jews such as Clara Landsberg or her mother, Miriam Landsberg.[34]

Miriam Landsberg, Hannah G. Solomon, and other German Jews mirrored mainstream America’s adulation of Addams. One of these Jewish admirers, Sara Hart, called Addams “the single, most influential citizen of my generation.”[35] Miriam Landsberg visited Hull House frequently and helped spearhead efforts among affluent Jews to establish a settlement in Rochester. In 1905, after spending several weeks at Hull House, she wrote: “I do not wonder that any one who has ever lived at Hull House cannot bear to go back to ordinary life.” She described the 21 residents (including her daughter Clara) as a “family” composed of “people of the finest minds” and life at Hull House as “simple, practical, … ideal.”[36]

Settlement work was popular among graduates of Bryn Mawr and similar colleges. Even so, it was not Clara’s first career choice. She and Margaret had wanted to teach at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, but two of the school’s most influential trustees, Mary Garrett and M. Carey Thomas (then president of Bryn Mawr College), refused to hire her because she was Jewish.[37] In 1899, Edith Hamilton (then headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School) wrote to M. Carey Thomas to apprise her of Clara’s conversion:

My sister has just written me that Miss Landsberg is about to become a member of the Episcopal church, and I have wondered whether this would make a difference in your and Miss Thomas’ opinion that we could not offer her a position because she is a Jewess.[38]

Clara Landsberg’s conversion made “not the least difference,” either to Mary Garrett or to M. Carey Thomas, as Garrett explained in her response to Edith Hamilton:

Our objection is one of policy and very few Jews employed in schools or colleges are Jews by religion; it never had occurred to us that Miss Landsberg was really an orthodox Jew. We are wholly unwilling to connect with the school in any capacity a Jew by race, and in view of our feeling of the financial unwisdom of such a step we think that Jews ought to be ruled out of court for the future in consideration of possible appointments.[39]

Yet Clara persisted. In 1900, M. Carey Thomas wrote to Mary Garrett saying, “The Jews enrage me. Is nothing in the world settled? Have Miss Landsberg & the Jews to come up perpetually. It is awfully bad policy.”[40]

Clara remained at Hull House until 1920, when a Quaker organization sponsored her to travel to Vienna to perform postwar humanitarian relief work. Two letters of recommendation finally qualified her as a WASP and (therefore) fit to represent the U.S. abroad. Jane Addams provided a ringing endorsement, and Mary T. L. Gannett was careful to specify: “As a matter of information, Miss Landsberg, during her college course joined the Episcopal Church – and as far as I know is still a loyal member of that Communion.”[41]

When Addams and her partner, Mary Rozet Smith, learned that Clara Landsberg had been accepted to the Quaker program, they both wrote letters of congratulation and farewell. Addams wrote, “I can’t bear to think of H.H. [Hull-House] next winter without either Alice [Hamilton] or yourself.”[42] Mary Rozet Smith wrote: “… no words will express … [our] sense of desolation … when we think of the year without you. … J.A. and I have decided that it is like losing a mother and a child at once. … With Alice in Boston and you in Vienna what will Hull-House be! It is too depressing to face.”[43]

Did Max and Miriam Landsberg know that their daughter was no longer Jewish? In the 1899 letter announcing Clara Landsberg’s conversion, Edith Hamilton had written, “Under the circumstances her family would prefer her not to be at home.”[44] Yet there is no proof that Clara’s parents did learn of her conversion. To all appearances, she maintained a positive relationship with her mother and father throughout their lives. In his final instructions to his children, Max Landsberg wrote, “[M]y life has been one of uniform happiness. The only serious trouble in my whole life has been the loss of my dear wife, your good mother.”[45]

As tolerant as Miriam was toward other beliefs, however, it is likely she would have cared deeply that Clara had left Judaism. At a national conference, as chair of the National Council of Jewish Women’s Committee on Religion, she worried that many German Jews were “given over entirely to materialism and indifference to all Jewish affairs.” She warned Jewish mothers that children raised without religion could “fall prey to … pious sharks … eager for souls.”[46] A few years later, she implored mothers to transmit a love of Judaism to their children “to preserve to our posterity that Judaism which gave Religion to the world.”[47] Despite Miriam’s fears, it is doubtful her daughter would have fallen prey to “pious sharks.” Rather, through exposure to Christianity at school and through her closest friends and role models, Clara rejected the most modern version of Judaism, one carefully crafted by her own parents, in favor of the Episcopal Church, which her father had criticized for what he saw as its strict adherence to ritual and creed.^[48]

Part Two of this article will discuss Clara Landsberg’s becoming godmother to Jane Addams’ grandniece, Clara’s travels with Addams, and Clara’s own work as a pacifist, which was deeply informed by her connection with Addams. It will also document her retaining ties to her birth family, even as she joined the Hamilton family as well. And it will describe Landsberg’s trip to Germany with Alice Hamilton just after Hitler had come to power. In a letter to herself documenting the onset of the Holocaust, Landsberg would write, “I am a Jewess.”

Our thanks to Cynthia Francis Gensheimer and the Chicago Jewish History for allowing us to share this article with you.

[1] Even one of Clara Landsberg’s fellow residents, Francis Hackett, seemingly forgot her surname: “Miss Clara, of Bryn Mawr vintage, valiant, tense, souffrante, at once impatient and remorseful, indefatigable and worn-out.” Francis Hackett, “Hull-House: A Souvenir,” 100 Years at Hull-House, eds. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 69.

[2] Max Landsberg, born in Berlin in 1845, was a rabbi’s son and a protégé of Abraham Geiger. American Jewish Year Book 1903–1904, 72; http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1903_1904_3_SpecialArticles.pdf. When Miriam Landsberg, who was born in Hanover in 1847, died, the American Israelite called her death a “loss to American Jewry.” American Israelite, April 25, 1912. Peter Eisenstadt, Affirming the Covenant: A History of Temple B’rith Kodesh, Rochester, New York, 1848–1998 (Rochester: Temple B’rith Kodesh, 1999), ch. 2 and 3; Stuart E. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Rochester, 1843–1925 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). At a 1910 meeting of the National Conference of Jewish Charities, during Miriam Landsberg’s term as vice-president, Jane Addams gave the opening address, and Rabbi Landsberg served as delegate representing the Jewish Orphan Asylum of Western New York, which he had co-founded and led for decades. Sixth Biennial Session of the National Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States Held in the City of St. Louis, May 17^th to 19^th, 1910 (Baltimore: Kohn & Pollock, 1910). American Israelite, February 5, 1914, 3. Rabbi Landsberg was elected president of the New York State Conference on Charities and Correction in 1910, when Miriam Landsberg was the outgoing vice-president. “Conference of Charities Holds Three Busy Sessions,” Democrat and Chronicle, November 17, 1910, 17.

[3] As chair of the Committee on Religion of the National Council of Jewish Women, Miriam Landsberg worked closely with Hannah G. Solomon, the organization’s founder. Susan B. Anthony wrote to Miriam Landsberg giving instructions for a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. and letting her know that Hannah G. Solomon and Sadie American had already arrived. Susan B. Anthony to Miriam Landsberg, February 12, 1899, University of Rochester Archives. After Hannah G. Solomon’s daughter, Helen, visited the Landsbergs in 1902, Rabbi Landsberg wrote to Hannah telling her what a “great treat” it had been to have her visit: “Helen reminds me so much of you, although she looks more like the best husband on earth.” He signed the letter, “With love for your husband and all the sisters within your reach.” Max Landsberg to Hannah G. Solomon, April 2, 1902. Helen Solomon Wellesley Correspondence, Hannah G. Solomon Family Collection, MC 749, American Jewish Archives. For the working relationship among Rabbi Hirsch, Hannah G. Solomon, and Jane Addams, see Rina Lunin Schultz, “Striving for Fellowship: Sinai’s Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch and Hull-House’s Jane Addams, A Not-So-Odd Couple,” unpublished manuscript, February 24, 2015.

[4] Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1898), 2:730. In 1891, Susan B. Anthony, Rabbi Landsberg, and Rev. William C. Gannett spoke at the annual Thanksgiving service. “The Benefits of Unrest,” Democrat and Chronicle, November 27, 1891, 6.

[5] “Rochester, N.Y.,” American Israelite, June 20, 1889, 2.

[6] For background on Bryn Mawr College, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) and Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

[7] For a significant biographical work on the nature of Clara Landsberg’s relationship with Margaret Hamilton, as well as Edith’s connection to Bryn Mawr College and the Bryn Mawr School, see Judith P. Hallett, “Edith Hamilton,” The Classical World 90, nos. 2/3, Six Women Classicists (November 1996–February 1997): 107–147.

[8] Bryn Mawr College Program 1892 (Philadelphia: Sherman & Co., 1892), 77.

[9] Clara Landsberg’s student transcript, Bryn Mawr College Archives. Religious affiliations researched by the author.

[10] Clara Landsberg’s alumna record, Bryn Mawr College Archives. Sandra L. Singer, Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-speaking Universities, 1868–1915 (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 75, 212.

[11] Presumably by the time that Clara Landsberg moved to Hull-House, she had become a member of the Episcopal church, but evidence surrounding the conversion is scanty, and that surrounding the exact dates of Clara Landsberg’s tenure at Hull-House is contradictory. For Alice Hamilton’s experience at Hull-House, see Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (Fairfax, Virginia: American Industrial Hygiene Association, 1995), ch. 4 and 5; Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3–4, 5, 115–136, 139–141, 144–152, 182, 244. Both Hamilton’s and Sicherman’s books are valuable resources that contain references to Clara Landsberg throughout.

[12] Hannah G. Solomon, introducing Jane Addams as a speaker at a national convention of the National Council of Jewish Women. “General Council of Hebrew Women Meets,” The Washington Times, December 3, 1902, 2.

[13] Philip Davis, “Educational Influences,” in The Russian Jew in the United States, ed. Charles S. Bernheimer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The John C. Winston Co., 1905), 217.

[14] Hull-House was not the only center serving immigrant Jews in its neighborhood. German Jews in Chicago organized their own institutions, and in fact Jane Addams mediated between the German and eastern European Jews when the Jewish-run Maxwell Street settlement was established a few blocks from Hull-House. The first organizational meeting, held at Hull-House in 1892, nearly disbanded due to the terrible arguing between the immigrants and the German Jews who convened the meeting. In an essay titled “A Resented Philanthropy,” one of the immigrants at the meeting later credited Addams with reestablishing civility. He said, “The ‘culture’ which was to emanate from the settlement and permeate all corners of the Ghetto was conspicuously absent from the heated discussion of the ‘enlightened’ benefactors.” In 1907, 150 people visited Hull-House weekly to lecture, teach, or supervise clubs. For Hull-House’s purpose, the names of its residents, and its weekly attendance, see Hull-House Year Book 1907, 5–6 (Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/hullhouseyearboo1906hull/page/38/mode/2up?q=jewish).

[15] Clara’s work evolved over time. She worked full-time at Hull-House for one year, but, finding that too difficult, she eventually taught at the University School for Girls (Miss Haire’s). Alice Hamilton to Agnes Hamilton, [mid-June? 1902], in Sicherman, Alice Hamilton, 142–143. Clara Landsberg’s alumna record, Bryn Mawr College.

[16] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 437 (A Celebration of Women Writers, ed. Mary Mark Ockerbloom, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/addams/hullhouse/hullhouse.html).

[17] Italians came to predominate during Clara’s second decade. In 1902, the Chicago Tribune reported on a “Hebrew invasion” in the “crowded west side district”: “As soon as a Jewish family gets a foothold in a tenement other occupants vacate.” “Races Shift Like Sand,” Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1902, 13.

[18] Bryn Mawr Alumnæ Quarterly Vol. 1–2 1907–1909 (Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr Alumnæ Association, 1907–1909) (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/214021114.pdf).

[19] Francis Hackett wrote in his memoir: “Russian Jews and Jewesses came in great numbers to the classes at Hull House, and had special leanings toward literature” (72). Some English classes were composed entirely of Jews. Philip Davis, “Intellectual Influences,” in The Russian Jew in the United States, ed. Charles S. Bernheimer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The John C. Winston Co., 1905), 217.

[20] Jane Addams to Anita McCormick Blaine, June 29, 1901, Anita McCormick Blaine Correspondence and Papers, 1828–1958, Wisconsin Historical Society (Jane Addams Papers Project, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/1015).

[21] Jane Addams, American Friends’ Service Committee (AFSC) letter of recommendation for Clara Landsberg, May 1, 1920. AFSC Archives.

[22] Hilda Satt Polacheck, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 51–52, 66.

[23] Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 66.

[24] Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 66.

[25] Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 66–67.

[26] In 1905, Hilda Satt took over supervision of the evening classes in Clara’s absence. In 1906–07, she taught beginners’ English at Hull-House. Jane Addams to Clara Landsberg, July 4, 1905, Clara Landsberg Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago Library (Jane Addams Papers Project, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/840); Hull-House Year Book 1906–1907, 8.

[27] Addams noted the frequency with which young Jewish men who had patronized Hull-House also graduated from high school with help from their parents and then managed on their own to go on to college. Twenty Years at Hull-House, 346.

[28] Morris Levinson to Clara Landsberg, May 26, 1905, Additional Papers of the Hamilton Family, 1850–1994, box 13, 83-M175-94-M77, Schlesinger Library. Levinson’s letters are quoted as written, without corrections as to spelling, grammar, or usage.

[29] Morris Levinson to Clara Landsberg, n/d, Additional Papers of the Hamilton Family, 1850–1994, box 13, 83-M175-94-M77, Schlesinger Library.

[30] “Dr. Landsberg’s Closing Lecture,” Jewish Tidings, March 30, 1888, 19.

[31] Max Landsberg, “The Position of Woman Among the Jews,” World Parliament of Religions, Chicago, Illinois, 1893 (GoogleBooks, https://books.google.com/books?id=q2U-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA241&dq=%22max+landsberg%22+%22The+Position+of+Woman+among+the+Jews%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-3aifgMLPAhUk_4MKHRbLCOIQ6AEIIDAA#v=onepage&q=%22max%20landsberg%22%20%22The%20Position%20of%20Woman%20among%20the%20Jews%22&f=false). When virtually no other rabbi in America would perform an interfaith marriage, both Hirsch and Landsberg did so. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Rochester, 93–94. Tobias Brinkmann, Sundays at Sinai (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 136.

[32] In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams explained that over time, she and the other residents abandoned Protestant evening prayer, and their demographic composition at least in part reflected the make-up of the neighborhood, including Catholics and Jews, “dissenters and a few agnostics.” Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 448–449. Rivka Shpak Lissak has claimed that although many traditional Jews avoided Hull-House, it “had a closer relationship with the marginal Jewish elements, the assimilationists and the radicals.” Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 80.

[33] Rima Lunin Schultz wrote: “For Addams, who affixed a Chi-Rho Cross to her bodice, her work at Hull-House was religious; yet by establishing her settlement as an independent association without ties to any religious organization, university, or other agency, and by not requiring religious worship or religious education, she set out to spread a Christian humanism that she envisioned as cosmopolitan and democratic, inclusive and tolerant. Did this mean that she resolved to exclude religious ideas from Hull-House? I would argue that this has been an area of misunderstanding about Addams’s intentions.” Rina Lunin Schultz, “Jane Addams, Apotheosis of Social Christianity,” Church History 84, no. 1 (March 2015): 207.

[34] Many eastern European Jewish immigrants were strongly attached to Jewish culture and Zionism, even as they lost their connection to Jewish worship. Jane Addams wanted children of immigrants to respect their parents, yet she also saw that many old customs and religious traditions made no sense to the younger generation and in some cases held them back. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 247–248; Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives, 80–94. In contrast, on a family trip to Germany when Clara was ten years old, the Landsbergs had appreciated the aesthetic value of medieval Christian architecture such as the Hildesheim cathedral. Clara Landsberg, “Leaves from my Diary,” 1887, 1–4, Additional Papers of the Hamilton Family, 1850–1994, 83-M175-94-M77, box 13, folder 81, Schlesinger Library.

[35] Sara Hart wrote of Jane Addams, “It was my pleasure to know her intimately for more than thirty years.” Sara L. Hart, The Pleasure is Mine: An Autobiography (Chicago, Illinois: Valentine-Newman, 1947), 82. Hannah G. Solomon considered Jane Addams a leader of “all humanity” and “the greatest woman of our century.” Jane Addams inspired Jewish women at the NCJW’s third biennial in 1902, which Solomon attended as president and Miriam Landsberg as vice-president (Hannah G. Solomon, “Council Welfare Work Forty Years Ago and Today,” 4, n/d, Hannah G. Solomon Collection, Library of Congress, box 11, folder 5).

[36] “Sings Praises of Hull House,” Democrat and Chronicle, March 17, 1905, 10.

[37] To understand Mary Elizabeth Garrett and the early history of Bryn Mawr School, see Kathleen Waters Sander, Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008).

[38] Edith Hamilton to Mary Garrett, April 18, 1899, Bryn Mawr College Archives, Papers of M. Carey Thomas, reel 214.

[39] I am indebted to Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, who cites this letter and gives a good overview of M. Carey Thomas’s antisemitism in M. Carey Thomas, 230–32, 267, 486. Mary Garrett to Edith Hamilton, April 24, 1899, Bryn Mawr College Archives, Papers of M. Carey Thomas, reel 214.

[40] M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, September 26, 1900, Bryn Mawr College Archives, Papers of M. Carey Thomas, reel 23, nos. 37–39.

[41] Mary T. L. Gannett, letter of recommendation, May 4, 1920, Clara Landsberg’s personnel file, AFSC Archives.

[42] Jane Addams to Clara Landsberg, August 7, 1920, Hamilton Family Collection, 84-M210, box 1, folder 7, Schlesinger Library. Alice Hamilton had just been appointed the first woman professor at Harvard’s School of Medicine.

[43] Mary Rozet Smith to Clara Landsberg, August 7, 1920, Hamilton Family Collection, 84-M210, box 1, folder 7, Schlesinger Library.

[44] Edith Hamilton to Mary Garrett, April 18, 1899.

[45] Max Landsberg to his children, January 16, 1918, Max Landsberg SC 6602, American Jewish Archives.

[46] “The Council’s Report on ‘Religion,’ ” The Reform Advocate, March 24, 1900, 167 (The National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/?a=d&d=refadv19000324-01.1.11&e=——-en-20–1–img-txIN%7ctxTI-%22miriam+landsberg%22————-1).

[47] Miriam Landsberg, “Report of Committee on Religion,” The Reform Advocate, January 3, 1903, 452 (The National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/refadv/1903/01/03/01/article/29/?srpos=12&e=——190-en-20–1–img-txIN%7ctxTI-landsberg+committee+on+religion————-1).

[48] Max Landsberg criticized Episcopalians for requiring members to “believe in the forty-nine articles of faith” and Presbyterians for the Westminster catechism. “What is Judaism?” Democrat and Chronicle, November 22, 1899, 11. The Hamilton sisters, whose family Clara Landsberg joined, had been reared in the Presbyterian congregation founded by their grandfather, but, as children, they preferred the small Episcopal church on Mackinac Island, where they spent their summers. For a thorough discussion of the Hamilton sisters’ religious upbringing, see The Education of Alice Hamilton, eds. Matthew C. Ringenberg, William C. Ringenberg, and Joseph D. Brain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), esp. 13–14, 23–24. For a discussion of religion among the residents of Hull-House, see Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

July 6, 2022September 29, 2025

Jane Addams on Guns

A group of men and two women, dressed in early 20th-century attire, gather outside a building. One woman, wearing a hat with feathers, appears to be speaking to the attentive crowd.

In the wealthy suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, a place where Jane Addams sometimes vacationed on the shore of Lake Michigan, a gunman with a high-powered assault rifle mowed down innocent people attending the city’s Independence Day parade. In a planned attack, from an elevated position, the gunman killed 7 people and injured 30 more. It was another preventable tragedy in a long-line of preventable tragedies in a country in which mass shootings are, outrageously, normal. The Gun Violence Archive in Washington, DC, reported on July 5, 2022, that there have been 318 mass shootings this year, ten alone on July 4 ( including the one in Highland Park). A physician, who was at the Highland Park parade and attended to the victims in the aftermath of the shootings, told a CNN reporter that the injuries he saw were “wartime injuries,” bodies “blown up by that gunfire—blown up.”

But it wasn’t a war zone. It was a parade.

Every day there is a new mass shooting (or two, or three…), and every day I am horrified, like the majority of us, who want gun legislation to stop this madness, are horrified. I can barely read the news anymore for the horrendous stories of senseless gun violence, story after story of people murdered by men with military-grade weapons designed for the battlefields of war.

Someone asked me what Jane Addams would think about this constant violence, about people gunned down in churches, grocery stores, public spaces, and schools. Jane Addams, a pacifist, would be heartsick. She would be in disbelief that she had worked so hard to get small children out of the factories and into classrooms, only to see that 100 years later children are not safe in their schools. She would be disgusted, like she was disgusted by the lynching of Black Americans in her era. She would be shocked, like she was shocked over the unthinkable deaths of more than 600 people, many of them children, burned alive in 1903 in the Iroquois Theatre Fire in Chicago because fire safety laws went unenforced. Most importantly, she would be furious with the inaction of our leaders and would turn that fury into action. If she were alive today, she would be lobbying in Springfield and in Washington, demanding change.

So, of course, I wondered if Jane Addams had any wisdom to impart on the subject of firearms and gun control. And as is always the case when I search the Jane Addams Digital Edition for answers to our modern problems or consolations for our current sorrows, I find in the words she left us nuggets of wisdom, truth, prescient observation, astute analysis, and sane advice. What I was not ready for this time, however, was the setting—Highland Park, Illinois—of the first nugget I found when I starting searching for “guns” and “gun control” and “firearms” in Jane Addams’s papers, dated from 1901-1931.

Below is a sampling of what I found. Some of it is eerie in its relevance:

On Dec. 21, 1903, two armed cavalry soldiers, who had deserted their post at Fort Sheridan, held up a hotel clerk and guests in Highland Park, Illinois, at gun point and robbed them of cash and personal possessions. Upon hearing the news, Howard H. Gross, a Chicago attorney, advocated repeal of the Chicago ordinance, passed in 1881, which made it unlawful “for any person within the limits of the city to carry or wear under his clothes, or concealed about his person, any pistol, colt or slung shot, cross knuckles, or knuckles of lead, brass or other metal, or bowie knife, dirk knife or dirk, razor or dagger, or any other dangerous or deadly weapon.” Jane Addams weighed in on the suggestion the following day, declaring it “a most pernicious idea.”

A newspaper clipping titled RESTRICT THE SALE OF FIREARMS discusses proposed city ordinances requiring gun sales be licensed and restricted to responsible individuals, aiming to curb easy access to firearms and promote public safety. — Chicago Tribune, Dec. 2, 1903, p. 14.

Lawlessness would only be encouraged by such a measure. Enforcement of the existing laws is the proper remedy for crime.

In 1907, the Peace Association of Friends published a pamphlet that asked the question: “Do We Want Rifle Practice in Public Schools?” The effort was a response to a growing military preparedness movement in the United States in which advocates argued that children should conduct military drills in school. Jane Addams, who had served three years on the Chicago Board of Education, was not having it and offered this statement for publication:

I am of course shocked at any proposition to introduce rifle practice into the public schools. The increasing number of accidents and murders due to the totally unnecessary and illegal “carrying of concealed weapons,” makes it difficult to understand why familiarity with fire arms should be encouraged. If war is to continue, at least let us insist that the use of fire arms shall be confined to the soldier, as strictly as the surgeon’s knife is limited to the man professionally prepared to use it.

In an article about juvenile delinquency published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1909, Addams wrote:

There is an entire series of difficulties directly traceable to foolish and adventurous persistence in carrying loaded firearms. The morning paper of the day on which I am writing records the following:

A party of boys, led by Daniel O’Brien, thirteen years old, had gathered in front of the house, and O’Brien was throwing stones at [Niezgodzki] in revenge for a whipping that he had received at his hands about a month ago. The Polish boy ordered them away and threatened to go into the house and get a revolver if they did not stop.

Pfister, one of the boys in O’Brien’s party, called him a coward, and, when he pulled a revolver from his pocket, dared him to put it away and meet him in a fist fight in the street.

Instead of accepting the challenge [Niezgodzki] aimed his revolver at Pfister and fired. The bullet crashed through the top of his head and entered the brain. He was rushed to the Alexian Brother’s Hospital, but died a short time after being received there. [Niezgodzki] was arrested and held without bail.

This tale could be duplicated almost every morning; what might be merely a boyish scrap is turned into a tragedy because some boy has a revolver.

In 1927, during Prohibition and much gang violence in Chicago, Addams published an essay that appeared in The Prevention and Cure of Crime, Discussed by the American Crime Study Commission. In that essay, she argued:

The sale of arms should be prohibited, for if a criminal has a gun he will shoot, and that he will try to shoot first, when in danger of arrest is perfectly obvious. We have had a great deal of shooting in our neighborhood in Chicago in connection with bootlegging. Illicit liquor is stored in empty warehouses, in stores and in the basements of disused houses. Bootleggers are much afraid of being detected not only by Federal officers and the police, but by the hijacker—the man who steals goods which are already illicit, so it is almost impossible to arrest him as a thief.

For all of these reasons the bootleggers employ lookouts to protect their goods, sometimes blocks away, and many of them are boys and very young men. Of course, many of these boys are armed. In fact, they do not like the job unless they are armed. They know that not only the hijackers, but the Federal officers and the police are armed, and in the spirit of sheer excitement they also wish to be armed “to the teeth.” Of course, the whole situation becomes dangerous to the community, perhaps most of all to the innocent passer-by.

In a statement supporting the presidential candidacy of Herbert Hoover in 1928, Addams argued:

What the prohibition situation needs first of all is “disarmament,” if this necessitates federal control of the sale of firearms so much the better, but whatever is necessary for the final result, the government agents should promptly be taught some other method than those of gunmen. That the police of the Irish Free State established immediately after the evacuation of the English Black and Tans and after Ireland’s civil war, could go unarmed in the midst of a population still carrying “concealed weapons,” encourages me to believe that brave and conscientious men may be found in America who realize that it is their business to bring the culprit to court.

In a speech at the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War in Washington, D.C., in January 1931, Jane Addams, clear and loud as a clanging bell, said:

About two years ago, a bill was introduced into the legislature of Massachusetts, in an attempt to control banditry, which has developed so rapidly into our American cities, by curtailing the manufacture as well as the purchase of firearms. While this bill was being discussed, it is said that a telegram came from Washington, stating that such legislation was contrary to the National defense policy, that wished the manufacturing of firearms to go on at a good pace, so that in time of war, arms might be easily available.

We have not gotten to the point of discussing this in Chicago, or reducing it to law, but you all know very well that our situation would be enormously improved in every great city, if some such law were passed.

Our thugs are armed and our policemen are armed, so it is largely a question of who shall shoot first; one sometimes longs for the English police who carry no arms…

Dear Jane Addams, please come back to help us. Please. We need you.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: www.gunviolencearchive.org; John W. Leonard, ed., The Book of Chicagoans: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Living Men of the City of Chicago (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Co, 1905), 247; “Soldiers Hold up Clerk in Hotel,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Dec. 22, 1903, p. 2; and Respect for Law, January 3, 1901; Statement on Carrying Concealed Weapons, December 21, 1903; Address at Memorial for Teachers Who Perished in the Iroquois Theatre Fire, January 16, 1904 (excerpt); Statement on Rifle Practice in Public Schools, 1907-1908; The Bad Boy of the Street, October 1909; Problem of Crime Unsolved, Let Us Start at It Anew, May 13, 1927; Draft of Statement Endorsing Herbert Hoover, October 23, 1928; What is Security? Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, 1931; all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

June 8, 2022September 29, 2025

A Week in the Life of Jane Addams, April 9-15, 1906

A black-and-white scan of a handwritten diary page dated April 10–15, 1906. Each day contains brief weather notes and various personal or medical appointments written in cursive, some of which are difficult to read.

Over the past couple of years, as I’ve worked to contextualize the documents we have chosen to publish in Volume 4 of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, I have made a good effort to decipher Jane Addams’s engagement diary. She kept an annual engagement calendar during most of her years in Chicago, although some of them are more rich with details about her life than others. As with any such diary a person keeps, the diaries we have for Jane Addams are riddled with abbreviations and cryptic notes, and some entries are impossible to understand. Addams’s handwriting, which was abominable even in her professional correspondence, is particularly illegible in these private diaries, and the microfilm images we use at the Jane Addams Papers Project (the originals are located in the Jane Addams Memorial Collection at the University of Illinois Chicago) add to the difficulty. Yet despite all the problems with reading these diary entries, they are invaluable.

Snapshots of these calendar entries offer a good sense of the cadence of Addams’s life, especially when she was in Chicago. They help us track her meetings and lectures, doctor’s appointments, and her special engagements, likes dinners and teas, with friends, family, and fellow reformers. Sometimes Addams would record the speaking fee she collected for a speech, particular trains on which she traveled, or the people she stayed with when she was on the road. Other entries indicate various Hull-House activities she attended or groups she hosted at the settlement. And particularly exciting for me as an editor ferreting out Addams’s daily life and activities, often a diary entry corroborates something Addams mentioned in her correspondence or, better still, provides the definitive clue that helps me unlock the mystery of a vague reference in a letter.

By way of celebrating this hidden treasure chest of documents, I thought it might be fun to offer a Day in the Life of Jane Addams. I’ve chosen a week in the spring of 1906, when Addams was up to her eyeballs with work as a leading member of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago. From the images I’ve provided, you can see for yourself what we are up against with Jane Addams’s dreadful penmanship and get a feel for her daily life. For each day in the calendar, I offer a translation of her entries, followed by sources, which corroborate or contextualize the entries or add the fullness of particular day.

*****

Since a trip in early February to Baltimore for speeches at the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association convention and for the Maryland Child Labor Committee, Addams had been in Chicago. She was in her first year on the school board, having been appointed in July 1905, and was serving as chairman of the School Management Committee. Regular school board meetings prevented extensive travel and the work load monopolized much of her time. However, a latecomer to woman suffrage, she was finding time to carve out a new place for herself in the movement. In the spring she was also involved with the National Tuberculosis Exhibition at the Chicago Public Library. On April 2, 1906, she shared the podium with Illinois Governor Charles Deneen, at the exhibit’s grand opening.*

Monday, April 9

2.30 School Mag’t

The Chicago Board of Education had offices on the sixth, seventh, and eighth floors of the Tribune Building, which was located at the corner of Dearborn and Madison streets in Chicago’s business district. Addams likely traveled to and from most meetings on the trolleys; there was a station on Halsted Street near Hull-House. At this afternoon meeting, Addams and her committee considered actions against a chemistry and physics teacher at Jefferson High School for fighting with a school janitor. Thomas H. Furlong made his case for self-defense, and the committee somewhat sympathized with his argument that the janitor had struck first. However, the committee also determined the teacher may have verbally provoked the affray, and because a student had witnessed the fight the committee recommended a one-week suspension for Furlong.

“Fighting Teacher Loses,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), April 10, 1906, p. 2; “Teacher Suspended a Week for Fighting the Janitor,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1906, p. 18.

Tuesday, April 10

2 Finance
H.H. trustees [4]

As the chairman of the Board of Education’s School Management Committee, Addams was also a member of the Board’s Finance Committee. After attending a meeting of the Finance Committee downtown, she hurried back to Hull-House for the regular meeting of the trustees of the Hull-House Association at 4:00 p.m. Meeting with Addams, who was the president, were trustees Mary Wilmarth, Helen Carver, Mary Rozet Smith, and Allen Pond. The trustees accepted Culver’s proposal to sign over Hull-House land, which she owned, to the Hull-House Association; and they discussed plans for the proposed Boys’ Club. At some point during this same day, Addams declined an offer from a publisher who was interested in turning a series of autobiographical articles, which had recently come out in Ladies’ Home Journal, into book form. Addams noted she liked the idea and had made an outline, but was “so immersed in the Chicago School Board,” she wrote, “that I find it hard to pull my mind out of it long enough to think of books.” This was, of course, an early discussion about Twenty Years at Hull-House, which would be published in 1910.

Hull-House Association, Trustees’ Minutes, April 10, 1906, JAPM, 49:1188-89; Jane Addams to Walter Hines Page, April 10, 1906; Jane Addams’ Own Story of Her Work: The First Five Years at Hull-House (Second of Three Installments), April 1906; and Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition (JADE).

Wednesday, April 11

3 dentist
[two illegible words smudged under “dentist”]
4 P.M. [illegible name] Hall
5.00 106 Randolph
Mrs Blaine dine
Bd. of Ed.

There are no letters in 1906 discussing dental work, but Addams did suffer some problems with her teeth over the years. Although dental hygiene was a new science at this time, most people only went to the dentist when they had to go; routine cleanings were not yet the norm. Board of Education meetings were held in the evenings on alternate Wednesdays. Prior to this meeting, Addams dined with Anita McCormick Blaine, who was one of her fellow school board trustees, perhaps at a restaurant on Randolph Street, which was just two blocks north of the Board of Education offices. The two women may have then traveled to the meeting together. It is also possible the meeting with Blaine had nothing at all to do with what Addams was doing on Randolph at 5 p.m. At the school board meeting, Addams’s School Management Committee offered reports on several issues, including the graduation of three young women from the Chicago Normal School and recommending the full board grant them elementary school teaching certificates. Addams also presided over a contentious discussion about high school fraternities and athletic programs, and she recommended the board enforce a rule that prohibited fraternity members from becoming a member of a school athletic organization. The specific reasons for Addams’s opinion are not known, and the board did not solve the issue that night. At the meeting, however, there was a unanimous vote to disallow private competitions for the city’s school children. Addams argued that the “Granting of these medals and other prizes is not a movement for education. It fosters rivalry rather than wholesome competition among the pupils, and has just the opposite effect to that which is intended.”

“Dental Hygiene’s Grand History, RDH Magazine, July 1, 2010 (online); “Renews Fight on ‘Frats,’” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1906, p. 3; School Management Committee to Board of Education, Report of Diplomas, April. 11, 1906, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm (JAPM), 39:1158; Statement on Chicago Board School Action, April 12, 1906, JADE. For a letter Addams received on this day in her capacity as a school board member, see: Lilian Smith Haines to Jane Addams, April 11, 1906, JADE.

Thursday, April 12

3 Dr [Hebert?]
<[illegible]>
3.30-4 Mrs Henrotin
to see newspapers
tuberculosis [pm]

The doctor reference is curious, and I was unable to identify him (bad spelling, Jane?); nor can I decide if the squeezed in text goes with the good doctor or is another appointment wedged into a busy day. Addams and Ellen Henrotin, a well-known Chicago clubwoman, were serving together on a municipal suffrage committee organized in Chicago to lobby the city charter convention to give women the right to vote. They had been meeting since January and had participated in a mass meeting about suffrage at Hull-House on Sunday, April 8. Addams and Henrotin were likely meeting about their suffrage work on that committee. Addams was likely going to see various newspaper reporters or editors to shop a lengthy article she had written on municipal suffrage, because less than a week after seeing newspapers, at least two of them published the article. At the end of her busy Thursday, Addams attended a session on “The School and Tuberculosis” at the National Tuberculosis Exhibition.

“Women Demand to Vote,” Chicago Tribune, April 9, 1906, p. 11; “To Rid Schools of Tuberculosis,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1906, p. 3; Statement on Woman’s Suffrage, January 18, 1906; Statement on Tuberculosis at The School and Tuberculosis Conference, April 12, 1906; Pleads for Suffrage, April 17, 1906, both in JADE.

Friday, April 13

11 a.m. C.J.W. at H.H.
[Hebert?]
4 School Mag’t
Moody Play

I have no clue what “C.J.W.” might be, but I suspect it was an organization (Chicago Council of Jewish Women, perhaps?) rather than a person; and there is that mysterious Hebert again. A Board of Education School Management Meeting was cancelled. And finally some leisure for Addams in the evening, when she went to the Garrick Theatre in Chicago to see a play. The theater was in the Schiller Building, which was designed by architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler. The play was “A Sabine Woman,” written by the poet and playwright William Vaughn Moody. Addams was an admirer of Moody’s work, in 1901 writing him a letter of thanks for his poem—“On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” published in The Atlantic Monthly—which gave her “clarity and comfort.”

“Advertisement,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 11, 1906, p. 9; Jane Addams to William Vaughan Moody, February 9, 1901, JADE.

Saturday, April 14

10 doctors
11 preside suffrage meeting
5.00 WTUL
Dinner [Miss?] [illegible name]

On this day, the Chicago Eagle (admittedly not the most reliable of historical resources) reported that Addams and a group of women representing the Consumers’ League met with a Dr. Whalen of the Chicago health commission about meat inspection in the city. This could be the 10 a.m. entry here, but I’m not not even close to certain. I am certain, however, that the second engagement here was a planning meeting of the Chicago municipal suffrage committee, which took place at the Municipal Museum. In the evening, Addams attended a meeting of the Women’s Trade Union League, probably at Hull-House, where it regularly met. As for the dinner afterwards, your guess is as good as mine. If you know the answer, let us know!

Chicago Eagle, April 14, 1906, p. 7; “Women Plan for Ballot,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1906, p. 68.

Sunday, April 15

2.30 Brands Hall
Erie & Clark sts
tuberculosis

This was Easter Sunday, and Anita Blaine, who was a Hull-House donor as well as a friend, sent a lilac bush to the settlement in celebration. Brand’s Hall, which was located on the corner of Erie and Clark streets, was an auditorium in the Chicago business loop northwest of Hull-House. Perhaps Addams attended an Easter performance of some sort, although I could not find any mention of one in her letters or in the Sunday newspapers. Later in the day, she attended the Tuberculosis Exhibition, still underway at the Chicago Public Library.

“Find Root of Phthisis,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 15, 1906; Jane Addams to Anita McCormick Blaine, April 16, 1906, JADE.

And so you can see that Jane Addams was a busy woman, and the editors at the Jane Addams Papers are always busy, too, trying to figure out what the heck she was doing and struggling to decipher the woman’s handwriting. At the end of this particular busy week, Addams declined an engagement at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, writing: “I have delayed replying to your cordial letter hoping that I might be able to accept your very attractive invitation. But I have already so many engagements for June and School Board affairs entail so many special appointments for the second and third weeks of that month that I really cannot add another thing.”

I’m exhausted just thinking about the rapid pace of Jane Addams’s daily life, but I never tire of editing her papers. Studying her life and her work is a privilege. Even with the daily frustration of reading her handwriting, it’s a pretty darn good gig.

by Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

*Sources: Board of Education, City of Chicago, 1905-1906 (Chicago: Board of Education, 1906), 6-9; “What the Woman Suffragists Will Do Today,” The Baltimore Sun, February 9, 1906, p. 7; “Miss Jane Addams Speaks,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Feb. 11, 1906, p. 3; JA Diary, April 9-15, 1906; “Phthisis Show Opens Tonight,” Chicago Tribune, April 2, 1906, p. 10, JAPM, 29:1181; Jane Addams to Edward A. Ross, April 16, 1906, JADE.

April 13, 2022September 29, 2025

Every Day an Easter Bonnet

Black-and-white photo of a serious-faced woman wearing a decorative hat adorned with large flowers, a high-necked blouse, and a dark jacket, standing in front of a light-colored, textured background.

A man once asked me if I thought anyone would see me as a serious scholar wearing such heavy eyeliner. I am sorry now that I did not defend myself to him. But I was a young scholar then, lacking confidence. He was an old scholar, lacking good manners. People called him a curmudgeon, but I called him words that were not euphemisms for what he was. Under my breath, of course. Today if he said such a thing to me, my retort might give him a little ‘ole heart attack. But back then I was polite to my own detriment. I ignored his comment and went on with my life. In eyeliner.

Fast forward about twenty-five years.

Recently, I ran across a photograph of Jane Addams I’d never seen before. In the photo she is young, her face smooth and unlined, and her extraordinary, expressive eyes are bright, and also as yet unlined. She is wearing a hat with a curved brim, atop of which is what looks like a slouchy dark velvet adorned with GIANT chrysanthemum-like flowers, six at least, perched slightly off center. I gaped at the magnificent chapeau atop her brilliant mind, and before I could stop myself, I said out loud, to Jane Addams on my computer screen: “Oh my god, woman, how did people take you seriously in that hat!”

I covered my mouth. My eyes scanned the room as if searching for anyone who might have heard me. Shame on me. Shame, because my mind had immediately conjured the memory, for first time in years, of that old, rude, sexist scholar who dissed me for wearing eyeliner. And now I was dissing Jane Addams for wearing a hat. I know Jane Addams is dead, so it wasn’t like I could actually offend her, or offend anyone for that matter, alone as I was in my home office. But I was so mad at myself for making fun of Addams’s hat out loud with such vehemence, that I answered my own question: “Well, Stace, how does anyone take you seriously in such heavy eyeliner?”

Maybe some people don’t take me seriously in heavy eyeliner, but I am old enough and confident enough in myself and my abilities that I do not care. I’ve written books and given lectures and appeared in history documentaries in eyeliner. I am not a flashy dresser, but I like eyeliner. So what? Jane Addams was a serious woman, a determined advocate for the underprivileged, an innovative reformer, and a brilliant thinker and writer. She lived in the era of spectacular hats, and after a quick search through pictures of her, it became as obvious as the painted lines around my eyeballs that Jane Addams loved a spectacular hat. I still think she might have crossed over the milliner’s line with the chrysanthemum one, but what if she did? So what?

In 1896, Jane Addams visited Leo Tolstoy at his country estate Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow. When she met him that day, she was wearing a dress with extraordinary sleeves, and Tolstoy chastised her for them. In 1911, she published an account of that meeting in McClure’s, writing:

“Tolstoy, standing by clad in peasant garb, listened gravely, but, glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my traveling gown, which, unfortunately, at that season were monstrous in size, took hold of an edge and, pulling out one sleeve to an interminable breadth, said that there was enough stuff on one arm to make a frock for a little girl, and asked me directly if I did not find ‘such a dress a barrier to the people.’ I was too disconcerted to make a very clear explanation, although I tried to say that, monstrous as my sleeves were, they did not compare in size with those of the working-girls in Chicago, and that nothing would more effectively separate me from ‘the people’ than a cotton blouse following the simple lines of the human form; that even if I had wished to imitate him and ‘dress as a peasant,’ it would have been hard to choose which peasant among the thirty-six nationalities we had recently counted in the Hull-House neighborhood.”

I guess you might say Tolstoy was kind of like the old scholar who questioned my eyeliner. Way more accomplished, of course, but still, rather rude. And Jane Addams might have been stung by Tolstoy’s comments, like I was stung, and clearly she was thinking about them fifteen years later. Yet although she most always wore plain and simple frocks, she never shied away from a magnificent hat. She worked hard and dedicated her life to helping others, so I think it rather grand she afforded herself this luxury. Jane Addams kept her face determined and serious, and I suspect a pretty hat was her smile.

In honor of the season of Easter bonnets, here are some of my favorites. And do, please, place your cursor over each image to treat yourself to the full effect. (P.S. We used that last one as the inspiration for our Jane Addams Papers Project logo).

Sepia-toned portrait of a woman wearing a tall hat decorated with feathers and a high-collared jacket. She has a serious expression and is posed against a plain background. Bachrach Bros. and Balto. are written at the bottom. — Jane Addams (1885) – Swarthmore Peace Collection

A woman in early 20th-century attire and a decorative hat sits on a bed, holding gloves, with another woman in similar dress seated in the background. The room has patterned wallpaper and a metal bedframe. — Jane Addams – Library of Congress

Black-and-white photo of a woman in early 20th-century clothing and a hat, standing on steps outside a building. Handwritten text reads “Jane Addams leaving Mercy Hospital.”. — Jane Addams Leaving Mercy Hospital (1912) – Library of Congress

A woman wearing a dark dress and a decorative hat sits at a table, holding a pen. A vase with flowers is visible in the background. She looks directly at the camera with a calm expression. — Jane Addams (1914) – Library of Congress

Jane Addams was not the only serious woman who appreciated a stylish hat. Check out these women changing the world while rockin’ a posh headdress.

A group of men in suits gather around two women in hats, one with a feather, on the steps of an ornate building, possibly a government or historic site, engaged in conversation. — Jane Addams and Lillian Wald meet with journalists, (1916) – Library of Congress

A black-and-white photo of women in early 1900s clothing standing in a car draped with a banner reading Votes for Women, during a suffrage parade, with a crowd and building in the background. — Mrs. Charles Blancy, Mary Hawes Wilmarth, and Jane Addams en route tot he Progressive Convention, 1912 — Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago.

Three women in early 20th-century attire and hats stand outside a building with stone steps, posing for a photo. Two carry handbags, and one holds gloves in her hand. The setting appears formal and official. — Julia Lathrop, Jane Addams, and Mary McDowell (1913) – Library of Congress

A group of women on a ship’s deck hold a large banner reading “PEACE.” They wear early 20th-century clothing and hats, some holding flowers, and appear to be peace delegates. — Jane Addams and members of the Women’s International Congress (1915) – Library of Congress

Two women in early 20th-century attire, both wearing large hats and fur-trimmed coats. One holds a bouquet of flowers and a handbag. They stand outdoors, posing and smiling for the camera. — Jane Addams and Elizabeth Blake (1911) – Chicago History Museum.

Now that I’ve thought about Jane Addams’s hats and my eyeliner and written this fluffy blog post, I’ve changed my mind about the chrysanthemum hat. I actually think I rather like it, all naysayers be damned.

by Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Notes: The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:510-11; A Visit to Tolstoy, January 1911, Jane Addams Digital Edition.

February 15, 2022September 29, 2025

Reviews in Digital Humanities

Thanks to Núria Sara Miras Boronat for her review of the Jane Addams Papers Project, published in the most recent release of Reviews in Digital Humanities (Vol. 3, No. 2, Feb. 14, 2022).

We particularly appreciated the kudos, below:

JADE is one of the most important interventions that has occurred in the last decade for not only Addams’ work but also for pragmatist scholarship. It provides very valuable information about the intertextual and contextual references of her writings, which are not obvious to contemporary readers, especially if those readers are not from the U.S. or are not English native speakers. It also informs readers about the density of connections and affections of one of the greatest thinkers and activists of the progressive era. Finally, it has a strong value as a project for teaching digital humanities.

We are happy to address one issue that Núria pointed out, the relative difficulty in locating our blog posts. We are on it, and hope to have a easy way to find all posts up and running soon.

December 21, 2021October 14, 2025

Guest Post: Jane Addams and the Great War

A group of women on a ship’s deck hold a large banner that reads PEACE. Some are labeled, and all are dressed in early 20th-century clothing, wearing hats and flowers, smiling for the photo.

By Neil Lanctot

The onset of a brutal global war in the summer of 1914 shocked Jane Addams and other American pacifists who were certain their cause was gaining widespread acceptance. “Nobody who was not a mature person…can realize now how remote, how unbelievable, a European war then seemed,” her friend Alice Hamilton later wrote. “Believing as we did then in the slow but sure progress of the human race, we looked forward to nothing worse than sporadic outbursts in such unknown regions as the Balkans or South America, never in the highly civilized countries of the Europe which we knew so well.”

For Addams, a war of this scope (“an insane outburst,” she called it) meant “a changed world,” a world where the rising tide of militarism would undermine the cherished progressive social reforms she had tirelessly advocated over the prior two decades. “It will be years before these things are taken up again,” she told a reporter, “The whole social fabric is tortured and twisted.”

Almost immediately, Addams concluded that the war was likely to be a watershed event in human history and America would have an enormous role to play. But military involvement, she believed, was not the answer. America’s job, as she saw it, was to find a way to bring the belligerent nations to the peace table, alone or with the assistance of other neutral powers. “The United States,” she observed, “with all neutral nations, should throw every bit of its power into the scale for peace.”

Her activities to achieve this goal in the months ahead were both remarkable and extensive: leadership of an unprecedented female-run organization – the Woman’s Peace Party; a fascinating journey through Europe in 1915 meeting with the heads of state of Germany, France, England, and other belligerent powers; and involvement with the “Peace Ship” scheme of the eccentric mogul Henry Ford. But she would pay a price for her pacifism as the war raged on. The onetime most beloved woman in the nation, the so-called “American saint,” would find herself viciously criticized for daring to question American foreign policy and the need for a military buildup at home. Letters and editorials denounced her as an “ancient spinster,” a “crack-brain old creature who ought to be restrained in some institution,” and a “foolish, garrulous woman” who was “badly overrated.”

Theodore Roosevelt, her old friend and colleague in the Progressive or Bull Moose Party, also soured on Addams. To TR, the nation’s rather modest defenses needed to be drastically strengthened if the United States wished to be a global force for good. Any peace efforts at present, he believed, were terribly misguided if not dangerous. As for Miss Addams and her female supporters who had journeyed abroad in 1915 to participate in an international women’s peace congress, they were a “disgrace to the women of America.”

Roosevelt’s hated enemy, President Woodrow Wilson, appeared more sympathetic. Wilson’s determination to avoid war with Germany despite repeated provocations (most notably the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915) cheered Addams immensely in the early years of the conflict. He was also willing to keep in regular contact with her, so much so that Addams and other pacifists truly believed they had a real friend in the White House. Privately, Wilson was not especially receptive to her constant urging that America should act now to bring about peace. Still, as a skilled politician, he was careful not to show his hand. His advisor and close friend Colonel Edward House well understood the importance of Addams. “Her following,” he admitted in his diary, “is large and influential.”

By the fall of 1916, Wilson was finally ready to act. Germany, he knew, was eager to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, even if it meant embroiling the United States in the war. Wilson’s peace move that December, though it accomplished nothing, delighted Addams, as did his “Peace Without Victory” speech to the Senate a few weeks later. But his attitude soon changed once the Germans decided they could wait no longer. Hoping to win the war in 1917, they planned to unleash their submarines to their full potential as of February 1.

To many Americans, the new submarine policy and subsequent diplomatic split with Germany suggested that war was now inevitable. Addams believed otherwise. After all, Wilson had repeatedly told the pacifists he did not want war. “Thank God Woodrow Wilson is President,” one enthused. When Addams and her peace colleagues went to see Wilson in late February, she still thought he could be reached. But the President was uninterested in any of their proposals to avoid war and seemed convinced that his own participation in the peace process was absolutely essential. “I found my mind challenging his whole theory of leadership,” Addams later wrote. “Was it a result of my bitter disappointment that I hotly and no doubt unfairly asked myself whether any man had the right to rate his moral leadership so high that he could consider the sacrifice of the lives of thousands of his young countrymen a necessity?”

A disillusioned Addams watched Wilson take the country into war a few weeks later. She rejected the popular belief that the war was a necessary evil to achieve a better world or prevent future wars. Nor could she understand why Wilson refused to seriously consider alternatives such as the conference of neutrals or “continuous mediation” proposals she had championed. It was, in her nephew James Weber Linn’s words, “the only defeat that she could not forget.” “It seemed to me quite obvious,” Addams later wrote, “that the processes of war would destroy more democratic institutions than he could ever rebuild however much he might declare the purpose of war to be the extension of democracy.”

During the years of American involvement, she found herself increasingly outside of the mainstream, now worked into a war-fueled patriotic frenzy. Not surprisingly, most Americans were now openly hostile to anything “that woman” had to say, especially what they interpreted as “pro-German twaddle.” The vitriol dissipated somewhat after she began making speeches for the Food Administration, a new agency which emphasized production and conservation of food for the war effort. Still, the American public remained suspicious of her pacifist activities throughout the war and the decade that followed. Addams, some still believed, was the “most dangerous woman in the country.”

By the 1930s, when many Americans began to see involvement in World War I as a tragic mistake, Addams’ pacifist activities no longer seemed so threatening. Praise and accolades were showered upon her, ranging from selection to Good Housekeeping’s list of the twelve “greatest living women” in 1931 to the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. Much to her credit, she never distanced herself from her unpopular wartime stance. “We of course never imagined that we could bring the war in Europe to an end,” she explained to journalist Mark Sullivan in 1933, “but we did hope that a body of neutrals with no diplomatic power of course, sitting continuously, might be able to make suggestions for peace which would shorten the conflict.”

That such proposals had only a slim chance of success during World War I never deterred Jane Addams. “She felt,” her niece Marcet Haldeman later wrote, “that any gestures, any proposals of a pacific nature were infinitely more sensible than such mass murder.”

For more info or to order this new book, see The Approaching Storm‘s publisher’s page.

December 1, 2021September 29, 2025

The Patron Saint of Gift Giving

A green gift box with a red and plaid ribbon bow sits among evergreen branches, red and gold ornaments, and festive holiday decorations with colorful lights in the background.

In June 1907, Jane Addams sent her sister Alice Haldeman handmade bags for her birthday. Made by a Hull-House neighbor, likely a poor immigrant, the bags were a typical gift from Addams, who enjoyed sending handmade goods, particularly from the Hull-House Shops. Items like linens and wooden or metal household objects were typical choices for birthday, Christmas, and thank-you gifts Addams gave to friends, family members, and Hull-House patrons. Most of her recipients were likely grateful for these thoughtful gifts or, at least, they were gracious in the receipt of them. Haldeman, however, did not hide her feelings about much of anything, let alone gifts from baby sister. She did not appreciate the bags, and she told Addams so.

In response to Haldeman’s disappointment, Addams wrote: “I am sorry you didn’t like my poor little bags which were made by [an] old lady in the neighborhood who sells them. I have had one in my traveling bag which I have grown attached to. Of course it would be no use in a bureau drawer. However I will try again and send you a book…”

Oooo. Burn.

We cannot know what Haldeman might have written to raise the ire of her sister because her letters to Addams do not survive. However, this passive aggressive response reveals Addams’s frustration, whereas we get so little of her personality in most of her surviving letters, which are guarded, congenial, and professional. Addams’s letters to her sister from 1901 until Haldeman’s death in 1915 contain numerous instances of apologies for failed gifts, evidence that Addams’s failure in this regard caused difficulty between the sisters. To know she chafed at a sister who had the power to put her on the defensive helps us chip away a little at Addams’s constrained, disciplined, public persona.

Haldeman was picky about gifts. Addams was sensitive to Haldeman’s criticism of her gifts. They exchanged strong words. Feelings were bruised. And then the women went on being sisters and friends. Sounds human to me, and I can certainly relate on a personal level. What is interesting to me as a historian, however, is to think about Jane Addams as a sister, as an ordinary human being doing ordinary human-being things, like stressing out over gifts to her nit-picking elder sister. Addams was not just a famous social reformer, or activist, or best-selling author, or recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She was a woman, just like me, who was imperfect, who sometimes lost her cool, and who failed on occasion to please the people she loved most.

After the failed birthday bags in June 1907, Addams was determined to get it right at Christmas. That holiday she sent Haldeman a book and followed it up with a box of sparklers, closing her Christmas Eve letter: “I am always, dear Alice, your loving sister Jane.” In other words, sis, give me a break.

The book she sent was Mother by Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Addams deemed the novel “remarkable,” but it was one of Gorky’s least successful works and Addams sent Haldeman the copy she had read because the new one she ordered did not arrive in time to send. I can almost hear Haldeman grumbling that her sister sent her a crappy, used novel for Christmas. She had complained about books before, in fact, one time accusing Addams of sending her a book for Christmas that she deemed inappropriate for her young daughter. To that snub, Addams had replied: “I hadn’t thought of course of Marcet’s reading it. I might easily send you many books that would be too mature for her.”

The Christmas gift debacle of 1909 is my favorite of Addams’s sister-gift failures. That year she sent a kimono, which seems a perfectly glorious gift to me and likely did to Addams, too. Picked out by a wealthy Chicago friend, Addams hoped it might please her finicky sister. Nope. Haldeman poo-pooed the kimono, and Addams, once again, was annoyed: “I am sorry you didn’t like the kimono, it was bought in Chinatown in San Francisco, selected by Mrs Robert Herrick when she was there, perhaps you are disillusioned about Xmas, last year you didn’t like the book I sent—after all it is only the message of remembrance which reaches thru, isn’t it? Please give the kimono to someone and forget it— next year I’ll try something quite different.”

I am not one who buys into the “Saint Jane” moniker for Jane Addams. She was too shrewd and too determined in her activism to live up to that gendered, ridiculous, otherworldly title. It is clear Alice did not think saint when she unwrapped a gift from Jane. But I do think Jane Addams was a wee bit saintly in dealing with her grumpy, perpetually dissatisfied sister. Nowhere is this clearer than in Addams’s persistent attempts to bestow on Haldeman the perfect gift. She kept trying to please her sister, even though her sister kept throwing the gifts back in her face.

Perhaps it was difficult for Haldeman to acknowledge a kindness or the favor of her younger, famous sister. Maybe she liked to play the cranky-butt. Or, most likely I believe, she took a little pleasure in stirring the emotional pot in the belly of the serious, stoic leader of Hull-House. I wonder if she actually liked all the gifts Addams selected for her, but she just couldn’t allow herself to give her sister the win. In the end, I suppose, Alice Haldeman was probably a difficult woman to please; and I love it that Jane Addams just kept on trying.

Regardless of what Haldeman thought about them, Jane Addams’s gifts were good and great and sometimes spectacular. They reflected her economic and aesthetic sensibilities, illustrated her social responsibility and intellectual curiosity, and related to her work at Hull-House, her interest in different cultures, and her respect for the immigrants who lived in Chicago. Jane Addams was a generous, inspired giver of gifts. In honor of her and in the spirit of the coming holiday season, I offer the following annotated list of gift ideas, straight out of the correspondence of the patron saint of gift giving.

Gifts Ideas from Jane Addams (JA)

Art (and for goodness sake, pay for the frame if it needs one)—JA to the wife of her nephew Stanley Linn and her one-year-old great-niece and namesake: “I hope you will like the pictures. We are all very fond of Norah Hamilton’s etching and I put in the Irish geese for Jane. Please have them all framed ‘on me,’ as it were, that is part of it.” Jane Addams to Myra Harriet Reynolds Linn, December 19, 1917

Blanket (Handmade, by YOU. If Jane Addams had time to knit, then so do you. Do you run a social settlement and take trains all over the country giving lectures about starving orphans in Europe? I didn’t think so. Start knitting; the Christmas clock is ticking, people).—JA to her niece and great-nephew: “The blanket I knitted for Henry, got awfully grimy in the process. I did it at H. H. where it is impossible to keep white wool clean. It goes to the little brother with my best love and a Merry Christmas.” Jane Addams to Anna Marcet Haldeman-Julius, December 10, 1919

Books—JA to her niece and great-niece Alice (her sister’s namesake): “I hope her very prosaic little present reached you safely, to [the] rest of you I am sending only books this year — very simple presents indeed! … I am sending things there early because of the crowded mails — don’t open them too soon.” Jane Addams to Anna Marcet Haldeman-Julius, December 17, 1917

Books for Children (one book for siblings to share so as not to be excessive)—JA to fellow suffragist and friend: “I have sent the children one of the Van Loon books which my little nephew so dotes on. I hope they won’t mind having it together altho I am afraid it is not a favorite plan with children.” Jane Addams to Florence Gottschalk Taussig, December 31, 1921, Jane Addams Digital Edition (JADE).

Book of which you are the author—JA to the wife of a HH patron: “May I congratulate you on the new daughter and send you a copy of my new book with best wishes for a merry Christmas. You doubtless know much more about the spirit of youth these days than I can possibly tell you.” Jane Addams to Mary Everts Ewing, December 22, 1909

Car (or a Cow)—JA to her niece-in-law: “I do hope that the baby is better, if the doctor advises a cow you would better get one at once and I will send the Xmas money as soon as I return — of course we would not hesitate between a cow and a Ford if the baby is better fed by the former.” (Hey, I could use a new car this year, a Ford would be fine so long as it’s a hybrid, please). Jane Addams to Myra Harriet Reynolds Linn, November 30, 1916; Jane Addams to Myra Harriet Reynolds Linn, December 3, 1916

Holy Water Receptacle (only old ones from Paris)—JA to Alice Haldeman: “I am sending my Christmas package today to avoid the final rush. Knowing your fondness for worked metal, it is an old holy water receptacle I got in Paris last summer. It can of course be used for matches or anything you like.” Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 19, 1913.

Japanese Kimono (who cares what Alice thought, a kimono is a great gift idea; pick a colorful pattern you like, and if your recipient doesn’t like it, keep it for yourself and never buy that ungrateful person another gift.)—JA to Alice Haldeman: “I am sending you a short Japanese kimono which is nice to wear in bed or in your room. It goes with my best wishes for a Merry Christmas.” Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 19, 1908

Japanese Sparklers—JA to Alice Haldeman: “I sent you a box of Japanese ‘sparkers’ which seem to be a feature of Christmas this year. You light the end in a flame and all the rest happens merrily.” Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 24, 1907

Lamp—JA to her sister’s daughter: “The little Italian lamp is for Marcet. I wish very much that you would be here for Christmas but I hope that it will be a merry one, wherever it is. Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 6, 1903

Linens—JA to Alice Haldeman: “I am sending your Xmas present now because the mails are so full later. The bureau scarf is a [Romanian] one, ‘handmade’ from the neighborhood.” Alice probably hated it, but I’m sure JA’s niece-in-law was appreciate of her furniture linen: “The blue table covers were woven at Hull-House, one of the best bits of weaving which we have done.” Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 6, 1903; Jane Addams to Myra Harriet Reynolds Linn, December 11, 1919

Money (money is always good)—JA to a widowed friend: “May I send five dollars for Christmas to each child and ten for you. I wish it were ten times more, it would more adequately express my love and best wishes to the dearest family in the world.” Jane Addams to Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, December 18, 1911

Piano—JA to nephew Stanley Linn regarding gift for his wife: “I will send a little package for Jane later, but the real purpose of this letter is to ask you whether you think that between us we might get a piano for Myra’s Christmas. It might be a little solace to her to have music in the house. I could pay $150. down and the rest might come along on the [installment] plan. Could you have a good piano selected at Los Angeles and let me know the cost and terms of payment before buying. I should want to know what we were in for. It might be possible to get a good second hand one for two hundred dollars in which case I would try to do it all at once.” Following up two weeks later, JA wrote: “[Enclosed] please find a draft for the full amount of the piano. I am so glad you found one, and I hope that it is a good one.” Jane Addams to Stanley Ross Linn, December 4, 1919; Jane Addams to Stanley Ross Linn, December 17, 1919

Pin (a simple brooch of some sort)—JA to friend Lillian Wald: “May I send you this very work-a-day little pin from our shop with my most ardent wishes for the very best Christmas of all to you…” Jane Addams to Lillian D. Wald, December 21, 1911

A vintage newspaper ad features illustrations of children in various rompers and creepers, with prices listed below each child and descriptive text about styles and sale details. — Ad, Chicago Tribune (1917)

Rompers—JA to her grand-nieces and nephews in Kansas and California: “The rompers I had ordered from the Trade School were so big that I sent them all to Cal. and after Xmas they were going to try again.” Jane Addams to Anna Marcet Haldeman-Julius, December 17, 1917

Russian Things, Box of—JA to eight-year-old great niece: “I am sending you a box of some Russian things which I found the other day in the Russian shop, and I am sending a typewritten list so you may know how to divide them. Jane Addams to Jane Addams Linn, December 20, 1924, JADE.

Silver Box—JA to a regular Hull-House donor: “Some of the advanced boys in the shop have lately been venturing upon silver work and I am sending you a box they have made which has received some praise from one or two artists. It ought to be much bigger to contain all the gratitude and affection which I should like to put into it. But perhaps you will know what it ‘represents’ to use kindergarten lingo. With every possible good wish for the New Year.” Jane Addams to Anita McCormick Blaine, December 25, 1904

Typewriting Table (only go for this if you are giving it to someone who has hated every single gift you’ve ever given them for twenty years)—JA to Alice Haldeman: “I sent you a typewriting table today from Fields for Xmas. I almost sent a much prettier one which was not the right height but finally settled on the plainer one. If it isn’t right for the space please use it in the bank and we will look for another when you come, for your own room.” (Good grief, did Addams have to tell her sister there was a prettier one? ) Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 10, 1914

Happy Holidays. And good luck.

by Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Notes: It is important to note that there is a disproportionate number of surviving Christmas letters that Addams wrote to her sister Alice and her nephew Stanley Linn and his family. The evidence makes it appear she favored them with her gift giving. While it is true she was fond of the Linns and provided them extra support because they struggled, the extant correspondence only provides a glimpse of Addams’s holiday generosity. Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005), 489n52, 519; Sherry R. Shepler and Anne F. Mattina, “Paying the Price for Pacifism: The Press’s Rhetorical Shift from ‘Saint Jane’ to ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in America,’” Feminist Formations 24 (Spring 2012): 154-71; “Noiseless Parlor Fireworks,” The Index, 17, Christmas ed. (Dec. 14, 1907): 55; “Rompers and Creepers Come,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1917, p. 12 (advertisement); Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, January 10, 1901; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, June 13, 1907; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 18, 1907; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, January 10, 1909; Hull-House Year Book, January 1, 1916 (boys metalworking), all in JADE. Photo of Jane Addams, c. 1912, courtesy Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress.

November 24, 2021October 14, 2025

Fidelity, Accuracy, and the Delicate Balance

A person typing on a laptop at a wooden desk with headphones, handwritten notes, a cup of coffee, and a smartphone nearby.

A documentary editor’s top priority is unwavering accuracy to their collection’s text.

Wait, that doesn’t sound right.

A documentary editor’s goal should be the regularizing of words and writing styles so as to be easily read and searched by a reader.

But that doesn’t sound quite right, either.

These are the two schools of thought that a documentary editor grapples with when deciding on an editing style early in a project’s life. Fidelity: digitally representing an object exactly how it was created. Accuracy: changing characters or words to standardize and correct mistakes for various purposes. Humans are imperfect beings, leading us to make mistakes every so often, but also giving every person their own unique form of expression. But when someone’s written work, along with the imperfections it will undoubtedly have, is being prepared for increased access by being digitized and transcribed, how faithful should we be to their exact pen strokes?

For an example, take this salutation by W. E. B. Du Bois:

A greeting from a letter from W. E. B. Du Bois. — W. E. B. Du Bois to Jane Addams, April 19, 1905.

A common mistake made by over 400 authors in our digital edition so far, Du Bois spells Addams with a single D. In this case, as per our transcription guidelines, an editor would place [brackets] around the misspelled word and correct it. Our practices lean more toward accuracy than fidelity in this case, and would be applied to any incorrectly spelled name or word. After lengthy discussion, we felt this rule would aid with online searches . We also know that the spelling written above is factually wrong, and feel that correcting the mistake lessens confusion with names that may have been spelled 10 different ways across 10 different documents.

But what about another rule we have, concerning abbreviations:

A closing from a letter to Mary Rozet Smith. — Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, August 24, 1906.

Here, in a closing of the letter to Mary Rozet Smith, Addams writes, “Always yrs J. A.” which is exactly as we have transcribed the line. But wait, “yrs” is decidedly not how you spell “yours” in which case it should be bracketed and corrected, right? In this case we are leaving the spelling as is, arguing that expanding and regularizing abbreviated words changes the tone of the writing too intrusively. By leaning more toward fidelity rather than accuracy here, we hope to retain the unique style of writing that an author may have had.

Our transcription guidelines include dozens of rules about how to treat difficult to read texts or irregularities in spelling and punctuation. With each rule, editors hope to keep the delicate balance between fidelity and accuracy in transcriptions. One rule that is visible across the site is the use of brackets. By using brackets around changed words, editors can easily inform readers that something about the text may be different than the original, and by providing an image the reader can quickly check the spot that the change took place.

The bright side to editors working on a digital edition is the ability to easily change project guidelines. If, for some reason, we decide to change any of our rules, it would be entirely possible, though perhaps time consuming. This allows our relationship with our transcriptions to continue to grow as our editors develop a deeper connection with our texts.

This blog post was inspired by Ben Brumfield’s blog post “The Transcription Quality Balancing Act”.

For further examples of different transcription practices, see the National Archives’ Transcription Tips and Family Search’s “How should I index incorrect records?”

— Victoria Sciancalepore, Assistant Editor

November 22, 2021September 29, 2025

Our Thanks to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

“Thank You” is written in bold, stylized letters with a vintage decorative frame and floral designs featuring white flowers and leaves around the text.

I am delighted to announce that the Jane Addams Papers Project has been awarded a grant by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation! We are extremely grateful to the Foundation for their support of our work and their support for humanities research.

The award for Making the Jane Addams Papers Accessible to the Public
will support the work of undergraduate student assistants who are currently entering Addams documents in 1924 into our system. Our students analyze the digitized texts, creating descriptive metadata that makes them easier to locate and understand, and transcribe the texts. This makes text searches possible and helps readers unfamiliar or unable to read cursive. The Delmas grant will also fund the work of a student to help us create educational materials for high school AP and honors curriculum.

The grant will also be matched by the National Endowment for the Humanities. A win-win!

If you are able to help support the work of the Jane Addams Papers Project, please click on the donate link to keep our student workers typing away!

September 8, 2021September 29, 2025

Jane Addams and the Long 19th Amendment Project

Historic black-and-white photo of women suffragists holding a banner, with text about Harvards Long 19th Amendment Project Portal and a cartoon blue bird with a yellow Votes for Women sash.

I am very pleased to announce that the Jane Addams Digital Edition has shared content from our site with the Schlesinger Library’s Long 19th Amendment Project, an amazing digital portal that revolves around archival discovery, teaching innovation and collaborative scholarship on the history of gender and women’s rights.

This project, supported by the Schlesinger Library and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks to build collaboration by including digitized materials from well-known archives like the Papers of Susan B. Anthony and the Papers of Alice Paul at Schlesinger Library, but also includes materials from more than 40 contributing repositories.

When we were approached by the Long 19th Amendment team, we were excited to participate for two reasons. Jane Addams isn’t known primarily for her work for woman suffrage. She is often mentioned in lists, or gets a small part in the larger history, but in her day, Addams was a leading suffragist. She was a vice president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and used her considerable fame to promote the movement. She gave frequent speeches on woman suffrage, especially on its impact for working women, spoke on college campuses, and testified before Congress in 1912 to make her argument.

The other reason that we were eager to participate, is that the Long 19th Amendment Portal offered the opportunity to fulfill one of our long-term project aims regarding data and data sharing. We want to be able to export our Dublin Core-based data from our Omeka content management system so that it can be repurposed and shared with other scholars. This project demonstrated that with just a little effort on our part, we could share more than 500 documents.

Looking at the Jane Addams Digital Edition in terms of woman suffrage, we had several options.

To share documents that have been tagged with Woman Suffrage
To share biographies of people tagged with Woman Suffrage

Working with the Portal team, we decided to share documents written between 1901-1920 in the first contribution.As we proofread more texts, we will update the data shared to include additional years. Our biographical collection will be included as a linked collection that researchers can locate and consult directly.

This is just the first in what we hope will be other collaborations with scholars working on related collections. If you are interested in accessing data from the digital edition, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

August 24, 2021September 29, 2025

Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks –An Audio Musical

A sepia-toned image of a woman looking down is overlaid with the title Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks, a Ferris wheel, and text about a new musical play set in 1890s Chicago by Kristin Lems.

Exciting news! On Thursday, August 26 at 8 pm CST, Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks, an audio musical written and composed by Evanston playwright Kristin Lems, will open to the public at the website www.SaintJanePlay.com. The two-hour musical play, which can be enjoyed in one sitting or in four separate installments, is free, asking for a voluntary donation with a suggested sliding scale. After the site goes live, listeners may attend the show any time on demand.

Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks is set in Chicago in the decade of the 1893 World’s Fair. It is about the friendship between Hull House founder Jane Addams and Nellie Wicks, Kristin’s great grandmother, in the years 1890-1905, during the early years of Hull House.

Prize-winning Chicago dramatist Douglas Post is the director, with musical direction by Diana Lawrence and mixing and editing by Dan Dietrich. Piano arrangements and performances were created by Tom Cortese of Champaign, Illinois.

The cast consists of well-known area actors and singers, including Kathy Cowan as Jane Addams, Rebecca Keeshin as Nellie Wicks, Monica Szaflik as Ellen Gates Starr, Maddie Sachs as Julia Lathrop, Patrick Byrnes as George Wicks and John Dewey, Frankie Leo Bennett as Gene Wicks, John B. Leen as Jim Wicks and Sol Friedman, Kingsley Day as Richard Crane, and Therese Harrold as Addie Wicks. The professional, non-equity cast was auditioned and selected in December 2020 and recorded in the early months of 2021.

The “audio musical” is a new genre. The singer-actors rehearse their parts together on zoom, but record and upload them individually to a single destination without being in a recording studio. Then, the scenes and songs are reviewed, mixed, and edited by the director and recording engineer. The final product is similar to an audiobook or radio play, but there are also songs, in this case, 17 original songs including “The Hull House Rag,” “Straight to Hell in Chicago,” and other memorable numbers. The new genre enables artists to release entertaining musical theatre work while keeping both performers and audience safe.

The musical will open on Women’s Equality Day, August 26, to celebrate the 101st anniversary of American women winning the right to vote. Jane Addams was active in the suffrage movement 10 years after the time of the play, along with many activist women of Hull House. Two key organizers, Ellen Gates Starr and Julia Lathrop, are characters with key roles in the show.

Kristin Lems has won many accolades as a writer, composer, and performing artist, but this is her first full-length musical. Lems was inspired by stories about the unusual friendship between the two women, told by her mother, musician Carol Lems-Dworkin (1924-2019), and along with primary materials, including a handwritten diary by Nellie Wicks, two full length unpublished novels written by Nellie’s eldest daughters, recorded oral histories, and an autographed picture given to Nellie by Jane Addams shortly before Addams died. Lems also researched Jane Addams, Hull House, and Chicago history with a 2017 sabbatical from her employer, National Louis University, where she is a professor.

Many other outstanding talents helped design the trailer, iconic poster, website, video product, and script, and many people deserve thanks and praise for moving this ambitious project forward to this day. For information about the cast, members of the pre-production, production, or post-production team, or to contact Kristin Lems, please email saintjane2021@gmail.com.

August 11, 2021September 29, 2025

Dr. Harriet Rice: First Black Resident at Hull-House

A black-and-white portrait of a woman wearing round glasses, a fur hat, and a fur-collared coat, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression.

A Black woman wearing a thick fur coat and hat faces the camera. She has a serious expression and wears a monocle. The image is black and white, with a plain light background. — Dr. Harriet Rice (1915)

In 1893, an African-American woman with an extraordinary academic background came to live at Hull-House, and she spent a decade of her life in residence at the famous social settlement in Chicago. Her story is not a tale of realizing dreams against all odds. It is not a tale of American exceptionalism, illustrative of the possibilities of equality in a democracy. It is certainly no fairytale. It is, instead, a history of realities. It is a history of human experience informed by the harsh constraints of race and gender in the post-Reconstruction United States. Hull-House was remarkably progressive during the nadir of American race relations, and it provided a space for women to thrive. However, it was not a protective bubble against the prejudices of white America. And the city of Chicago, strictly ordered as it was by race and ethnicity and class, even in many forward-thinking reform organizations, could be cold and bigoted and cruel.

When Harriet Rice, a 27-year-old physician, arrived at Hull-House in the year of Chicago’s great and hopeful Columbian Exposition, she understood it was not going to be easy. She was the first and only African-American resident at the Hull-House settlement, which was located in an impoverished neighborhood of white immigrants, many of whom measured their success and status in juxtaposition with that of African Americans, the city’s lowest caste. Dr. Rice was a smart, ambitious Black woman at a time when society relegated women and people of color to subordinate roles. She knew that a majority of the population in the United States believed Black people were inferior. She knew women had to work harder than their male counterparts to make professional careers for themselves. But she was not looking for easy. She was used to hard work and struggle. She had always chosen challenging paths.

Born in 1866 in Newport, RI, Harriet Alleyne Rice was the daughter of a steamship steward who prospered enough to own a home and to send his children to college. Harriet was a bright and curious girl and a gifted student, and she dreamed of following the career path of an older brother and becoming a doctor. In 1887, she became the first African-American woman to graduate from Wellesley College, and she went straight on to the University of Michigan to join an early cadre of female, Black medical students there. Unfortunately, a health crisis brought on by a debilitating injury derailed her medical studies, but after enduring two operations and a lengthy convalescence, she entered the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. After earning her medical degree in 1891, she completed a year of post-graduate training at the prestigious New England Hospital for Women and Children. Dr. Rice was in a special class of African-American women, only one of 115 who held medical degrees by 1896.

When Dr. Rice settled in Chicago, her plan was to practice medicine, and on Sep. 8, 1893, the Illinois State Board of Health issued her a certificate entitling her to practice medicine and surgery in the state. Yet finding work proved difficult. Most hospitals in the United States did not grant privileges to African-American doctors, and Provident Hospital, established in 1891 on Chicago’s South Side, was the only African-American hospital in the city. As well, many white patients rejected medical treatment from Black doctors, and by 1900 there were only 30,150 African-Americans in Chicago and fewer still who could afford to pay for medical visits and treatments. Rice, who was one of only forty-five African-American physicians in Chicago, faced not only racial prejudice but gendered prejudice, as well. Many male physicians at that time barred women physicians from hospitals, and gender discrimination in all areas of the medical profession was commonplace.

We can only speculate about Rice’s hopes and dreams for herself in Chicago, and the particulars of her decision to live at Hull-House are unknown. But it is likely that Hull-House offered a refuge and an agreeable and affordable housing option. For Black Chicagoans housing was expensive and limited, confined almost exclusively to the city’s “Black Belt,” and much of the housing available to the city’s Black residents was inferior in condition and inconveniently located. There was a growing middle-class in Chicago and a prosperous Black community, but Rice was not possessed of standing and wealth when she arrived in the city seeking to build a better life for herself. When she moved into Hull-House, she might have already been feeling discouraged about her prospects, despite the fact that Jane Addams wanted her to join the settlement and might have even recruited her. Other residents were supportive of Rice, too. Mary Rozet Smith funded a fellowship with a small stipend for her. Florence Kelley shared a room with her at the settlement and, no doubt, offered her advice. And Julia Lathrop helped Rice make contacts in Chicago and counseled her when her medical practice floundered.

At first, Rice settled in comfortably and made friends. Madeleine Wallin, who was also a new resident, found Rice “one of the most lady-like and unobjectionable people” at the settlement. Jane Addams assigned Rice to help establish a medical clinic and dispensary at Hull-House, and when the leading physician, a white woman, left the settlement, Addams was hopeful that Rice would assume responsibility for the operation. However, Rice was either uninterested in dispensing medical care to the poor or, more likely, she was unwilling to accept poor treatment by Hull-House’s clientele of white immigrants, many of whom likely mistrusted the young Black doctor. Black Chicagoans would have been accepting of Dr. Rice, but most of the city’s Black residents lived too far from Hull-House to make use of the dispensary or other of the settlements programs and services.

In January 1895, Addams wrote to Mary Smith: “Dr Rice has an awful cold which has hung on for weeks and is perfectly miserable, she is also desperate about her financial situation, she has no practice save the Jane Club and H. H. Sister Lathrop has taken her life in her hand and is trying to induce her to go to the colored hospital. She said that I might find her in fragments upon my return.”

The following month, Addams updated Smith again: “I forgot to mention Dr Rice in my long screed this morning. She has a wretched cold—has lost her voice for weeks and is altogether doing miserably. I do not know what do for her or about her. She is still working on the library but by the time she pays her room rent and her coal probably does not eat enough. She has not the settlement spirit (if there is such a thing) and makes Miss [Annie] Fryar and indeed the rest of us, indignant by her utter refusal to do anything for the sick neighbors even when they are old friends of the House. I am constantly perplexed about her.”

And later in the month, Addams wrote: “Dr Rice’s cold is no better but she is much more human and charming.”

Rice struggled to establish a private medical practice, and she was struggling to find purpose at the settlement, too. Addams arranged for a $25 monthly stipend for Rice to work in the Hull-House branch of the Chicago Public Library, and then Rice ran the Hull-House Dispensary until it closed in June 1896. After that she took a short-term, paid position for the Illinois Board of Charities to organize records of Cook County’s public institutions serving the poor. From 1897-1898, Rice was the only doctor at the Chicago Maternity Hospital and Training School for Nursery Maids.

Jane Addams may have been right. Perhaps Rice did not have the “settlement spirit,” certainly other residents of Hull-House over the years failed to find the spirit in their own hearts. In Rice’s defense, however, she possessed the skills and education to be a physician, and she wanted to be a physician. Running a dispensary for the poor did not fully utilize her talents, and it is easy to imagine the racial hostility she experienced in that role. Addams liked Rice and felt empathy for her financial difficulties and ill health, but whereas she could accuse Rice of lacking the “settlement spirit,” Addams herself seemed to have lacked the spirit of sympathy for the frustrations Rice experienced. Addams likely believed that having Rice at the settlement was evidence of her own open-mindedness and racial equality at Hull-House. However, she either ignored or failed to fully understand Rice’s unique challenges from the standpoint of race. Hull-House was a safe environment for women, but in the early decades the settlement was probably not always a safe environment for a woman of color.

The truth of the matter is clear. Race and racism played a significant role in the experience of African-Americans, and Rice was not immune. Though she had the mental capacity and the training for a lucrative career in medicine, the color of her skin had more bearing on her chances for professional and financial success than did her preparedness for medical work. As a result, since arriving in Chicago, Rice had had to worry about money. All Hull-House residents were required to contribute to the settlement, to have a purpose, to pull their weight. They were also required to cover their expenses, although Hull-House was an affordable housing option for most of its residents. Rice’s attempt to establish a private medical practice was failing, and she was having difficulty making ends meet.

She also suffered poor physical health, perhaps exacerbated by the stress of persistent discrimination. In 1899, an unknown illness became serious enough that she moved back home to Newport to have another surgery and endure another long convalescence. There is no record of how Jane Addams or any of the other residents felt about Rice’s departure. However, when she returned to Chicago in 1901, she went back to Hull-House.

In July 1901, Jane Addams wrote Mary Smith: “The Bureau of Charities has absolutely no money and we have been more of a relief bureau than any thing else — but — [though] relief was needed Dr Rice is most amiable and charming and likes the work.”

Jane Addams still wanted Rice at Hull-House and, perhaps, felt an obligation to her. In 1902, Rice took a flat in the new apartment building at Hull-House, her salary as postmistress at the settlement’s Post Office allowing her to afford the flat and take her meals in the settlement’s Coffee House. From 1902-1904, Rice’s circumstances were secure, but perhaps she was restless or disappointed that a career in medicine was eluding her. After serving briefly as the Hull-House cashier, Rice left the settlement for good in 1904. If she kept in touch with Addams in the early years after her departure, no correspondence survives to document it. If she had hard feelings for the settlement, we cannot know, although later evidence suggests that Rice did not look upon her years in Chicago as successful, nor particularly pleasant ones.

A bronze medal featuring a relief of a woman holding a laurel branch, attached to a white ribbon with red and blue stripes at the edges. — WWI Medal of French Gratitude Image Courtesy of the American Medical Women’s Association.

We don’t know much about what happened to Rice after she left Hull-House, but there is evidence she continued to be restless. In 1910 she was an assistant in a Boston dispensary’s pathology laboratory, and sometime after that moved to France to live with her brother. She was in Europe when war broke out, and she was one of two African-American women who served in WWI, finally getting a real chance to practice medicine. Rice worked in a French military hospital for most of the war. In 1919, she was awarded the bronze medal of French gratitude, the Reconnaissance Française, for her meritorious medical service. Her WWI years were “happy years,” perhaps the most professionally fulfilling years of her life, years that proved to herself and illustrate for the historical record Dr. Rice’s capacity to be an skilled physician.

After the war, Rice returned home to Newport, where she lived with her sister, and she made another attempt at private medical practice. She also returned to the same old discriminatory circumstances she had faced in the past. When her sister died in 1925, Rice wrote to Wellesley classmates to share the bad news and some of her personal disappointments, as well. “I’m a lonely wonderer on the face of earth, without friends, without home, or settled employment of any kind,” she wrote. She was 61 years old and feeling lost. She was also, she added, “looking forward without hope, and backward only, with regret.”

In December 1928, when she was living in Boston, Rice wrote to Jane Addams, and her letter is a heartbreaking illustration of her sorrows. Having read in the newspaper that Addams had been in town for a lecture, she wrote: “I do wish I might have seen you. I should have been so glad to see you once more—although I hardly imagine that you would have been the least glad to see me. I’ve never forgotten once hearing a southern doctor tell about seeing again his old “colored Mammy” and how glad she was to see him; but on his side there seemed to be nothing.”

That sentence of the letter is replete with bitterness, but there is some tenderness in the letter, as well. Rice alluded to a less than amiable final departure from Hull-House, but she was hopeful that the years had softened any hurt there may have been between her and Addams, and also between her and Mary Rozet Smith, who had sponsored her residency at Hull-House all those years ago. “So,” Rice concluded, “please do let me wish yourself, and Miss Mary and Miss Eleanor [Smith] all the best wishes of the Christmas tide—health and good cheer and all the happiness possible in this dreadful world.”

Despite her accomplishments, which were unique and impressive, Rice saw the world through the lens of disappointment. The “dreadful” world had been for her, in large part, cold and bigoted and cruel. The character of race was a living, breathing entity, shaping her life and drawing her experiences; and it is hard to blame her for feeling frustrated and wounded. As for Jane Addams, it is impossible to know what she would have said to Rice to counter her negative narrative or to console her. If she replied to Rice, the letter is lost. But I suspect Addams, who was usually keen to reconnect and keep in touch with previous Hull-House residents, would have taken the time to see her old colleague in Boston had Rice requested a meeting when she was in town.

Between 1928 and 1933, Rice worked in Philadelphia and later in New York City, where she found employment in a laboratory at the Columbia Medical Center. Apparently, her financial circumstances were often precarious in those years. In June 1933, she wrote Mary Rozet Smith for help. In America’s Great Depression, her position at Columbia was in jeopardy. She hated to beg for work, but she had no choice. “This is a man’s world and they won’t let a woman get farther than they can help—or hinder.”

In 1935, Rice received a questionnaire sent to Wellesley graduates. Many of the questions pertained to marriage and family and did not pertain to her, but one of the questions provoked a passionate response. To the question “Have you any handicap, physical or other, which has been a determining factor of in your activity,” she wrote: “Yes! I’m colored which is worse than any crime in this God blessed Christian Country!”

Racial prejudice and discrimination had not subsided in the 1930s. Jim Crow still reigned in the South, “Sundown Towns” restricted the movements of African Americans in the Midwest, and most northern cities were increasingly segregated. There is little evidence of Rice’s later years, but at some point she settled in West Somerville, MA, outside of Boston to live in retirement. She was living there when she died at the age of 92 on May 24, 1958. Although she faced unimaginable difficulties, she had accomplished much in her long life, including a few historical firsts as an African-American woman. Before she died, I hope she gave herself the credit she deserved for reaching beyond what the society in which she lived proscribed for her. I suspect at the end of her life, however, she was still disappointed about the ways in which her country failed her. And it makes me angry that in death she suffered one final indignity, being buried in a public cemetery in her hometown of Newport in the area designated for African Americans.

I was born exactly 100 years after Dr. Rice, and I wish I could tell her things are different now. And they are different; and, in many ways, they are better. There are far fewer obstacles today for bright and curious little girls like Harriet had been, and Black women have greater access to college and professional careers than those who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still, I suspect, Rice would be disappointed to learn that only 36 percent of doctors today are women, and less than 3 percent are Black women.

By Stacy Lynn,
Associate Editor

Sources: Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 3-15, 23-30, 57, 97, 103; Irving Cutler, Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent, 4th ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 156-60; Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890-1945,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 214-41; Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954); Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 740-42; Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 387-88; Ann Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880-1920 (Chicago: Policy Press, c/o University of Chicago, 2018), 53; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 12, 14; Kimberly Jensen, “Uncle Sam’s Loyal Nieces: American Medical Women, Citizenship, and War Service in World War I,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 67 (Winter 1993): 680; “African Americans,” Encyclopedia of Chicago; Florence Kelley to Nicholas Kelley, June 29, 1902, transcribed in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Beverly Wilson Palmer, eds., The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 113; 1910 U.S. Federal Census; 1920 U.S. Federal Census; Maria Aspan, “Black Women Account for Less than 3% of U.S. Doctors,” Fortune, Aug. 9, 2020; “New Physicians for Illinois,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 9, 1893, p. 4; “George Addison Rice,” Fall River (MA) Evening News, Mar. 10, 1894, p. 4; “New England News in Tabloid Form,” Newport (RI) Mercury, Sep. 24, 1921, p. 5; “Dr. Harriet Rice, 92, Native of Newport,” Newport (RI) Daily News, May 27, 1958, p. 2; Selected Papers of Jane Addams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 3:233n2, 3:241, 3:270n24, 3:454n6; 415n21; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Jan. 15, 1895, in Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:411; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Feb. 3, 1895, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm (JAPM) 2:1656-58; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Feb. 24, 1895, JAPM, 2:1673; Harriet Rice to Jane Addams, Dec. 7, 1928, JAPM, 20:608; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, July 19, 1901; Harriet A. Rice to Anita McCormick Blaine, Aug. 31, 1904, both in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

August 11, 2021September 29, 2025

Thanks to the Ramapo College Foundation!

A historic red stone archway stands over a paved path, surrounded by green trees and a low brick wall on a sunny day.

We would like to thank the Ramapo College Foundation for awarding the Jane Addams Papers a grant of $2,200 to support student work on the project in the 2021-2022 academic year.

These funds will support the salary of one of our excellent student workers, who process documents, transcribing the texts, creating metadata, and identifying the people, events, organizations and publications mentioned in them.

Ramapo College and the Ramapo College Foundation have been extremely generous to the project and their support has been critical to keeping our work on schedule.

We are still seeking funding to support additional student workers. If you can help, please donate to the project!

July 21, 2021September 29, 2025

Segregation At Hull-House: A Closer Look

A group of twelve boys of diverse backgrounds, some shirtless, sit and stand closely together in a room with wooden walls, smiling and posing for the camera.

In June, Addams biographer and Project Advisory Board member Lucy Knight got in touch with a query regarding a claim that Hull-House was a segregated space until the 1930s. The claim first made by Thomas Lee Philpott in his 1978 work: The Slum and the Ghetto: Housing Reform and Neighborhood Work in Chicago, 1880-1930. It was repeated by Khalil Gibran Muhammed’s Condemnation of Blackness (2010), and then repeated by me in a 2015 blog post reporting on Khalil Muhammed’s talk at Ramapo College. Lucy wanted to know more, because the claim had begun appearing all over the web. Since then she has gathered evidence that refutes the statement.

I wrote that blog post a few weeks after launching the project at Ramapo and did not question the statement. I probably should have, but assumed that given the time and the place it was likely true. Today I want to give the question a little more light and attention.

There is no smoking gun document — one in which a policy of segregation was clearly established. Without that it can be extremely difficult to prove whether or not African-Americans were welcome at Hull-House or in its programs and sponsored clubs. A majority of the records of Hull-House have not survived, which makes it unlikely that we will ever be able to definitively confirm or debunk the statement.

There are a couple of layers to the question. First, was Hull-House itself a segregated space? To that question, the answer is clear. It was not. Dr. Harriet Alleyne Rice (1866-1958), a Black physician and graduate of Wellesley College, started working at Hull House as early as 1893, working with the Hull-House branch of the Chicago Bureau of Charities and tending to the poor.

Addams invited Black speakers to Hull-House, including prominent figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who gave the speech “The Souls of Black Folk” at Hull-House on Lincoln’s birthday 1907 (Hull-House Year Book, 1906-1907). A year earlier, Atlanta newspaperman J. Max Barber spoke about the Atlanta race riot to a Hull House “audience mostly composed of negroes.” (Chicago Tribune, October 8, 190-6,. p. 3). Addams invited Ida B. Wells to visit and dine at Hull-House. And in 1912, Addams hosted a meeting of the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the Hull-House grounds.

A large group of men and women, many wearing hats and formal attire, gathered outdoors between brick buildings at the Fourth Annual Conference of the NAACP in Chicago, 1912. A sign below lists notable participants. — Hull-House hosted a reception for the delegates of the NAACP meeting in Chicago on April 30, 1912.

A more complicated question was whether Hull-House’s clubs and groups welcomed people of all races. Few if any spaces in Chicago were integrated during Jane Addams’s life. By 1910, the vast majority of African-Americans lived in Chicago’s South Side in what was known as the “Black Belt.” They formed their own organizations to empower their communities, much as other ethnic and religious groups did. African-Americans who came to Chicago during the Great Migration found opportunity, but also oppression.

Hull-House was located in the Near West Side, a overcrowded community that featured a wide range of European immigrants. The area was filled with ever changing languages and customs as Irish, German, Czech, and French immigrants were replaced by Jews from Russia and Poland, Italians and Greeks. In 1895, Hull-House workers surveyed the area showing the cultural (if not racial) diversity. It was not until the 1930s and 1940s that African-Americans and Mexican became a more significant presence in Hull-House’s neighborhood.

A detailed, color-coded map of Chicago blocks from Polk to Twelfth and Halsted to Jefferson, showing the distribution of various nationalities in 1895 through colored rectangles representing individual buildings. — Nationalities Map of Polk Street to 12th Street in the Near West Side (Hull House Maps and Papers, 1895).

As a neighborhood-based settlement, Hull-House represented its surroundings, which meant that in its early years, the majority of its clientele were white immigrants. Photographs of early activities show this clearly.

A vintage black-and-white photo shows a group of young children in old-fashioned clothing and hats standing outdoors, with an adult woman behind them and buildings visible in the background. — A group of toddlers outside Hull-House in the 1890s. At this point the neighborhood was predominately comprised of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. (Seven Settlement Houses — Database of Photos, University of Illinois at Chicago)

Many of clubs and associations that operated out of Hull House were developed around ethnic affiliations, which was a way to retain community and customs in a time of rapid change and Americanization. The range of clubs at Hull-House was vast, and the numbers of people in and out of the Hull-House grounds reached nine thousand per week between 1906 and 1916. The clubs and associations were organized and operated by their members, some, like the “Greek Olympic Athletic Club,” were made up of Greek immigrants interested in athletics; others like the Hull-House Electrical Club, was made up of men who worked in electrical occupations. There were Greek and Russian social clubs, a 19th Ward Socialist Club, and the Jane Club, which was a co-operative boarding club for young women that operated its own house with thirty bedrooms. There were also general Men and Women’s Clubs, Boys and Girls’ Clubs, and educational programs in art, practical employment skills, and English language classes.

I find it unlikely that many of these clubs or programs were multi-racial in the first decades of Hull-House’s existence. Among the photographs of Hull-House activities located in archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago, photos from before 1920 depict what appear to be white groups.

A large group of children and a few adults pose for a photo on a city sidewalk in front of a brick building, with some children sitting on the curb and others standing behind them. — This photograph, dated only “ca. 1920s” by Wallace Kirkland, shows a group of neighborhood children preparing to leave for the Bowen Country Club. (Hull-House Photograph Collection,University of Illinois at Chicago)

There is some evidence of Black participation in clubs and groups at Hull-House before the 1930s. In 1913, the Chicago Defender wrote an obituary of George Williams, “the only Negro boy connected with Hull House as a member. He was a member of the band and took part in all the active branches of the settlement. Miss Jane Addams praised him to the highest. The day of his funeral the full band was out and his casket was borne by three Italians and one Jewish boy.” (Chicago Defender, September 20, 1913.)

An African-American women’s club was formed at Hull-House in 1925, first called “The Colored Mothers’ Club,” and later the “Community Club.” They met on Monday evenings and held monthly interracial meetings which the Chicago Defender characterized as “not only harmonious and satisfactory, but very helpful.”

A group of Black women in dresses pose in front of a bus labeled “Willett Motor Coach Company” in a grassy outdoor setting, with vintage cars and trees visible in the background. — This photo from around 1927 depicts the Hull House Community Club, composed of African-American women. (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

The Defender continued:

In and around Hull House a large number of the foreign population moved into other neighborhoods, and their places have been taken up by our group. The residents of the famous social settlement are still living up to their ideals of helping the people in the neighborhood to adjust themselves, and our boys and girls are urged to join all of the classes, and with their elders are cordially invited to take part in all the activities of the place. (Chicago Defender, December 11, 1926, p. 5.)

But, does this one newspaper article tell the whole story? By 1937, the Defender characterized the Community Club as the medium through which Hull-House worked among the African-American community. The club was affiliated with the National Federation of Colored Women and its focus was on bettering conditions for African-Americans in their community. (Chicago Defender, September 25, 1937, p. 19.) Did Hull-House push African-American activity off to the side into one or two clubs? Did African-Americans feel welcome in the late 1930s when they walked into the settlement?

Dewey Jones, the Assistant Director of Hull-House in 1938 reported during a 1939 speech that one long-time member of the Community Club had complained that its members were not invited to take part in general community events. In 1941 a caption on a photograph depicting Black women at the Jane Addams Memorial Lilac Ball on May 24, 1941 noted that “Director Charlotte Carr insisted that African Americans be invited to the Ball.” The fact that Carr’s action was noted, makes it appear that it was not the norm.

Four people sit in a row of chairs watching a dance, while two couples dance nearby. The setting appears to be a formal event with women in dresses and men in suits. Some seats in the background are empty. — The Jane Addams Memorial Lilac Ball was held May 24, 1941 at the Stevens Hotel in Chicago. (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

Florence Scala (1918-2007), an Italian-American resident of the West Side and a volunteer at Hull-House from 1934 to 1954, recalled that though the Near West Side had a great mix of ethnic groups, “there were no blacks, blacks were not active in the Hull-House programs when I was going there.” (Carolyn Eastwood, Near West Side Stories: Struggles for Community in Chicago’s Maxwell Street Neighborhood (2002), p. 139.)

By the 1930s and especially by the early 1940s, photographs of Hull-House activities show the changing composition of the neighborhood. There were Mexican fiestas, and pottery classes, and photographs of integrated children’s activities at the Joseph T. Bowen Country Club.

A Mexican fiesta was held at Hull-House on June 13, 1941 for the purpose of bettering relationships between Mexicans and American in s the Chicago area. (Chicago Tribune, June 8,. 1941, p. 41. Hull-House Association Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

A group of children in winter clothing stand in a hallway, some holding hands, accompanied by a few adults. The children appear to be waiting or lined up near a doorway. — Photos like these, with no clear date, save the “1920s-1930s” offer evidence of Black families participating in Hull-House programming, but not enough detail. (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

So we are left with conflicting recollections and reporting. Did Florence Skala have a very different experience at Hull-House than the children who attended the Bowen camp in the 1940s? Were the adult activities more racially divided, broken into clubs that kept to their own kind? Without additional documentation, it is hard to make a determination that includes all the voices we have.

We can close with a look at what African-American reporters said at the death of Jane Addams in 1935. In an obituary written of Addams in 1935, Thyra Edwards of the Pittsburgh Courier focused on Addams and Hull-House with regard to race.

Jane Addams had no ‘attitude’ toward the Negro. To her he was just one of the citizenship, one part of the whole. She recognized that the distinction of color exposed him more easily to attack and discrimination at the same time, adding a moral responsibility upon Americans to work against extraordinary exploitation because of color.

When Negroes moved into Hull House, there was no ‘consultant’ as to whether they should be accepted and in what proportions. Quite simply, new neighbors had come to Hull House and they found their way into whatever classes or groups they chose. (Pittsburgh Courier, June 1, 1935, p. 9.)

Another tribute to Addams was published in the Chicago Defender, where Eugene Kinckle Jones remarked:

Jane Addams made no special effort to lead the Negro to the Promised Land but by no act or thought did she eliminate this race from the classes or groups most in need.’ At Hull House, they had no set place but they were eliminated from no place. In her condemnation of crime, she condemned lynching. In her belief in the extension of suffrage to all, she included the Negro in her ‘all.’ (Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, p. 3.)

Thanks to Louise Knight for her research into the question which she graciously provided.

July 7, 2021September 29, 2025

Moving House

When the Jane Addams Papers Project came to Ramapo College in September 2015, space was a concern. The project was designed with the idea that undergraduate student workers would be an integral part of our work and in the early years, we were not quite sure where we would be able to fit them. Ramapo College has been a great partner to the project, giving us new space and increased capacity as the project has grown.

Four people work in an office. A woman uses a computer at the front, another person works at a desk with a computer, and two women sit together at a round table having a discussion. Shelves and office decor are visible. — Our current space. Students work at computers while Cathy and Tori discuss a document.

Our first office was a small faculty office, into which we squeezed three computer stations — one for Cathy, one for me, and one for a student. A short time later, Ramapo provided me with an office next door. We squeezed in three more computer stations and were now able to have four (or sometimes five) students working with us. We had to stagger schedules to make it work, and it got a little tight sometimes, but we built great camaraderie at close quarters. When we had too many students to fit, the Dean allowed them to use a conference room and sometimes we flowed out into the Library or student lounges.

In 2018, with the Project hiring between 8-10 students per semester, Ramapo upgraded our space. We moved into a Project office, a large space where up to six students and two staff can work together. This space has become a hub of activity and attracts attention from faculty and students alike who pass in the hall. Working from home during the pandemic meant missing the collaboration that goes on in the office every day.

Two people wearing masks and hard hats stand in a room under construction behind a glass door labeled 204 Digital Humanities. The room has boxes, construction materials, and exposed floors. — Cathy discusses details of the office while standing in the unfinished space.

When the construction is finished, we will have a new home at the Peter P. Mercer Learning Commons. Ramapo’s newest building, an expansion and enhancement of the George Potter Library, has been under construction since 2019. While it seemed the project would never end, and we feared that the pandemic would slow construction, the end is in sight: Fall 2021.

A small room with two folding chairs, cardboard boxes, scattered wires, metal rods, and debris on a bare concrete floor, giving the appearance of ongoing construction or storage. — Inside Cathy’s office, still very much a work in progress.

The Jane Addams Papers will occupy the Library’s Digital Humanities suite, with a large workspace that can fit eight or more students at a time, as well as space for my desk, files, and books, and a separate attached office for Cathy. We will be located on the Learning Commons’s second floor, close to the College Archives. All around us will be a brand new, four story library with abundant private and group study areas, smart classrooms and conference rooms, a café, outdoor seating, and a maker space. The hope is that this new lively space will become the heart of the campus and we are delighted to have a place there.

Cathy and I were recently given a hardhat tour of the construction site so that we could see our new space. Guided by Ramapo’s Director of Capital Planning, Daniel Roche, and Ramapo’s Construction Project Manager, Kosta Svarnas, we finally saw our new space! We are so happy that Ramapo gave us exactly what we wanted and needed in our new offices, and we could see all the possibilities of the space even while still under construction. Cathy’s office,

Two women in hard hats stand outside a modern glass building on a sunny day. One has purple hair and wears jeans, the other has short blonde hair and wears dark pants. Both are smiling and facing the camera. — Tori and Cathy stand outside the Peter P. Mercer Learning Commons.

connected to the main workspace, will allow her easy access to the staff while also being able to conduct private meetings with students and others. My space, just outside her office, will allow close work with both the students and Cathy, and we will finally have enough space to store our document images in our offices. We have an overhead projector and screen which will help train students and give presentations about the project. And we will have a neat graphic presence that we will reveal once we are in the space.

While we don’t have an exact move in date, we are extremely excited about the future of the Project at the College and in this new space. And that, I think, is what really excites us the most.

June 3, 2021September 29, 2025

“All Very Neatly Enacted”

On May 12, 1902, Jane Addams was aboard the California Limited, traveling on the Santa Fe Railroad line on her way home to Chicago. She had been in Los Angeles for a national convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The California Limited, inaugurated in 1892, was billed as the “finest train west of Chicago.” It featured Pullman sleeping cars, an observation deck, and dining cars, and it offered “the highest attainment in luxurious railway travel.”

Jane Addams was a seasoned traveler, had toured Europe twice, traveled to Paris for the World’s Fair in 1900, and had visited much of the United States. Yet she was often an impatient traveler, and long journeys tended to steal her energy. She accepted train travel as a regular occurrence in her busy life, but riding on trains and waiting on trains sometimes made her tired and cranky. She had been anxious about the long trip to the West Coast and, in fact, might have begged off if she had not promised Florence Kelley she would go. Kelley was a committee chairwoman for the Federation and headed up the panel on which Addams was presenting a paper. Addams went West not for herself, but at the behest of her friend. She wanted to support her old Hull-House colleague, but she had been “quite dreading California.”

To her surprise, however, the journey out to California turned out to be a delightful and welcomed reprieve. It was “very easy,” she wrote Mary Smith, “Mrs Wilmarth, Mrs Ward and I had a state room together and read aloud and united our souls to no end.” Mary Wilmarth and Lydia Coonley-Ward, both active members of the Chicago Women’s Club, were also attending the national convention.

Addams’s time in California was also something of a triumph for her public reputation. At the convention, which was a great success and drew enthusiastic attention, Addams delivered a well-received speech, “The Social Waste of Child Labor.” She also earned praise for the “intense” appeal she made on behalf of African-American women’s clubs, when the Federation, to placate the white southern women in attendance at the convention, effectively voted to bar black clubs from admission to the national organization. Addams also made public appearances and delivered speeches beyond the convention, spending two weeks as a media darling. A reporter who covered her speech at a Y.M.C.A. in Los Angeles, for example, marveled at her “extremely effective presence” and the frequent applause Addams’s speech there garnered. And an early historian of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs noted in her 1912 history that “no woman at the Los Angeles Biennial could have failed to be greatly impressed by the address of Jane Addams of Illinois.”

Still, Jane Addams of Illinois was underwhelmed by the convention. As she wrote Smith, “I met with all the delegates as wise as an owl as to looks, but it all seems terribly remote and save for the color question without any real issue.” Although she was a supporter of women’s clubs, she was not, in her bones, a club woman. As well, she was anxious to get back to work in Chicago, was longing for home, and itching to return to Hull-House, having spent much of the spring on the road.

At 6 p.m. Saturday, May 10, she boarded the California Limited at the Los Angeles train station to embark on the approximately fifty-seven hour journey to Chicago. A successful trip in the books, Addams settled in for the ride, tucked up with a good book and good company. A “very easy” journey home? Not so much.

Just before 10 o’clock on the following Monday morning, her train was nearing Revere, MO, a few miles northwest of Keokuk, IA, and still nearly 300 miles southwest of Chicago. Addams was sitting in her section of the train with her nephew James Weber Linn, a University of Chicago professor, who was traveling with her. Suddenly, an axel on the dining car broke, the train ran into a switch and crashed into a box car sitting on a side track. A corner of the dining car was torn off and six of the train’s cars derailed. Addams was “thrown with quite a degree of violence to the side of the coach.”

In the first decade of the twentieth century, train accidents were on the rise. Americans at this time were ninety times more like to die in a train wreck than they were to die in an airplane crash a century later. On the California Limited that day, one man was killed and many passengers were injured. A physician on board attended to Addams, who injured her arm and torso and suffered lacerations on her face from a shower of broken glass from the car’s shattered windows. In a public statement later that day, Addams told reporters: “The same jolt that injured me threw my nephew to his feet, saving him from serious hurts. I was thinking of something else at the time and didn’t have time to make any effort to save myself. The crash came without warning.”

Addams was pretty banged up in the accident, arriving home to Chicago later that night to a group of worried Hull-House residents, who collected her at the train station. She would take a few days to rest and recover, and would experience some lingering aches for the rest of the month. Yet she was sanguine when she wrote Mary Smith a week after the accident.

Dearest: I have had my R.R. wreck at last, the pain, the moment of panic, the thrill, the rescue, all very neatly enacted. The ten days thereafter, [although] containing some very miserable hours, have not on the whole been so bad & I find this morning — the first downstairs — filled with a content so deep that it reminds me of that of the early days of H. H. You have been a saint about writing, three of your letters during the first week and cheered me to the soul.”

Jane Addams was not one to dwell on her difficulties and always as quick to return to her work as possible. Following the train wreck, she cleared her calendar, striking one particularly busy day entirely off, but soon her schedule was full again. On May 26, she hosted friends for a Hull-House play, addressed the Merchants’ Club of Chicago on May 31, and was back on a train in July for a long trip to upstate New York.

Jane Addams was a woman who filled up nearly all her days with her reform activities and her writing. Women in perpetual motion, ever engaged in good work, have no time for a derailment. Not by trains, nor by anything else.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Notes: Mark Aldrich, “Public Relations and Technology: The ‘Standard Railroad of the World’ and the Crisis in Railroad Safety, 1897-1917,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 74 (Winter 2007): 76-77; Michael Bezilla and Luther Gette, Branch Line Empires: The Pennsylvania and the New York Central Railroads (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 219-20; Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Haste, eds., Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 183-85, 982-86; Steve Glischinski, Santa Fe Railway (Minneapolis: MBI Publishing, 2008), 35, 139; Mary I. Wood, The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (New York: General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1912), 141-45; “To Chicago and New York; The California Limited—Daily,” Advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 1901, p. 1; “Colored Clubs Need Not Apply,” The Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1902, p. 44; “California Limited,” Advertisement, San Bernadino (CA) County Sun, May 11, 1902, p. 4; “Santa Fe Train Is wrecked Again,” Salt Lake (City) Telegram, May 12, 1902, p. 6; “Santa Fe Limited in Wreck,” The St. Louis Republic, May 13, 1902, p. 3; “Miss Addams Hurt in Wreck,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), May 13, 1902, p. 1 (clipping); “Jane Addams Injured,” The Daily Times (Davenport, IA), May 14, 1902, p. 10; “Jane Addams Still Suffers,” The Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1902, p. 2; “The Federation’s Best Brilliancy,” The Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1902 (drawing); “Colored Clubs Need Not Apply,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1902, p. 44; Jane Addams Diary, Mar. 15-May 8, May 24, July 4, 1902, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, 29:796-810, 813, 822; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, April 8, 1902; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, April 16, 1902; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, May 3, 1902; Statement on Train Wreck, May 12, 1902; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, May 19, 1902; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, May 26, 1902; Delinquent Children, May 31, 1902; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, August 5, 1904, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Photographs: Jane Addams, c. 1900; All Aboard the California Limited, c. 1905; both photos courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

April 28, 2021October 14, 2025

The Jane Addams Memorial Tollway?

Brown highway sign reading Jane Addams Memorial Tollway next to a busy multi-lane road with several cars driving in both directions. Dry grass and a partly cloudy sky are visible.

I live about three hours south of Chicago, and while I don’t pay close attention to the Chicago news I keep a peripheral eyeball on the city’s newspapers. A couple of weeks ago, I saw in the Chicago Tribune a mention of a non-fatal, semi-trailer rollover on the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway. Heh? The Jane Addams Memorial Tollway? How on the Illinois prairie had I never heard about a tollway named for Jane Addams?

So, it turns out that the Northwest Tollway was renamed the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway in 2007, so I’m fourteen years late to this party. The Jane Addams Memorial Tollway is a section of Interstate 90, which is the longest interstate highway in the United States and is the busy, east-west highway that runs from Boston to Seattle, crossing through twelve northern states, from Massachusetts to Illinois to Washington. The Jane Addams part of the interstate covers seventy-six miles from O’Hare International Airport, northwest of downtown Chicago, to the Wisconsin state border. The Jane Addams Memorial Tollway goes right through Rockford, where Jane Addams attended college at Rockford Female Seminary, and it bends north heading toward Wisconsin about thirty miles southeast of her hometown of Cedarville.

Jane Addams spent forty-six years in Chicago, cleaning up the 19^th Ward, assisting poor immigrants, advocating for child labor laws, demanding woman suffrage, and pleading for world peace. While leading a variety of reform movements, writing eleven books, and becoming a Progressive Era icon, Jane Addams also functioned as a matriarch of her extended Cedarville family. Over the years, she spent a lot of time in train cars traveling to and from Hull-House and her hometown, passing through Rockford each time. Perhaps that was a factor in the mind of the history genius or crackpot, depending on your point of view, who came up with the idea and deemed it an honor to name that path for the most famous Illinois woman who ever traveled it.

Is it an honor to have your name attached to a road? Some people think so, I guess. It sure is a popular memorial route (pun intended) here in Illinois. A stretch of Interstate 55 in southwestern Illinois is named for beloved U.S. Senator Paul Simon, and the signs announcing it as such include an image of a bowtie for which he was famous. A Mississippi River bridge connecting Illinois and Missouri at St. Louis is named for Cardinal baseball great Stan Musial (it’s called “The Stan Span” by locals—yes, yes, it is, oh my god). And REO Speedwagon Way, a couple of blocks in downtown Champaign, commemorates the University of Illinois beginnings of the popular 1980s band.

Hull-House and Rockford College held a 150^th birthday celebration at the Belvidere Oasis on the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway on Sep. 14, 2010. A reporter covering the tollway renaming found it “sensible that an Illinois Tollway is named for Jane Addams because women drive, too.” Okay, well, who am I to diss a highway oasis birthday party for Saint Jane or to argue with the argument that women drive? So let us assume that naming a road after an important person (or band) makes sense. What bothers me is that this road named for Jane Addams, a woman who dedicated her life to helping the less fortunate people around her, is a tollway. Paying drivers only, thank you very much. Today, if I get on the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway at tollway plaza #6 at O’Hare and drive it all the way to Beloit at the Wisconsin state line, it will take me ninety minutes if I’m lucky and traffic isn’t horrible and it will set me back $7.90, albeit locals with an I-Pass will pay half that amount. To be honest, I am one of those crazy people who think basic infrastructure, like roads, should be provided for all citizens free of charge, and I suspect Jane Addams would agree with me on that point.

To make this Jane Addams tollway thing even more unseemly to me is the fact that this “honor” renaming of highway happened at the moment the Illinois Tollway authority was “flush with cash” from tollway collections and planning an expensive, long, disruptive construction project to widen and improve the road at a final staggering cost of $2.5 billion. The Illinois Tollway, which operates mostly independent of Illinois state government, was using the good name of Jane Addams for positive spin. In 1907, Addams protested the widening of Halsted Street in front of the Hull-House settlement, and I’m offering this fact as historical evidence that she was an “Anti” in the road-widening movement. My own read on this story is that the Illinois Tollway had extracted too much toll money from previous drivers, widened the road to get more “customers,” named it the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway to make us feel warm and fuzzy, and has been gouging drivers in the good woman’s name ever since.

Paul Simon, Stan Musial, and REO Speedwagon got free transportation memorials. Jane Addams got a tollway. Seriously? Is this a joke?

The signs for the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway feature a logo of sorts, with a dark profile of Jane Addams in front of a simple drawing of a white house (Hull-House, presumably), both contained in a circle. Around that circle are the words “Dedication” and “Advocacy” and “Service.” Those of you who have not had the “pleasure” of traversing the toll roads of Chicagoland will have to take my word for it that they have absolutely nothing to do with dedication or advocacy or service. Jane Addams Memorial Tollway makes me scratch my perplexed noggin, because nothing about traffic congestion, suburban sprawl, concrete spaghetti, or the ca-ching sound of coins being sucked into the change bins on toll plazas sings Jane Addams to me.

Oh, I know, I know. In this big, wide, crazy world, it matters not a bit. Jane Addams is remembered every day at Hull-House, which is not only a museum that contextualizes her life and her work, but is also a soulful, living and breathing organization still dedicated to social justice. Illinois school children learn about Addams and her work every year when they study Illinois History. And the Jane Addams Papers Project is making her documents freely available on the internet. Each of these efforts is a beautiful memorial to Jane Addams and her historical importance. It is really not important that Interstate 90 from Chicago to Wisconsin is named the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway. I am sure most people who drive upon it know it only as Interstate 90, anyway, and even those who might catch one of logoed signs indicating that it is the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway, likely pay it no notice whatsoever.

Yet, in an era when Americans are reconsidering what place historical memorials have in public spaces, how their meanings change over time, and the costs we pay for getting them so wrong, I wonder what good even the good ones can do us. Some might argue that a highway or a bridge beats a stone statue any single day of the week for its ability to honor what and who matters to a collective national, state, or local us. I wonder if whatever “us” is has, however, become too divided to agree on what makes a good or bad monument or memorial. In the end, I think I’ve decided that statues and roads don’t cement legacies into our shared consciousness, and I believe that good books and museums and accessibility to the historical records that document our past are the best, truest memorials of all. I’m content to let historians, museum professionals, and school teachers do the long-haul driving on this road.

As for Jane Addams, she is well known in Illinois, more appreciated here in her home state than she is anywhere else. She is a favorite Illinois daughter, and that is why the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway exists. As an Illinoisan and as an editor of the papers of Jane Addams, I sometimes get a little sensitive when I meet people who haven’t heard of Jane Addams and then leap to conclusions to recover themselves. But the next time I tell someone what I do for a living and they ask me if Jane Addams is related to the famous Boston Adams family, I will sigh, like I always do. I will offer them a short bio of the woman and her work, like I always do. And then I will roll my eyes in my imagination and say to myself: “Come on, people, even the Illinois Tollway has heard of Jane Addams and knows that she spelled her surname with two “d’s!”

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Notes: Illinois Tollway, “Jane Addams Memorial Tollway,” flyer, 2016; Jane Dwyre Garton, “76 Years After Her Nobel Prize, A Tollway for Jane Addams,” Huffington Post, May 25, 1911; “Tollway Windfall Spawns Big Plans, Chicago Tribune, Sep. 8, 2007, p. 1; “Celebrating a Radical Social Worker,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 27, 2010, p. 3; “Tollway Contracts Close to $180M,” Chicago Tribune, June 30, 2013, p. 7; “Illinois Tollway Recognized for Its $2.5 Billion Jane Addams Tollway Project,” Toll Roads News, Mar. 15, 2017; “Illinois. (Construction video of part of the tollway); Jane Addams to the City of Chicago Board of Local Improvements, January 10, 1907, Jane Addams Digital Edition.

March 15, 2021September 29, 2025

Me and Jane’s Books

Five books by Jane Addams are lined up on a shelf. The prominent title, Twenty Years at Hull-House, features a cover illustration of a building. The other books have dark spines with gold or white text.

A woman in early 20th-century clothing sits at a desk, writing on paper with a pen. A mirror behind her shows another woman sitting in the background. The room has patterned wallpaper and a carpeted floor. — Image courtesy of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Jane Addams was an author with a fascinating and peculiar style. Her writing was all about her settlement work and social justice philosophy, but she had a delicate hand. She infused her philosophy with stories, weaving like lace her world view and ideas into the tapestry of the human drama and sometimes shocking socioeconomic realities she presented in her writing. I admire Jane Addams as a writer. In addition to publishing dozens of articles and pamphlets, she published eleven books in her lifetime. And it is my intention to own a first edition copy of every single one of them.

This is what I do. I embrace with wholeheartedness the historical subjects I study. I am no dispassionate historian, and I am always looking for tangible ways to connect with the past. As an editor, I always ground my analysis of history by the words on the pages of the historical documents with which I am so lucky to work. But I also know that weaving my historical enthusiasm into my scholarly writing, using threads from the connectedness I cultivate in my work, makes me a better historian. Perhaps, I, too, have a peculiar style.

Also like Jane Addams, I am a lover of books. My ever growing personal collection of 1,500-ish weighs heavy the bookcases in my modest 1919 bungalow. Like Jane Addams, I am an author, although my two books hold no candle to her eleven. Like Jane Addams, I also take great joy in owning, giving, and receiving books that matter to me. I appreciate Addams’s particular delight in collecting books associated with her friends and the people she admired. As Addams wrote the writer and editor Richard Watson Gilder in 1903: “The little book of Lincoln I knew very well but splendidly forgot that you had edited it. I need not say that I shall prize [it] more than before—which means a great deal.”

Having studied the papers of Jane Addams for four years now, I have come to see Jane Addams the woman as a distant friend. The project of collecting her books means a great deal to me. It feels a natural way to connect with her across the distance of the years between us. I am also drawn to Addams’s books because history has undervalued her contributions as an author. To most people who know of her, Jane Addams is Hull-House. She is a social worker and reformer. She is a campaigner for suffrage, for the short-lived Progressive Party, and for world peace. Indeed, all good and well deserved descriptions of her. Yet despite the fact that she published eleven books, she is rarely defined as an author, and with the exception of Twenty-Years at Hull-House, her books are not widely read or known today.

I am not a voice in the wilderness on the merits of Jane Addams’s literary significance. Her books are digitized on platforms like Internet Archive. Her writing inspired an excellent writer’s biography, Jane Addams: A Writer’s Life, and selections from Twenty-Years at Hull-House often appear in literary or historical anthologies. As well, in recent years, the University of Illinois Press has made her books more accessible, publishing them in paper with rich introductions to provide important historical contexts and bringing back into print the rarer among them.

Perhaps you, like so many people interested in the life and times of Jane Addams, have read one or more of the many biographies about her life. But have you read one of Jane Addams’s own books? If the answer is no, I encourage you to do so. To read her books is to know her better by seeing how she packaged her social reform knowledge for a wide audience. And, by the way, if it suits you to purchase a first edition copy in order to fulfil this imperative, and then if you find you have not the shelf space to accommodate it, I will happily take it off your hands.

Thus far, I have collected five first editions in various states of condition. I have The Second Twenty-Years at Hull-House, My Friend, Julia Lathrop, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil , and Twenty Years at Hull-House. The condition of my copy of Twenty Years at Hull-House is a bit rough, or, perhaps, I should say that it is delicate, like Jane’s soft employment of her bold philosophical ideas in her writing. No matter. It is my favorite, partly because of the lovely etching on the cover by Frank Hazenplug and the drawings scattered throughout by Norah Hamilton, both of these artists Hull-House residents. Because of their contributions to the book, Jane Addams wrote that it was “quite a Hull-House effort.” The book is quintessential Jane Addams, beautiful in its connections to the critical reform work she conducted in Chicago, to the settlement house that made her famous, and to the extraordinary people who lived and worked with her there.

Inside my copy of Twenty Years at Hull-House is the name, written in pencil, of the woman whom I suspect was the book’s first owner. Fanell Crawford McDaniel. She was a former teacher, trained at the Normal School in St. Louis, who was a 33-year-old homemaker in 1910 or early 1911 when she purchased the book and when she was the wife of a prominent attorney in Tuscaloosa, AL. I lived in St. Louis for eight years, and one of my dearest friends in the world was born and raised in Tuscaloosa. The spine may be broken on my affordable first edition of Twenty-Years, but possessing it connects my heart to Jane, to Fanell, and to my friend Christi in ways that make it more prized than a more pristine but less loved copy of Addams’s most well-known book might be.

I am content to take time in the acquisition of the remaining six of Jane Addams’s books. It is a fun process this state of collecting, and I don’t want to reach its end too soon. I know the first two books, Democracy and Social Ethics and Newer Ideals of Peace, are more rare and will come at dearer prices. Last week I almost pulled the trigger on a copy of Democracy, but its raggedy condition bid me pause to think it over for a while. There is a fine copy of the Chautauqua Reading Series edition of Newer Ideals available for $24, which is intriguing. I might purchase that one soon, although it would be an addition and not a replacement of the original edition I desire.

Right now, I also have my eye on a first edition of The Excellent Becomes the Permanent. I hope one of the books I collect will have an inscription by Jane Addams. This copy of The Excellent would check that box in glorious fashion. It is inscribed by Addams to her English friend Stanton Coit, a leader in the Ethical Culture Movement. The book is in the UK, and its list price of $360 will make it my most expensive acquisition yet. The shipping costs alone will top the bargain price I paid for my first edition copy of My Friend, Julia Lathrop. I wonder if this might be my best and least expensive chance for a signed Jane Addams original, but I don’t know enough about the market to deem my hesitation a gamble.

On one of the bookseller websites I monitor there is a first edition, second printing of The Long Road of Woman’s Memory. Not the first edition I seek, but it is desirable for its lengthy inscription: “With all good wishes from ‘the author’ Jane Addams Hull-House Chicago.” Sigh. Heavy sigh. The list price of that dandy is $2,500. Free shipping, but still beyond the budget of this historian.

Maybe I should order that $360 book in the UK and count my first-edition-Jane-Addams-book blessings.

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams: A Writer’s Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); “Stanton Coit” (1857-1944), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; “James Watson Gilder” (1844-1909), American National Biography; 1900 U.S. Federal Census; 1920 U.S. Federal Census; “A Charming Teacher,” Tuscaloosa (AL) Gazette, July 9, 1896, 3; Wedding Notice, Tuscaloosa News, Nov. 10, 1903, p. 5; Jane Addams to Richard Watson Gilder, April 6, 1903; Jane Addams to Graham Taylor, September 4, 1910, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Below is the impressive book bibliography of Jane Addams, the oldest books with links to a version of them on the internet. It is Women’s History Month, you know, so why not celebrate by reading a book by a great American writer?

Democracy and Social Ethics (1902)

Newer Ideals of Peace (1907)

The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909)

Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (1910)

A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912)

The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916)

Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922)

The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930)

The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (1932)

My Friend, Julia Lathrop (1935)

Forty Years at Hull-House (1935)

March 3, 2021September 29, 2025

Excavating the History of Women and the Peace Movement

A grid of nine black-and-white portraits of women, some formal and some casual, with a few containing handwritten names above or beside the images.

The peace movement dominates Jane Addams’s work from 1914 until her death in 1935. Working through the Woman’s Peace Party, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Addams worked with her counterparts in many nations in a global movement to bring about peace, social justice, and equality. She also served as the de facto leader of the American women’s peace movement.

Our detailed focus on the content of the documents and our efforts to identify the people mentioned in them yields a different kind of history than one that only focuses on the leaders of movements. As we have begun publishing WILPF documents from both the United States and abroad, we are finding the names of early adherents, donors, and activists and adding them to the project’s database.

We know about Emily Greene Balch, Crystal Eastman, and Lucy Biddle Lewis, who were Addams’s coworkers for peace in the United States. But what about the rank and file? The women whose dollar donations funded the work of the WILPF? It turns out that within Jane Addams’s correspondence, we can learn about them too.

Eleanor Daggett Karsten, the secretary of the Woman’s Peace Party and then the United States Section of the WILPF, updated Addams every few weeks in 1920 with information about the women joining the new league, founded in 1919 at the International Congress of Women. As a document to add to our edition, I have to admit that each time I saw one of these multi-page columnar lists, I sighed, knowing that this one document might take a week or more to completely enter into our system due to the number of names. Thankfully, most of these lists contained street addresses, which made it easier (though not always easy!) to identify the women.

It didn’t take long to realize that instead of drudgery, adding the names of the early members of the WILPF was historical excavation of the best kind. Our biographical work is carried out in two steps. First the student or editor who enters the document into our system tries to link the name on the document to an existing name in our database. We use an Omeka-based system and a plug-in called Item Relations, to search the more than 12,0000 names in the system. When the person is not there, we add them. In this stage, the goal is to simply identify the person so that we are sure they are not duplicated and that we have verified their basic information.

We strive to add birth and death dates, full names, and a short biography, which we don’t publish until the second stage, when a student researcher does more in-depth work and drafts a full biography. Our goal is to then create relationships between the people in the edition and the organizations and events they participated in. This social network of Addams’s world being built slowly document by document, is one of the results of the project that we are most excited about. It will take time to build the data up, but it is time well spent.

For women, that means that “Mrs. Jerome H. Frank on 168 Hamptondale Road in Hubbard Woods, Illinois,” becomes “Florence Kiper Frank (1887?-?)” A draft biography, that isn’t publicly available yet notes that she was a member of the United States Section of the WILPF and was married to lawyer Jerome H. Franks and had a daughter named Barbara. Much of this comes from census records (having a street address on these lists is an enormous help), local newspapers, and other web-based resources to get accurate information. We create a bibliography pointing to the sources used so that others can follow our trail.

A black and white portrait of a middle-aged woman with short hair, wearing a dark top and a pearl necklace, with a signature reading Alice Dow Allinson at the top of the image. — Alice Dow Allinson

Black and white portrait of a woman with short, wavy hair, wearing a dark V-neck top. The image has a faded, vintage appearance and a plain white background. — Louise Bose Bloch

A black and white portrait of a woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a fur-collared coat, and a decorative brooch, looking slightly to the side with a calm expression. — Madeline Ward Carter

A black-and-white portrait of an older person wearing a dark coat and a unique hat adorned with two large upright feathers. The photo has a faded, vintage appearance with a white background. — Flora Scholl Ehrmann

Black and white portrait of a woman with short, dark hair, wearing a blouse with a round neckline. The background is plain and the image has a slightly faded appearance. — Rebecca Winsor Evans

Black-and-white portrait of an older woman with light hair styled up, wearing a dark dress with a necklace and a faint smile, shown against a plain, light background. — Florence Dombey Shepherd

Black and white portrait of an older woman wearing a large hat and a necklace, with the handwritten name Pauline L. Reichard above her head. — Pauline Louise Neidhard

An elderly woman with white hair, wearing a dark dress with light trim, stands facing the camera. There is a handwritten signature above her head on a light, plain background. — Marion B. Cock

A black and white portrait of a woman wearing a light-colored hat and jacket, looking at the camera with a slight smile; foliage is visible in the foreground. — Elizabeth D. Paxson

Black and white portrait of a woman with short dark hair, wearing a blouse, looking slightly to one side and smiling gently. Below the image is a handwritten signature that reads Birdie M. Rosetti. — Birdie May Dreifus Rosenthal

A black-and-white portrait photo of an older woman with short hair, wearing a dark top. Below the image, the handwritten name Alice Boynton appears in cursive. — Alice Boynton

Black and white portrait of a person with short, light-colored hair, facing forward. The background is plain white, and the image has a soft focus with minimal visible detail. — Mary Louis Macmillan

It is extremely exciting to find a photograph of the women, often in the U.S. Passport Applications that we access via Ancestry.com. Though the images are not of the best quality, hopefully we can add scanned originals at some point in the future. We have also found that having even these short biographical stubs accessible on the web means that family members can find the project and see the associations that their ancestors had with Addams and peace. We have already received some photographs and biographical information from family members and hope that this will increase as we add more names.

Some of the more challenging research revolves around women who worked for peace outside the United States. There are many complicating factors—misspelled or partial names, the lack of genealogical resources for most non-English speaking countries, lack of language skills among our staff to read and search foreign-language resources (Google Translate only helps so much!), and often a lack of detailed geographical information about where they lived. Many of these peace activists are hard to trace through World War II, as records of pacifists and peace organizations often did not survive the war.

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with short, dark hair, wearing a dark dress with a light-colored scarf around her neck, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression. — Hideko Inouye (Japan)

A black-and-white portrait of an older woman with neatly styled hair, wearing a dark dress and a pendant necklace, looking calmly at the camera against a plain background. — Eva Elizabeth Hällström Moltesen (Denmark)

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with short, wavy hair, wearing a dark dress with a decorative neckline, looking slightly to her left with a calm expression. — Yella Fuchs Hertzka (Austria)

A sepia-toned portrait of a woman wearing a large, elaborate hat and a dark dress with a high lace collar, posing with a slight smile against a plain studio backdrop. — Rosa Genoni (Italy)

A woman in an old-fashioned dress sits on an ornate chair at a carved wooden desk, reading a document. Her hair is pinned up, and she appears focused on the papers in her hand. — Lida Gustava Heymann (Germany)

Black-and-white portrait of a woman with short, wavy hair, wearing a ruffled dress and a beaded necklace, looking slightly to the side with a serious expression. — Helena Sickert Swanwick (England)

But adding them, even with partial names and limited dates, accomplishes something. As we enter more documents and move into the 1920s and 1930s, we uncover the names of those who participated in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and in time we will learn more about their lives as well.

February 17, 2021October 14, 2025

A Japanese Visitor at Hull-House

Black and white portrait of a man with short hair and a mustache, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, facing forward against a plain background.

Every Sunday evening during the winter months, visitors jockeyed for seats in the Hull-House Auditorium. They came for the weekly Hull-House lecture at 8 p.m. They came to hear from diverse speakers, who shared knowledge and enthusiasm for a wide range of topics and used the stereopticon (an early projector) to illustrate their thoughts and ideas.

The Hull-House settlement’s winter lecture series was wildly popular, and every week many people were turned away after the auditorium filled all of its 750 seats. The lecture series was an important part of the settlement’s mission. The lectures were intended to educate, to inspire, to encourage appreciation for the arts, science, and culture, and to foster respect for new people and new ideas. The lectures were free, and working people from the Hull-House neighborhood, predominately men, made up a good share of the audience.

Black and white architectural drawing of the Auditorium and Coffee House at Hull House, Chicago, by Pond & Pond Architects. The building has arched windows and decorative rooflines. Two people walk on the sidewalk in front. — Hull-House Coffee House and Theatre Building, constructed in 1899. The Auditorium was located on the second floor.

On Sunday, Nov. 29, 1903, the speaker was Toyokichi Iyenaga and his topic was “Beautiful Japan.” Iyenaga was a lecturer in political science at the University of Chicago and was an expert on Japanese diplomacy.

Professor Iyenaga was born in Japan in 1862 and came to the United States to study at Oberlin College, where he won a prestigious oratorical contest and earned his degree in 1887. After he completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1890, he settled in Chicago, where he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago for nineteen years. Iyenaga distinguished himself as an orator and was a prolific, compelling, and sometimes controversial speaker. At a public lecture in Chicago in July 1903, Iyenaga raised eyebrows by arguing that American women could learn from the women of Japan, in matter of their attire, because Japanese women did not waste their time on fashion and did not, like their American counterparts, endure “the torture of high-heeled shoes or shock the sensibilities of right-minded people by wearing dead birds on her hats.”

Black-and-white newspaper photo of Toyokichi Iyenaga, Ph.D., with a mustache, wearing a suit and tie. The caption mentions his upcoming lecture on Japan of Today at the Twentieth Century Club. — News coverage of his visit

Iyenaga was a colorful speaker. He was also, for most people, a curiosity. In 1903, there was only a small number of Japanese people living in the United States, and most of them were settled in the Pacific Northwest. American immigration policy—like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred the immigration of Chinese laborers and later the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement between Japan and the U.S. to restrict Japanese immigration—reflected prevailing racist sentiments in America against Asian peoples. As well, racist imagery of “Yellow Peril” exacerbated irrational fears that people from the East represented an existential danger to people in the West. Thus, the Japanese community in Chicago was small and remained small, growing only to about 300 in the city by the 1920s.

One of the quintessential characteristics of Jane Addams’s philosophy as a human being and as a reformer was the importance of intercultural exchange, of face-to-face interaction between people of widely diverse backgrounds, of different races and cultures, religious affiliation, and economic or social class. Critical to that philosophy in the organization and management of Hull-House was providing a forum for all people and all viewpoints. Over the years, Hull-House hosted anarchists, socialists, feminists, labor organizers, and many other people with sometimes controversial ideas and radical rhetoric. Speakers like the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin and the African-American leaders W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, who were not welcome in many venues in the segregated United States, were welcome at Hull-House.

Hull-House provided child care, pure milk, economic resources, and educational opportunities. It was a laboratory for social, political, and economic reform. It launched the careers of dozens of progressive reformers. It sheltered people and fed them. It helped poor people navigate charitable, educational, and municipal bureaucracies. It offered spaces for immigrants to celebrate their cultural traditions and to learn ways to embrace their new Americanness, too. But Hull-House also offered a venue for ideas to freely flow, and for diverse voices to speak, to be heard, and to be respected. It was not so much brave as it was a simple imperative, a nonnegotiable truth in the world view of Jane Addams.

And so, there was Dr. Iyenaga at Hull-House on a winter night in 1903. Not a curiosity or a “Jap,” as a majority of Americans would have described him. Rather, an educated man and a talented orator with an interesting perspective to offer an audience of a mostly poor, immigrant quarter of Chicago.

The more I study Jane Addams and the activities of Hull-House, the more I appreciate the wide and beautiful network of people she cultivated and the open arms of the settlement she led. In the narrative of Hull-House, there was a never ending flow of people with breathtaking stories to tell us about the American past. Toyokichi Iyenaga is one of those stories. He is another person on my growing list of people who came into the Hull-House orbit who are worthy of at least a small spotlight of his own.

After that first Sunday lecture, Professor Iyenaga returned to Hull-House for additional lectures. He attended a teacher’s workshop in Iowa with Jane Addams in 1906, and he worked with her in the peace movement. In 1917, he and Addams attended a peace conference in New York, where he urged the United States to allow Japanese admission to citizenship and argued that “hundreds” of Japanese men in America wanted to enlist to fight Germany but were prevented from doing so. In 1921, he helped fund the attendance of Matsuyo Takaziwaa, a young Japanese woman and Wellesley College student, at the Third International Congress of Women in Vienna, at which Jane Addams presided as president.

Sometime in the 1910s, Toyokichi Iyenaga traded the University of Chicago for Columbia University and moved his wife Yui and son Katsunosuke “Kenneth” to New York. He continued his work as a professor with growing expertise in U.S.-Japanese relations and remained a popular public lecturer. He also published several books, his most prominent Japan and the California Problem, published in 1921. From the limited historical record of his life, Iyenaga’s immigrant story was a successful one. He prospered, won respect as a scholar, and raised his son, who became a small businessman. In 1922, the elder Iyenagas retired to Oneida County, New York, where they were prominent citizens and active in charitable causes. In 1936, Professor Iyenaga was ice fishing on Oneida Lake, fell through the ice, and drowned. He was seventy-four years old, and he left behind a wife, son, daughter-in-law, two young grandsons, and an impressive list of publications.

But that was not the end of his immigrant story. And, sadly, the end of that story was an ugly one, reflecting the depth of racism in the United States, and the sad truth that in some ways not much had changed since Toyokichi Iyenaga was a young professor in Chicago.

On Dec. 23, 1942, a drunk white man announced to his friends in a bar in Sylvan Beach, NY, that he could “get a couple of Japs. I’m not just talking either.” With his .32 caliber automatic revolver, he walked a mile to the home of Kenneth Iyenaga, the late Professor Iyenaga’s 47-year-old son. The Iyenaga family, five of just 460 Japanese-Americans who lived in upstate New York in 1942, lived in a 1920s house, built from a Sears Roebuck construction kit. There was a photograph of Gen. Douglas McArthur in a front window and a portrait of George Washington hanging in the parlor. The Iyenagas were patriotic Americans. Kenneth purchased war bonds and donated an old car in a local drive for scrap metal. His wife Kei, a Japanese immigrant who graduated from Barnard College, volunteered for the American Red Cross.

The shooter who had come to murder the Iyenagas was Joe O’Toole, a 64-year-old former bartender. He came in the kitchen door with his gun and started shooting. He first hit Kei in the neck, he shot the 77-year-old widow of Professor Iyenaga in the thigh, abdomen, and shoulder, and then he shot Kenneth once in the chest. Fortunately, the Iyenaga’s elder son Yone escaped when the shooting started, and their younger son Kenneth Jr. was not at home at the time.

Kei and Yui survived their injuries, but Kenneth died that day on the kitchen floor. O’Toole confessed his crime. He was proud. “I shot the damn Japs,” he told police.

O’Toole was indicted for murder and assault, but the court excused him of responsibility. Instead, he was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He escaped justice, or perhaps he was dealt the only kind of justice a white criminal justice system in America could see. In 1943. When the country was at war with people who looked like O’Toole’s victims. O’Toole was white, so he was lucky. The Iyenaga family was brown, and not so lucky. A mother lost her only son that day, a wife became a widow, and two boys no longer had a father.

The Iyenaga family’s immigration story represented the best and worst of what America offered and denied immigrants. Jane Addams appreciated the possibilities and understood the difficulties Toyokichi Iyenaga faced in Chicago in 1903 at the time he delivered a lecture about the beauty of his native country at Hull-House. She would have been horrified by the violence his family faced, seven years after she was buried.

During World War I, Jane Addams never wavered in her commitment to peace, paying a high price in reputation and support for Hull-House. I have often wondered if she would have set aside the peace dove when the United States stood up against Hitler in World War II. But I don’t have to wonder about one thing. Based on how she maintained her respect for German people during World War I, I feel confident she would have maintained her respect for Japanese people during World War II. She understood that you could abhor a country’s militaristic behavior and not abhor that country’s people.

I also feel confident that Jane Addams would have been a vocal opponent of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Not only because she knew Toyokichi Iyenaga, but because she understood that democracy or peace or anything that is worth holding requires an acceptance that all people are entitled to their humanity.

by Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Michael D. Albert, “Japanese,” in Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton, eds., The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 253-55; Masako Osako, “Japanese Americans: Melting into the All-American Melting Pot,” in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 409-37; Greg Robinson, The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 276-77; “Japanese,” Encyclopedia of Chicago; Report of the Third International Congress of Women (Geneva: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1921), 165; 1920 U.S. Federal Census; 1940 U.S. Federal Census; Toyokichi Iyenaga Gravestone, Verona Beach Cemetery, Verona Beach, NY; Cap and Gown (University of Chicago Year Book), (1904), 25; “A Jap Carries off a Prize,” Gibson City (IL) Courier, Jan. 28, 1887, p. 2; “Finds Fault with American Women,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), July 25, 1903, p. 3; “The Jap, Toyokichi Iyenaga,” Bureau County Tribune (Princeton, IL), Aug. 11, 1905, p. 6 (image 1 of Iyenaga); “Iyenaga Tells of Women in Japan,” The Dispatch (Moline, IL), Feb. 22, 1906, p. 5; “Good Program Is Prepared,” The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA), Oct. 5, 1906, p. 5; “Toyokichi Iyenaga, Ph.D.,” The Buffalo Sunday Morning News, Nov. 30, 1913, p. 37 (image 2 of Iyenaga); “Charges Hibben Is in Pay of Greece,” The Boston Globe, June 1, 1917, p. 10; “Toyokichi Iyenaga, Former Lecturer at U. of C., Drowns,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 30, 1936, p. 1; “Ex-Bartender Held in Killing of Jap at Rome,” Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), Dec. 24, 1942, p. 28; “Slaying of Jap Laid to Insanity of Man Tested Here,” Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), Mar. 17, 1943, p. 17; “Tragedy That Struck the Iyenaga Family,” Syracuse (NY) Herald American, Aug. 11, 1985; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 429-31; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:606 (image of auditorium); Hull-House Bulletin, 6 (Mid-Winter 1903-04), 1, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm (JAPM), 53:1170; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Jane Addams to W. E. B. Du Bois, January 26, 1907; Mabel Hyde Kittredge to Jane Addams, May 18, 1921, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

February 16, 2021September 29, 2025

Teaching Jane Addams in High School AP Classes

We are delighted to announce that, with a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, we will be working with a group of New Jersey high school teachers and an educator from the Jane Addams – Hull-House Museum to explore ways to use the Jane Addams Digital Edition in high school AP classes.

The award, Developing Digital Educational Modules for High School AP Courses, will support a series of virtual meetings between Addams Project staff, and a select group of high school teachers from around the state. We are especially excited to also be working with Michael Ramirez, the Education Manager at the Jane Addams – Hull-House Museum in Chicago.

Two Ramapo College teacher-education students, Allie Cheff and Marina Kaiafas, will work with the teachers and Addams staff to develop primary-source-based educational materials that draw from the digital edition.

Jane Addams’s work during the Progressive Era and early 20th century was wide-ranging, and available topics range from her work in establishing social settlements, professionalizing social work, fighting against child labor and the persecution of immigrants and African-Americans, working to win support for woman suffrage, and her efforts for peace and social justice through the Woman’s Peace Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

We will hold a virtual symposium at the end of the grant to talk about what we learned and make publicly available to the materials on the project’s Education hub. We will also develop a guide for archives and other editing projects to help them create similar resources based on their holdings.

Teachers invited to participate are from all over the state and have extensive teaching experience. They are: Staci Anson (Ramapo High School), Yvonne Beatrice (Mahwah High School, ret.), Katherine DeVillasanta (Clearville Regional High School), Joseph Dobis (Franklin High School), Joseph Dwyer (Nutley Public Schools), Angela Funk (Indian Hills High School), Keri Giannotti (Bloomfield High School), Scott Kercher (Sparta High School), Faye Johnson Brimm Medical Arts High School), Allison McCabe Matto (Red Bank Regional High School), Louis Moore (Red Bank Regional High School), Frank Romano, Jr. (Perth Amboy Public School), Robert Schulte (Neptune High School), and Patricia Yale (Hillsborough High Schoo).

This grant builds on work that we did a few years back, also funded by the NJ Council for the Humanities, that developed National History Day guides and lesson plans using the digital edition for middle school students. Renee Delora, who led that effort, has joined this project to provide support to the student workers.

February 8, 2021September 29, 2025

Hull-House of Possibilities

Four young girls in dresses perform indoors; one plays piano, one plays violin, and two stand in the center singing. They all have short bobbed haircuts and stand on a wooden floor with framed pictures on the wall behind them. — Children Practicing at the Hull-House Music School. (Photo courtesy: Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois Chicago).

On February 21, 1901, little Blanche Ebert performed big musical compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven and Stephen Heller on the piano at a concert at Hull-House. She was a student of the Hull-House Music School and one of four gifted pupils who performed that day. Blanche was nine years old, and her passion for music just blossoming, but her education at Hull-House, a settlement dedicated to expanding the definition of the possible for young people, must have given her early confidence, both as a pianist and as a girl.

Hull-House Music School offered “serious musical training to talented children,” admitting them based upon aptitude tests; and Blanche was no doubt gifted from the start. But as she hailed from a poor immigrant family in the 18^th Ward, just north of Hull-House, Blanche was also at least a little bit lucky, too. Most poor children did not have access to the musical instruments, private lessons, and concerts, like those offered at the Hull-House Music School.

Blanche Ebert Seaver, 1916. (Photo courtesy David Stoddard Atwood Collection, California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA).

In a brochure circulated to raise funds for the Hull-House Music School in the late 1890s, Jane Addams said: “We realize afresh that it is the business of youth to reaffirm the beauty and joy in the world.” In order to succeed in that business, girls and boys deserved cultural nourishment, Addams believed. Much of the focus of the activities at Hull-House revolved around children, each one an effort to expose young people to a world beyond the tenements and dirty streets of urban Chicago, to organize activities to bring art and music and beauty to people in the settlement’s neighborhood. At Hull-House, children were deemed worthy of attention and nurturing in the arts, and activities like private piano lessons , gave them remarkable opportunities to redefine their futures.

Blanche Ella Theodora Ebert was born on Sep. 15, 1891, in Chicago, the tenth child of Norwegian immigrant parents. Her father supported his large family as a painter, and in 1901 Blanche was one of seven children still living at home. We cannot know how Blanche felt as she took the stage to perform the opening piece of music by Beethoven for the Hull-House concert in 1901, but we can imagine something of what the opportunity to play a piano and perform for an audience meant to an underprivileged kid on a cold Chicago day in the early twentieth century. And we do know that Blanche Ebert took full advantage of the opportunity, charting for herself an unlikely and brave career as a pianist and composer.

Until about 1906, Blanche was a piano student and assistant music teacher at Hull-House. Her natural talent and her education at Hull-House afforded her entry into the Chicago Musical College from which she graduated in 1911. In 1912, she felt bold and moved west to Los Angeles, where she became a music teacher at the Egan School of Music and Drama. She also performed as a pianist in a variety of venues in southern California and became a “noted” accompanist. By late 1914, she was teaching at Blanchard Music School in Los Angeles and playing piano for silent films shown at the Majestic Theatre.

One day while riding the streetcar downtown, Blanche met Frank R. Seaver, an attorney eight years her senior. The couple married in Chicago on Sep. 16, 1916. They lived in California for a while before moving to New York, where Frank was stationed during WWI. In New York during that time, Blanche became a successful musical arranger and composer, writing and selling dozens of songs, many to popular artists of the day like the Irish singer John McCormack. Her most famous songs were “Calling Me Back to You,” composed during the war, and “Just for Today.”

Cover page for Battle Hymn of the Republic, arranged by Blanche Ebert Seaver, dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, published by Gamble Hinged Music Co., Chicago. Dated February 11, 1919.

Vintage sheet music cover titled Calling Me Back to You shows a silhouetted woman sitting under a tree, looking at a crescent moon and clouds in a blue night sky. Text credits Blanche Ebert Seaver for words and music.

In the 1920s, the Seavers lived in Mexico City, and it was there where Blanche discovered a second passion, philanthropy. She established a society to help homeless Mexican children, and that was the start of seventy-years of generous living. The Seavers moved back to the United States in 1928, settling permanently in Los Angeles. Frank Seaver made a fortune in the oil business, and Blanche became a well-known philanthropist.

Inspired and grateful for the education she received in Chicago, Blanche focused her giving on educational institutions. She and her husband donated money to the Harvard Boys School in L.A., the University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University, Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Rockford College in Illinois, and Pepperdine University. After Frank’s death in 1964, Blanche continued her giving, helping Pepperdine establish its Malibu campus and dedicating the Frank R. Seaver College there in 1975.

Throughout her life, Blanche, who never had children, continued to share her love of music and was an active patron of the arts and a supporter of children’s charities. She supported the Los Angeles Music Center, the Los Angeles Symphony, the Los Angeles Pops Orchestra, and the famous Hollywood Bowl. She also founded the Los Angeles Orphanage Guild and served as a member of the Board of Directors of Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. In 1963, the Los Angeles Times named her “Woman of the Year;” and MacMurray College in Illinois and Pepperdine University awarded her honorary doctorate degrees in 1973 and 1980, respectively.

Blanche Ebert Seaver died on April 14, 1994, ninety-three years after playing Beethoven at Hull-House. Her story is a second-generation American story. Her hard-working immigrant parents could only have dreamed of such a robust life for their children. But Seaver’s story is also a story of what Hull-House could offer little girls and little boys with talents and courage and dreams. Jane Addams could not write such a story as Blanche’s for every child who took advantage of the programs at Hull-House. But every single day, through its programs and activities, the settlement exposed young people to the arts and made a difference in the lives of the children in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Blanche’s story is one shining musical example of how Hull-House was a house of possibilities.

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Los Angeles City Directory (1915), 757; Blanche Ebert and Frank R. Seaver Papers, Finding Aid, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA; 1900 U.S. Federal Census; 1910 U.S. Federal Census; Blanche Ebert Baptismal Record, U.S. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Church Records, 1781-1969; Ebert and Seaver Marriage Record, Cook County, Illinois, U.S., Marriage Index, 1871-1920; “Chicago at a Glance,” Chicago Tribune, June 17, 1900, p. 50; “Reception to Pianist,” Los Angeles Express, Oct. 19, 1912; “Egan Recital Will Be Given Tomorrow,” Los Angeles Express, Jan. 8, 1913, p. 7; “The Festival Choir,” Los Angeles Express, Mar. 21, 1913, p. 10; “Whittier Choral Society,” The Whittier (CA) News, Mar. 24, 1914, p. 3; “Coronation of Queen Thelma Chamber Music Featured,” The Daily Telegram (Long Beach, CA), June 6, 1914, p. 5; “Important Musical,” Hollywood (CA) Citizen, July 3, 1914, p. 5; “Lost and Found,” Los Angeles Express, Nov. 27, 1914, p. 17; “Brahms Quintet Will Give Concert,” Los Angeles Express, Feb. 25, 1915, p. 6; “Majestic,” The Los Angeles Times, Mar. 31, 1916, p. 16; “Seaver-Ebert Nuptials, Chicago Event,” The Bulletin (Pomona, CA), Sep. 17, 1916, p. 9; “Mac to Confer Five Honorary Degrees at Commencement,” The Jacksonville (IL) Journal Courier, May 20, 1973, p. 36; “Blanche E. Seaver, Major Donor to Colleges, Dies,” The Los Angeles Times, Apr. 13, 1994, p. 206; “Seaver, Blanche Ebert,” The Los Angeles Times, Apr. 17, 1994, p. 164; Hull-House Music School,” pamphlet, c. 1935, Jane Addams Papers, Microfilm Edition (JAPM), 36:78-81; Hull-House Bulletin, 4 (January 1-May 1, 1901), 4-5, JAPM, 53:1123-24; Hull-House Bulletin, 5 (Semi-Annual, 1902, no. 1), 5, JAPM, 53:1141; Hull-House Bulletin, 6 (Autumn, 1904, no. 2), 4, JAPM, 53:1193; Hull-House Bulletin, 7 (1906-1906, no. 1), 6, 53:1219; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:421, 473n3; Jane Addams’ Own Story of Her Work: How the Work at Hull-House Has Grown (Third of Three Installments), May 1906; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Hull-House 1889-1909, 1909, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

November 4, 2020September 29, 2025

Hull-House in the Family and in the Stars

A dense field of bright stars and glowing clouds of gas in deep space, with blue and white hues, creating a vibrant and sparkling cosmic scene.

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with dark hair, wearing a light-colored blouse with a rounded collar and a dark choker necklace with a round pendant. She faces the camera with a neutral expression. — Henrietta Swope, the daughter of Gerard and Mary Hill Swope.

When I wrote last time on the “The Other Worldly Orbit of Jane Addams,” I knew I was going to follow it up by writing the story of a particular Hull-House resident, the daughter of Hull-House residents, who became an astronomer and very early in her career discovered 385 stars. This story of a woman named Henrietta Swope began at Hull-House, where her settlement worker parents met. It passed back through Hull-House with her own year of residency at the settlement after her graduation from Barnard College in 1925. And it is as illustrative of the extraordinary list of human beings who had a connection to Jane Addams and to Hull-House as the variable stars Swope studied are of the beauty of the universe.

Henrietta Swope began dreaming about the stars when she was ten years old, and I cannot help but think that at least a little part of the reason she was able to reach those stars was because she had Hull-House in her family.

But more about the stars later. Let’s start Henrietta’s story at the very beginning.

On Tuesday, August 20, 1901, at noon, in a clearing in the woods on Mackinac Island in northern Michigan, Jane Addams delivered a wedding speech. It was an unusual venue for the settlement leader to give a speech. But it was an unusual wedding. It was the union of Hull-House residents Mary Hill and Gerard Swope, two young members of the extended Hull-House family. A large contingent of the small wedding party were Hull-House residents, including the bride and groom’s best friends George Hooker and Maud Gernon.

Addressing the couple and the wedding party near picturesque Sugar Loaf Rock, Addams said, in part:

“Knowing as we do something of the character of these two people, somewhat of the temper of their attachment and the form of the expression we may confidently predict that and all life’s journey through to the end is will be illuminated by [that] Love which carries a burden which is no burden, the Love which attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility for it believes all things are possible to itself.”

It’s a coincidence and not at all prophetic, but I love that Addams used the word “illuminated” and wow, indeed, “all things are possible.”

Mary Hill and Gerard Swope were two extraordinary young people who found their way to Hull-House and who would be forever shaped by the experience. Mary was the thirty-year-old the daughter of a former Harvard president and an 1896 graduate of Bryn Mawr College. She moved to Chicago to study at the University of Chicago under renown educator John Dewey. In 1898, she became a resident at Hull-House, where she taught textile classes and basket weaving, directed the Hull-House Shakespeare Club, and for a time managed the Hull-House Labor Museum. The twenty-eight-year-old Gerard Swope, a native of St. Louis, arrived in Chicago with a degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked at the Western Electric Company in Chicago, and he taught English, electronics, and algebra classes at Hull-House and lived at the settlement for a short time in 1897. Mary and Gerard met at the settlement and fell in love.

Black and white portrait of a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, with short, neatly-combed hair, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression. — Gerard Swope George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

Gerard moved to St. Louis in 1899 to become a branch manager there for Western Electric, and Mary remained at Hull-House. The couple maintained a long-distance relationship until their wedding, after which Mary joined her new husband in St. Louis, where she did social welfare work and the couple started their family. Their first child Henrietta was born in St. Louis on October 26, 1902. Three sons—Isaac, David, and Gerard Jr.—followed, and a fourth son John was born in New Jersey where Gerard Sr. moved the family as his career path led him to the East Coast. In 1919, Gerard became president of General Electric’s new subsidiary International G.E., and the family moved to Manhattan. Gerard was involved with various reform organizations and he worked for quality working conditions which set him apart in the 1920s from many of his contemporary leaders of large corporations. Mary became a member of the board of directors of the Henry Street Settlement, operated by Lillian Wald, the good friend of Jane Addams, and she volunteered at Greenwich House and served as vice-chair of the New York branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Over the years, Mary and Gerard Swope kept in touch with Jane Addams, visited Hull-House, and made donations to the settlement. Gerard became a millionaire and in 1922 became the president of General Electric. The Swopes sent their bright daughter Henrietta off to Barnard College, where she earned her degree in mathematics; and then they sent her off to Chicago. Or perhaps Henrietta herself felt the pull of social work and felt the family connection to Hull-House. Although little is known about Henrietta’s time in that city, she lived at the settlement and worked in a program for the elderly while studying in the School of Social Service Administration (formerly the School of Civics and Philanthropy) at the University of Chicago with two significant members of Jane Addams’s orbit, Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott.

But Henrietta Swope was still dreaming of the stars.

So she left Chicago to take a job at Harvard to work for the astronomy professor Dr. Harlow Shapley at the Harvard Observatory. While she looked for variable stars and became Shapley’s first assistant, she earned a Master’s degree in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1928. The following year, she became famous when she identified 385 new stars, which helped scientists identify the “hub” of the Milky Way. At the time, Swope was touted as “one of the youngest women ever to have made a comparable mark in scientific research.” During her long, successful career as an astronomer, she studied Cepheid variable stars in dwarf galaxies and M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy. However, her most significant contribution was developing a new method for measuring the universe, using the brightness of stars, which became known as the “celestial yardstick.” I don’t understand any of this, but it sounds amazing. Henrietta Swope was an accomplished and well-respected scientist.

In 1936, Henrietta Swope was a member of the joint-expedition of the Harvard Observatory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study the solar eclipse in Soviet Central Asia. During World War II, she worked in the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory and then served as a mathematician in the Hydrographic Office of the United States Department of the Navy. Swope returned to Barnard College in 1947 to teach astronomy until 1952, when she moved to California to work at the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories. After her retirement in 1968, she continued to work at the observatories. Swope was a member of the American Astronomical Society; she won the American Astronomical Society Annie Jump Cannon Prize in 1968 for her research on photometry and variable stars; and she received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Henrietta Swope dreamed of the stars, she reached the stars, and then she made certain many generations to come could see the stars. In 1969, when she was in active retirement, Swope donated $650,000 worth of securities to the Carnegie Institution of Washington for the development of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the installation of a 40-inch telescope in the mountains. The Swope Telescope began operation in 1971. Henrietta Swope died in 1980, but the observatory she helped established is still helping people look at the stars.

Now, how’s that for a life story from the otherworldly orbit of Jane Addams?

By Stacy Lynn,
Associate Editor

Sources: “Swope, Gerard,” American National Biography; Mary Hill Swope Papers, Finding Aid, Special Collections, University of Illinois Chicago; Papers of Henrietta Hill Swope, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Oral History of Henrietta Swope, August 1977, Transcript, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; Carnegie Institution of Washington, Year Book 67, 1967-1868, 73-74; “Hull House Teacher is Wed,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 21, 1901, p. 3; “Romantic Wedding,” The Daily Herald (Port Huron, MI), Aug. 21, 1901, p. 5; “Wealthy Girl Aids in Finding Universe’s Hub,” The Capital Times (Madison, WI), June 11, 1929, p. 6 (image 1); “Girl Aids in Discovering Hub of Universe,” The Rock Island (IL) Argus, June 13, 1929, p. 12; “Henrietta Swope Wins Distinction,” The North Addams (MA) Transcript, June 24, 1929, p. 8; “Girl in Her Twenties Gets Credit in Major Scientific Discovery,” The Dispatch (Moline, IL), July 26, 1929, p. 31; “Girl Eclipses Stay-at-Homes,” Journal Gazette (Mattoon, IL), July 6, 1936, p. 6 (image 2); “Henrietta H. Swope, Is Dead; Helped to Measure Variable Stars,” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 1980, p. 28; “Studies Gauged Depths of Space,” The Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1980, p. 23; Hull-House Bulletin, 3 (Oct. 1898), 7, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm Edition (JAPM), 53:1051; Hull-House Bulletin, 3 (Nov. 1898), 4, JAPM, 53:1058; Hull-House Bulletin, 4 (Autumn 1900), 3, 4, JAPM, 53:1106-1107; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:618n5; Jane Addams to Florence Kelley, August 1, 1901; Address at the wedding of Gerard Swope and Mary Dayton Hill, August 21, 1901; Jane Addams to Esther Linn Hulbert, July 16, 1901; Gerard Swope to Jane Addams, January 7, 1905; Mary Hill Swope to Jane Addams, December, 1910; Gerard Swope to Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, January 19, 1923, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

September 15, 2020October 14, 2025

The Otherworldly Orbit of Jane Addams

A black-and-white photo shows a large group of men and women seated at tables in a formal dining room, engaged in conversation and eating, with ornate light fixtures overhead and wood-paneled walls.

I grew up in Illinois where the life and legacy of Jane Addams is widely known and appreciated. Illinois School children learn about Addams and Hull-House, and she is a perennial favorite topic of their book reports, term papers, and history fair essays and display boards. As a historian of Illinois history in the early years of my work, I came to know and appreciate Jane Addams at a deeper level, too, understanding better her contributions to social reform, her lobbying for protective legislation for workers, her modern arguments for woman suffrage, her importance as a philosopher, and her unwavering advocacy of world peace, even when it threatened to harm all she had built at Hull-House.

Yet the more I study the ways in which Jane Addams supported, nurtured, and inspired the women around her, and the ways in which she drew on the spirits, intellects, and achievements of those women, the more convinced I am that Jane Addams created and existed in an otherworldly orbit. An orbit where innovation and creativity and fearless determination flourished. An orbit which attracted women of myriad backgrounds and life work—educators, business women, artists, social scientists, doctors, writers, and lawyers, as well as social workers and reformers. An orbit which drew in some of the most talented and inspirational women of the era. An orbit that energized and empowered young women to find their talent and become inspirational leaders in their chosen fields and disciplines.

It was this otherworldly orbit of women that was Jane Addams’s super power.

A large group of men and women sit around several long tables in a dimly lit dining hall, engaged in conversation while eating a meal. The room has wooden walls, arched windows, and hanging light fixtures. — Hull-House Dining Hall; Jane Addams head of table at the far left, surveying her orbit.

Hull-House was a social settlement offering important educational and cultural programming for immigrants and working-class people. It was a place dedicated to social, economic, and political change to benefit all people in a society reeling from the excesses and inequalities of American industry and politics. Hull-House was also a remarkable planet of women, full of purpose and promise. And Jane Addams was the gravity that held these women together, bolstering their courage and making them so much greater than the sum of the individuals who at some point in their lives called the settlement on Halsted Street their home. Jane Addams dedicated her life to making the 19^th Ward, Chicago, her state of Illinois, the United States, and the world better places to live. That work and dedication set her apart. But I believe, this orbit of women that Jane Addams created at Hull-House was what made her truly extraordinary.

One of my greatest privileges of editing the papers of Jane Addams is daily introduction to the fascinating women in Jane Addams’s orbit. Although it is only a qualitative observation, I assert that few (if any) other institutions in American history so beautifully nourished more women to do so much good in the world than did Hull-House. I suspect this inspirational characteristic of Hull-House was in part due to Addams’s feminine, motherly or sisterly guidance of her juniors and her peers, as well as the more generous hearts of women in collaborate work. But I would also argue it was the brilliance of Jane Addams to understand that women of all backgrounds had something to offer to the narrative of reform and possessed voices worthy of projection. It was the brilliance of Jane Addams to create an atmosphere of open-minded curiosity and respectful discourse for women. It was the brilliance of Jane Addams to fill up that atmosphere with as many bright and shining female voices she could find and who could find their own way to her and to Hull-House, as well.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of the long list of extraordinary women connected with Hull-House and Jane Addams. Many of those women, like Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, and Dr. Alice Hamilton were well-known in their lifetimes and remembered by history today. One scholar likened some of those women to “stars” in a constellation around Jane Addams. I prefer to think of those female “stars” as existing in an otherworldly orbit with Jane Addams and with a breathtaking list of incredible women that history has largely forgotten. As a tribute to my joy in discovering the women in Jane Addams’s orbit and to amplify, like she did, the voices of the lessor known, I am going to offer a series of blog posts about some of the women you may not know who found their way to Hull-House and became a part of the wide influence of the settlement in the world far beyond Halsted Street.

**********

On Oct. 21, 1902, Jane Addams penned this letter:

My dear Miss Monroe
The twenty [minutes] will be perfectly convenient for us and affairs have so adjusted themselves that the little room now vacant may be yours so long as you care to keep it. The word little however is used advisedly—perhaps it would be better for you to see it before you decide on your belongings.
Faithfully yours
Jane Addams

The letter was to Harriet Monroe, a 41-year-old poet from Chicago. Monroe, who became a Hull-House resident for a brief time, delivered a public lecture about Milton on Dec. 3, 1902, at the settlement. She became a Hull-House teacher, offering an advanced class on English poetry and establishing a reading club at the settlement. Monroe was born and raised in Chicago, where her father was a successful lawyer before the Chicago Fire, after which his financial situation deteriorated. From a young age, Monroe developed a love of literature by exploring her father’s library. Although her family was not Catholic, she was educated at the Georgetown Visitation Convent in Washington, DC. In the 1880s, she lived in New York City, from where she wrote articles on the arts for the Chicago Tribune, before returning to her hometown in 1889.

In 1902, when she arrived at Hull-House, Monroe was not a well-known poet, not a household name, nor a novelist, as she had reported her occupation to the census taker in 1900. She struggled to make a literary name for herself, although she had published a few poems and penned a special verse, “The Columbian Ode” to open the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Poor health and failure to attain critical acclaim for her literary work frustrated her, but she kept writing and developed a widening circle of literary friends, which would come to include Robert Louis Stevenson, Eugene Field, Richard Watson Gilder, and Vachel Lindsay. In the years after her time at Hull-House, Monroe supported herself as a journalist, writing more than 200 articles for the Chicago Tribune, mostly on the arts, and she published sporadic freelance pieces in popular publications like Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine. It was a meager existence, but Monroe remained committed to writing, bemoaned modern American society’s general disinterest in poetry, and began to articulate the need for poetry in American cultural life.

As was typical with most Hull-House residents who came and went, Monroe maintained her connection to the settlement and to Jane Addams years after her departure. She was a frequent guest at the settlement, made donations and offered gifts, and in 1905 wrote “The Troll’s Holiday,” an operetta set to music by Hull-House music teacher Eleanor Smith and performed at the Hull-House Music School. Over the years, the letters between Addams and Monroe reflect a respectful, friendly relationship infused with admiration and staunch support for one another’s work. In 1908, Addams wrote Monroe about her poetry: “It seems to me very remarkable, to be able to express the subtler side of the background of life as you…” In 1910, Monroe praised Addams’s latest book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets: “It seems to me profoundly thought out and beautifully done; thought and done with fine intelligence and exquisite sympathy. Surely it will have a far-reaching affect.”

Women supporting women was the foundational characteristic of the orbit Jane Addams cultivated, and that super power of hers became the super power of other women, too. To be in Jane Addams’s orbit was to remain there, to want to stay close to the spirit of the woman, to feel the pull of the supportive energy of Hull-House, no matter the time or the distance. To have experienced Jane Addams’s orbit was to wish to create your own orbit of inclusion and support and purpose beyond the self.

I suspect Harriet Monroe either learned at Hull-House the lesson of going beyond yourself and connecting your talents to others, or while there she practiced the lesson which was already in her own heart. Because ultimately, Harriet Monroe’s greatest contribution was not her own poetry but rather her fierce support of the art form and the poetry of others. At the age of 52, Monroe conceived of the idea to create an American journal of poetry, to seek out great poets and good work, and promote that work in the pages of a popular magazine. In October 1912, Monroe published the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. When she launched the magazine, Monroe sent Jane Addams a complimentary subscription. Addams would not have it, however, writing in reply: “I am not in the least willing to have my name stand on an honorary list. Please let me send the enclosed and assure you that I have seldom subscribed to a magazine with more pleasure.”

Poetry was an immediate critical and popular success. For the remainder of her life, Monroe edited the magazine, raising American interest in poetry and launching the careers of many of America’s greatest poets, like Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot. Eighty-four years after Monroe’s death in 1936, Poetry magazine is still in publication, still a venue for new poets, still a vehicle for a great American art form. Hull-House and Jane Addams may or may not have directly inspired Monroe’s direction in life. I dare not give either the credit for Monroe’s brilliant vision and stunning contribution to modern American poetry. But in reading more and more stories of the lives of people who were in the orbit of the woman and the settlement, even for very short periods of time, one cannot dismiss the excellence of that orbit, either in what it may have inspired or the inspirational figures it drew into its remarkable sphere of influence.

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 598-600; “Monroe, Harriet,” American National Biography; 1900 U.S. Federal Census; Hull-House Bulletin, 5 (Semi-Annual, 1902, no. 2), 3-10, passim, Jane Addams Papers, Microfilm Edition (JAPM), 53:1156-63, passim; Hull-House Bulletin, 7 (1905-1906), 18, JAPM, 53:1231; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, October 21, 1902; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, May 13, 1905; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, June 27, 1905; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, May 23, 1908; Harriet Monroe to Jane Addams, January 31, 1910; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, December 2. 1912; all in Jane Addams Digital Edition. Images courtesy of Poetry Magazine, the Poetry Foundation, and Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Chicago. Click this link to explore the correspondence between Jane Addams and Harriet Monroe.

September 11, 2020July 23, 2026

Democratizing the Arts and Crafts Movement: Jane Addams and Hull-House as A Lever for Social reform

A sepia-toned portrait of a woman with short hair, gazing thoughtfully at the camera, her hand resting under her chin. She wears dark clothing and appears pensive against a plain background.

This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz on September 11, 2020.

Jane Addams was one of the most well-known and influential women reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She founded the Hull-House, a social settlement that became a leader in the new field of social work; she won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931 redeeming her reputation which had been attacked because of her pacifism during World War I; and she was a prominent suffragist representing politically organized women nationwide . She advised presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a writer of ten books and co-author of two more, hundreds of magazine and journal articles, as a lecturer and campaigner, what Addams said about democracy, the labor question, and international affairs had weight. One of the less known contributions of Addams, however, is in the field of cultural work. And that is our subject today. When we urge friendship and inclusion of newcomers to the American shores, when we valorize the contributions of diverse cultural backgrounds and admire traditional crafts, when we speak about making the motto: “one out of many” a fact of life, when we campaign for art and music in our public schools, we are validating the ideas and cultural pedagogy of Addams and her colleagues at Hull-House.

Today I want to tell you something about the history of Hull-House from 1889 to 1935, a settlement house located on Chicago’s Near West Side, a dense, industrial neighborhood populated by immigrant workers. Our focus is on the role of arts and crafts. Many of you will have an image of the Lower East Side of New York —as a congested tenement and sweatshop neighborhood filled with newly arrived immigrants. Hull-House was in Chicago’s “port of entry” neighborhood where immigrants found cheap accommodations having arrived at the railroad depots nearby. These photos make the point that Addams made when she thought that housing reform would be easier in Chicago than in New York, where tenements were taller and denser.

Historic black-and-white photo showing people walking on a snowy city street, with several buildings in the background, including the Hull-House settlement and a saloon. Likely taken in 1909 during winter.

Black-and-white photo of people outside an Italian pharmacy and drugstore on a street corner, with signs for cigars and newspapers. Early 1900s urban setting with surrounding buildings and a man sitting on a bench.

Settlement houses were community centers unlike charities or welfare bureaus. They were run by educated middle-to-upper-middle-class women and men who believed they could attack the worst aspects of industrialism and the chaos and ugliness of slum neighborhoods by bringing culture to the people in these neighborhoods.

The movement grew in American cities where by 1911 there were 400 settlement houses. By developing friendships with their neighbors, offering art and music classes, lectures and exhibitions they would “lift up the masses” and inspire an awakening that would have political and social transformative power. Soon Hull-House became a laboratory for teacher training, offered medical clinics, pioneered community and little theatre productions and became a think-tank initiating sociological and public health research projects. It lent its influence for the suffrage movement, to campaigns to outlaw child labor, and to efforts at mediating disputes between labor and capital.

Overall, the cultural programs remained the constant and most all-engrossing of the settlement’s offerings. Specifically, arts and crafts were made accessible to the neighborhood and the initial impulse of bringing art to the people turned into a much more complicated exchange where the people’s art and the canonical European heritage of art were brought together. A sign of this effort to re-think cultural production in an industrial democracy heavily influenced by the different traditions of its immigrants is the event that occurred in 1904 at the Annual arts and crafts exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago. It may well have gone unnoticed by many who visited the Art Institute. It may have had greater effect back in the neighborhood from whence the exhibited object derived: it was the inclusion into a prestigious exhibition of the work of highly trained artisans worldwide of a textile designed and handmade on a traditional loom by an Irish immigrant who came to Hull-House’s weaving room to practice her craft. This was noted quite simply in the show’s catalogue that listed Mrs. Brosnahan as the creator of a textile on display.

Left: A large room with several spinning wheels and chairs. Right: An older woman in period clothing using a spinning wheel in front of a brick fireplace.

Honora Brosnahan was a housewife in the neighborhood; she frequently displayed her skill in Irish spinning to visitors from among the neighbors and others from far and wide who flocked to the settlement house on Saturday evenings where in the workrooms they encountered neighborhood people, often dressed in the clothing of their native lands, performing ancient crafts.[1]

They might hear a lecture on the history of the technique—spinning, weaving, woodworking–or the history of the materials used. There might be accompanying music –folk or classic that spoke to the plight of workers such as “The Sweat-shop Song” composed by Eleanor Smith, head of the settlement’s Music School; and on the workshop walls there would be additional displays of handicrafts, tools, and even reproductions of genre paintings by European masters depicting artisans. at work or farmers in the fields chosen by Enella Benedict, artist-in-residence and head of the Art School at Hull-House.

For Addams it must have been a satisfying moment to enter Mrs. Brosnahan’s textile into the exhibit, a moment that she could relish as a realization of a major goal of the settlement. She had managed to create cultural space in which an immigrant woman’s skills were affirmed in her adopted homeland; her craft was valorized and included in a serious exhibition in the major museum of the Middle West. Her children and neighbors could see her valued in this downtown context as well as in the neighborhood space thereby knitting together the generations that had been upheaved by transplantation. This quiet cultural event spoke volumes and was key to Addams’s prescription for the social healing she believed was necessary for the growth of a new social ethic and a new respect for difference, for history, and for progress and the interconnectedness of humanity. This was happening at a time when fear of the stranger, the rise of race theories and the rhetoric of a nativist politics of exclusion was spreading in the land.

At Hull-House, the major settlement in the U. S. and the first to open in Chicago, two groups developed and interacted through art:

The first group was the colony of American-born and privileged women and men led by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr—college friends. They had visited Toynbee Hall, the first social experiment of its kind, in the East London slum and in their minds their desires to find ethically useful work, to share culture with those less fortunate, and to live democratically among the people cohered in the example of the Oxford college men who had joined Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta to work among London’s most disadvantaged.

Jane and Ellen decided they would use the former’s inheritance and the latter’s Chicago social and cultural connections—and open an American version of the English Toynbee Hall. The two young women were a sensation in Chicago, heralded by the city’s cultural and philanthropic elites and in less than five years of existence, Hull-House was on the list of attractions visitors to the Columbian Exposition in 1893 were told to view. Englishman William T. Stead—maverick journalist, moralist, and critic of industrialization famously wrote at the conclusion of the World’s Fair, that If Christ Came to Chicago (in a book by that title)—he would be most comfortable in the colony of humanitarians that had gathered at Hull-House to live among the poorest and most oppressed.[2]

Two black-and-white portraits: left, Jane Addams in 1889 with hair tied back; right, Ellen Gates Starr circa 1889 with curly hair, both wearing high-collared dresses. Text identifies them as Hull-House founders.

This brings us to the second group at Hull-House: The second group were the neighbors, in the beginning those Irish and German immigrant families already English-speaking, then Italians, Jews, and Greeks. Among them were Honora Brosnahan, Michael Gamboney, Jose Torres, and Nick Fosco and many others —– The two groups interacted and learned from each other in many positive ways. Yet the urban planning goals of transforming the neighborhood never materialized. However, the settlement “ideal” of a democratic cosmopolitanism and neighborliness represented best through the arts and cultural work succeeded in reaching many neighbors. As one Hull-House “boy,” now grown-up put it: “Hull-House showed us another way of living.” Jane Addams, in one of her more critical reflections, thought she had reached mostly “the transfigured few” not the masses.[3]

Three black-and-white photos: a teacher guides a child at pottery, a man shapes clay at a pottery wheel, and another man focuses on sculpting clay, each captioned with their journey in the Hull-House Art School.

Left: A woman holding bundles of garments stands outside a building. Right: An elderly woman sits in a chair indoors, surrounded by framed photos and art on the wall.

In a larger sense there were other successes. One of the major accomplishments is the acceptance of the importance of the arts in public schools, the acknowledgement that children need creative play and exposure to art, music, performance—and not just the children of the privileged in society, but those from all neighborhoods, all cultures, all economic classes. These ideas that we take for granted today, even when we fail to fully fulfill them, have become the measure of a compassionate, humane society. In addition, and equally important, the narrative told by Jane Addams in her writings, which are still in print and read, interpret the immigration story in a positive light and we learn how important immigrant’s cultural contributions have been to the American culture. Scholars have identified Addams and Hull-House with significant innovations of our educational institutions, our ideas about child development, art and occupational therapy, recreational therapy, criminology, and the field of social work.

Art and Labor

Chicago noticed the transformation of the interior space of the old Hull homestead where Jane and Ellen were launching their settlement house. Allen B. Pond, of Pond & Pond Architects, had aided the two women in locating the once-stately building as an ample place to begin their cultural work. His pen and ink drawing is one of the earliest images we have and shows the initial two-story additional building, known as the Butler Building, that Pond designed. The interior images illustrate the influences of Ruskin and Morris, and others we associate with the movement that argued for a moral aesthetic accessible to the working classes. T. C. Horsfall’s experiments with loaning art reproductions to the working classes of Manchester, England, would be tried here at Hull-House.

Four black-and-white photos of Hull-House interiors: a nursery with children, a parlor with a piano, a library, and a reception area, with descriptive text on the right side.

Allen Pond recognized kindred spirits in Addams and Starr. He remained their faithful architect for the twelve additional buildings of the settlement complex and he served as a trustee of the Hull-House Association until his death. It goes without saying that he is one of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society.

Two men in suits stand side by side in an old black-and-white photo. They are indoors with framed pictures on the wall behind them. Both look at the camera, with one slightly blurred.

At the same time that the two women enticed Edward Butler, wealthy businessman, art collector, and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, to donate $5,000 for the construction of the new building architect Pond was planning to adjoin the old settlement house for art exhibits, art studios, and a library, the colony of Hull-House residents had gotten deeply involved in the anti-sweatshop movement in Illinois. A cross-class campaign had been mounted when sensational articles exposed sweatshop conditions where women and children were working. There were demands for legislation to clean up the horrible tenement workshops and impose an 8-hour workday for women workers. Labor leaders, socialists, clubwomen, and religious leaders found in Addams, Starr, and a new Hull-House resident, Florence Kelley, inspiration and organization. This seemed to thrust the group far from the cultural evenings in which Ellen Starr read George Eliot’s Romola or lectured on art history or the work of the Chicago Public School Art Society of which she was President.

Watercolor rendering of early Hull-House and Butler Art Gallery, circa 1890. Street scene with people walking and horse-drawn carriage. Buildings have detailed architecture and fencing.

Starr asks rhetorically in her contribution to the settlement’s first publication, Hull-House Maps & Papers, (and I paraphrase here) is it ethical and practical to launch an expensive art gallery building in the midst of this struggle for survival among the garment workers in the neighborhood? She argues that there is a connection between the two movements, what later union women would sing out poetically in the phrase “give us bread and give us roses”—and that a society that has no justice for workers has no foundation to produce authentic art.

Black-and-white photo of an art gallery room with sculptures, paintings, wooden chairs, and a table at Hull-House Settlement, circa 1895.

From the beginning Starr and Addams determined to involve themselves in the art and the politics of social change. This dual approach was possible because of the dedication of the group of cultural workers who joined them, some living and working at Hull-House for four decades. In this manner, Addams and Starr were constructing a non-elitist, differently gendered version of the artist in her or his studio. One example is Artist Enella Benedict, wealthy daughter of a manufacturer and real estate developer, had studied in Europe and taught at the art school of the Art Institute of Chicago. She chose to run an art school in the settlement and paint in a studio she shared with aspiring artists who lived in the neighborhood. She remained with Addams until her death, also teaching from time to time at the Art Institute, but deeply imbedded in the collaborative cultural work of the settlement where she designed and painted theater scenery and tableaux vivants that depicted classical Western religious art themes. She received no salary. Of course she could escape for vacations to the New England coast or Europe. But her paintings reflected the pull of the immigrant neighborhood she called her own. Two slides show paintings done by Benedict: one, the portrait of “Edith” a local Irish Catholic girl; and the misty pastel-like line of workers waiting.

Left: A painted portrait of a woman in a yellow dress. Right: A black-and-white photo of an art studio, easels, chairs, and artwork, including a portrait in progress matching the painting.

Addams and Starr were joined by artists, musicians, craftspeople, radicals and socialists who foresaw a soulless society with the deskilling of craft workers and the alienation of the masses into wage slaves. These bright, engaged women and men were disciples of John Ruskin, William Morris; some were Christian Socialists, others were influenced by Marx and Engels. From the start they performed a cultural pedagogy heavily tied to ideas of the trans-Atlantic arts and crafts movement. It is surprising that it took them eight years to launch the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts in 1897, for from the start cultural work was at the very center of the enterprise.

The society’s aims were wide ranging: cultivating in its members and others a sense of beauty, encouraging beauty in articles produced for everyday use, influencing the manual-training movement and the design and decoration of both useful and ornamental objects, encouraging handicrafts, studying factory conditions with a view to reducing the dominance of the machine, and holding exhibits and founding centers for crafts activities. The society sponsored lectures on topics such as art education, the Arts and Crafts movement, the role of art in society, and specific crafts and held an annual exhibit, usually in November. Perhaps the society’s best-known lecturer was member Frank Lloyd Wright, who spoke March 6, 1901, on “Art and the Machine,” concluding that art was needed to give a soul to the machine. Charles Ashbee was prescient in seeing Chicago’s unique approach to arts and crafts in the acceptance of the machine and the attempt to humanize the product and the production so that worker and consumer would benefit rather than suffer from technology.

Membership in the society included wealthy businessmen Edward B. Butler and William R. Hutchinson—both trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as trustees of the Hull-House settlement. Allen B. Pond with his brother Irving, participated in that cross-over between aesthetic and social reform that characterized the Chicago society’s approach. Frank Hazen [Hazenplug] was a staff artist at Stone & Kimball who designed for both the Chapbook and the Hull House shops. He also worked with the Hull-House Theater and taught metalwork. He later headed the metalwork at the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony in Woodstock, New York. Byrdcliffe had a strong connection to the Hull-House arts and crafts group.[4] Artist Carl Eric Lindin, born in Sweden, [5] emigrated to Chicago and studied painting at the Art Institute and in Paris, became a resident artist at Hull-House where he met the Photo-secessonist photographer Eva Watson-Schutze and the Byrdcliffe, artists and craftsmen who overlapped with many of the Hull House group.[6] George Herbert Twose of Hull-House, was an Englishman who taught manual training in the public schools and woodworking at the Hull House shops, and was the first president of the Society.[7]

Strongly influenced by the arts and crafts movement, the New England artist Jessie Luther began her crafts career as director of the Labor Museum at Hull House, Chicago, at the invitation of Addams.[8] Adeline Titsworth worked in the Labor Museum and taught weaving classes.[9]

With the help of Eleanor Smith, the founder and director of the Hull-House Music School, Myrtle French, founder and director of the Hull-House Kilns, Edith de Nancrede, director of children’s drama and dance, and Laura Dainty Pelham, director of the Hull-House Players, one of the first Little Theatre Groups in the country, and Enella Benedict, head of the Art School at the settlement Addams and Starr experimented and evolved cultural pedagogies. They did so with the goal of developing a democratic and cosmopolitan ethos that unified cultural, religious, and socio-economic differences. I mention these women because it was no coincidence that the Hull-House model of cultural production was gendered differently from the membership and leadership of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts, which was from the start overwhelmingly male. The goals of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts and the departments of the settlement overlapped. Perhaps it was the marginalization of women in the arts that drove the Hull-House women to establish innovative institutional structures from which to launch themselves in order to be “eligible” in the eyes of the male custodians of culture to lead the society.

A sepia-toned painting shows a line of men in hats and coats waiting outside a building in an urban setting, conveying a somber mood of economic hardship.

Forty years later, Hull-House itself had been transformed into a place of production—a pottery and ceramics business employing the Mexicans now living in the neighborhood. The dishware provided the model for the commercially successful and popular Fiesta dinnerware.[10] Industrial shops and workrooms, a school that taught textile weaving; dressmaking; a printing press, and with the infusion of New Deal monies, expanded studios and workshops teaching arts and crafts and industrial vocations. The machine was a reality but Hull-House attempted to contextualize its usage visually and performatively in the unique Labor Museum. This evolution reflects Addams’s and Starr’s goal of democratizing arts and crafts—an evolution that can be expressed as a transformation of the concept of bringing art to the people to the implementation of creating cultural space where the people had a direct role as cultural workers for themselves.

From 1895 until 1900, when the Labor Museum was opened, there was a progression toward creating space at Hull-House for neighborhood people to work in industrial shops and at handicrafts while the colony of resident artists also flourished.[11] This was the heyday of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull-House. The society’s aims were wide ranging: cultivating in its members and others a sense of beauty, encouraging beauty in articles produced for everyday use, influencing the manual-training movement and the design and decoration of both useful and ornamental objects, encouraging handicrafts, studying factory conditions with a view to reducing the dominance of the machine, and holding exhibits and founding centers for crafts activities.

The society sponsored lectures on topics such as art education, the Arts and Crafts movement, the role of art in society, and specific crafts and held an annual exhibit, usually in November. Perhaps the society’s best-known lecturer was member Frank Lloyd Wright, who spoke March 6, 1901, on “Art and the Machine,” concluding that art was needed to give a soul to the machine. Charles Ashbee was prescient in seeing Chicago’s unique approach to arts and crafts in the acceptance of the machine and the attempt to humanize the product and the production so that worker and consumer would benefit rather than suffer from technology.

Searching for a Way to Democratize Arts and Crafts

Jane Addams and Ellen Starr were never satisfied with the programs Hull-House had established in the humanities, the fine, arts, and the performing arts. The major goal was to democratize culture as a necessary stage in the evolution of society. This meant devising ways to transmit quality humanities education outside of universities to the working people in their neighborhoods and to the public schools.[12]

Black-and-white sketch of a workshop corner with a stove, shelves of books, framed art, and various tools. Caption describes it as Ellen Gates Starr’s book bindery at Hull-House Labor Museum, around 1902.

Ellen Gates Starr’s evolving pursuits in the labor movement and in the shops modeled this conception more than any of the other resident artists. She was also the resident who experienced the most inner turmoil and conflict over the relationship of art and labor. Initially Starr followed the arts and crafts movement closely. She began bookbinding “with the goal of unifying mental and manual labor and contributing in some small way to the beauty of objects” and in pursuit of this goal she spent a total of 15 months—12 in 1897 and 3 in 1899—at Doves Bindery in England, where she was one of the few American women to apprentice with T. J. Cobden-Sanderson.”[13]

Ellen Starr was a discordant voice from the start. She did not agree completely with the direction that Hull-House settlement was taking. It seemed Starr almost immediately felt the contradictions that Addams later alluded to when she wrote “how difficult it . . . [was] to put a fringe of art on the end of a day spent in a factory.”[14] Ironically, the contradictions were to become most obvious to Starr in the way her own work in the Labor Museum’s book bindery seemed at times irrelevant to her actual labor union activities and socialist politics. She rationalized that her work provided opportunity, albeit limited, to illustrate products of unalienated work and that in her bindery she was demonstrating work done in the “’spirit of the future’—that is, in a spirit allowing for self-expression.” [15] In 1892, Starr had accused Hull-House of being merely “an excuse for the things we ought to do and be and don’t and aren’t.”[16] She worried about the contradictions of offering bourgeois culture to workers but not sharing power with them. “If we don’t wish working people to stand upon the same ground with us, if we believe that there is an eternal distinction, if we believe in caste, no matter how we disguise it, then why shouldn’t we let them alone? Why insult people by saying to them, ‘you are different, you will be different always, you can never be as we, knowing false and true, beautiful and ugly, but we wish to be kind to you, we want you to enjoy in your poor capacity, what you are capable of enjoying, and so we come and give you this and this.'”[17]

Four black-and-white photos: Ellen Starrs campaign card; Starr at a desk being booked by Chicago Police; Starr working in a bindery; Mary Kelly, her apprentice, also in the bindery.

Starr’s 1895 contribution, “Art and Labor,” discussed earlier, was anti-capitalist and anti-modernist in tone. Starr had warned that it was not enough to fight for wages, you had also to fight for the soul of man against the commercial and industrial world that was crushing him. She was uncomfortable with an elitist argument that an educated and cultivated class should guide the tastes of the uncultivated but succumbed to such an arrangement. The Chicago Public School Art Society, born out of Starr’s determination to bring objects of beauty into all the places she could, was a top-down organization that assumed the role of arbiter of taste and disseminator of bourgeois art. The activities in the Labor Museum, the arrangement of artifacts, and the interpretation of the presentations were controlled by Hull-House residents and staff.

Two black-and-white photos show old workshop rooms with wooden beams, chairs, and worktables, displaying equipment and tools. Caption reads: The Labor Museum and Industrial Shops.

Starr’s own complicated feelings about her loyalties surfaced as she began to feel a closer relationship to the working class and to those bright, ambitious young men and women who were attempting to better themselves. One of the great differences between Addams and Starr was that of their class positions. Issues of financial dependence had plagued Starr from her college days when she was able to complete only one year while Addams remained to finish college. Starr taught school and dreamt of more ambitious plans living on her own in the big city of Chicago. Jane always had the upper hand as a young woman of wealth and superior rank. The imbalance and dependency between them was understood by both women.”[18]

Addams drifted toward institution-building, an interest not shared by Starr whose bindery room seemed to offer scant comfort but, rather, felt incomplete as she imagined a socialist cooperative workshop buzzing with activity. Starr’s frustrations with teaching bookbinding and with the slow progress made in advancing the overall cultural and economic interests of the working class were further exacerbated by her basic disagreement with Addams about the need for revolutionary change in the social system. For Starr, nothing short of a religiously-inspired radical conversion to communitarian or socialist values would address the deep injustices caused by capitalism. Like her hero, William Morris, Starr married her own artistic expression and belief in socialism only to find that the contradictions were too dramatic. Expensive materials and long years’ training achieved great art at a cost beyond the means of workers. Ultimately, Starr was only able to train a handful of students in the craft[19] and the cultural world inhabited by artists and artisans in which she traveled and in which she exhibited her decorative and expensive rare books was becoming increasingly more remote from the picket lines she also inhabited in support of striking garment workers and waitresses.[20]

A collage shows people spinning and weaving in a textile room with various traditional machines. The central photo is a large workshop; surrounding images show individuals using spinning wheels and looms.

Starr’s discomfort with the contradictions that were expressed in the way the settlement movement developed did not cause her to break with Addams, or to give up fine art book binding or even change her ideas about cultural pedagogy.[21] As historian Suellen Hoy informs us “Until she closed her bindery in the 1920s, Starr earned a good part of her living by binding and ornamenting books.” [22]

At the same time her radicalism was becoming more public. On March 6, 1914, at age fifty-five, Starr was arrested and brought to trial on a charge of disorderly conduct stemming from her behavior on the picket line at a waitresses’ strike in Chicago.[23] She had shouted at the police, who she believed had unjustly arrested three waitresses on picket duty, “I am a citizen and as such protest this arrest.” The crowd became excited and it was reported that they shouted: “Kill the police.” After eight hours’ deliberation, a jury found her innocent.[24]

Starr’s plunge into a deeper and more catholic devotional life that served to pull her out of recurring emotional depressions, was also an expression of her lifelong search for fellowship and salvation.[25] In contrast to Addams, Starr was searching for something close to a sacramental community, a version of “social holiness” beyond “personal holiness” that would also reconcile her individuality as an artist with her desire to identify with workers.[26] Shortly after the Garment Workers’ Strike in 1910 Starr had joined the Socialist Party, and fit in with the Marxist, hard-line, predominantly immigrant organization. Although middle-class social workers were discouraged from joining, by 1915 Starr was serving on the Cook County Socialist Party’s executive committee.[27]

She did this even while deepening her commitment to Christianity. For Starr, her labor union radicalism seemed to draw her more deeply into her faith, or perhaps, the arduous task of standing up for the workers against the wealthy and powerful could only be endured by her through the strength of her religious convictions. It was her vision of the implementation of the social gospel here on earth that continued to inspire and sustain her as much as the realities of oppressive conditions stirred her rebellion. She ran unsuccessfully for alderman of the Nineteenth Ward as a socialist in 1916.

Jane Addams and Industrial Education: Contextualizing Factory Work and Elevating Craft at the Labor Museum

Starr remained conflicted about the craftsman ideal and attempts at cultural expression by working people in the top-down and controlled atmosphere of Hull-House and moved further into the trenches of class warfare. Addams moved toward institutionalizing cultural production and the settlement ideal of social amelioration as the answer to industrial conflict. She identified this as much more than the conflict between labor and capital in the workplace. Addams saw the disintegration of traditional family life, especially among immigrants, as intergenerational conflict exacerbated by the too-early employment of children and adolescents, and further negatively impacted by the attractions of popular culture. The museum’s workrooms and classes became models she used in advocating industrial and vocational education.

Addams was critical of the public schools and she questioned whether anything had been done to give boys who stayed in school until the required age of fourteen a consciousness of their social value. Instead she envisioned public schools as social centers that dealt with the larger issue of socializing work. She lobbied for curriculum to bridge the gap between traditional customs and youth’s embrace of popular culture by valorizing craftsmanship, folk music and dance, and theater of the immigrant generation and developing historical perspective while at the same time learning science, hygiene, and household skills for urban living. [28]

Work was at the center of the Labor Museum not as an antiquarian obsession with craft, as latter-day pro-labor New Dealers[29] would contend, but as an approach to socialize and humanize industrial occupations. Addams had become aware of the realities of workers’ families’ lives just as Starr. Central to her concern was the woeful inadequacy of educational preparation for workers’ children.[30] Workers’ children rarely attended high schools and for students who had no intention of attending college, high schools offered little in the way of training for jobs anyway. At the same time, families encouraged their post-grammar school sons and daughters to find whatever work was available. To Addams the long-range outcomes of this custom were dire, consigning young people to lives of insecure employment, low wages, and the sort of hollowness of spirit that led to negative habits and even criminal activity as the culture of the streets provided gratification.[31]

Three black-and-white photos of people weaving on looms, illustrating younger generations engaging in traditional weaving practices from diverse cultures.

A woman operates a spinning wheel while a man stands beside a large loom with woven fabric, in a workshop with patterned textiles hanging on the wall.

Classes and apprenticeship training became important pieces of the programs offered at Hull-House, part of a complicated equation that balanced demonstrations by immigrants “performed” to develop intergenerational understanding and respect of old world customs with the new vocational knowledge that aided first and second generation daughters and sons to enter the American economic system. Addams’s views of vocational guidance and industrial curriculum differed from both the plans put forward by business interests and those developed by organized labor precisely in this idea of connecting current skill learning with the history and art of craft. [32]

Instead Addams incorporated the immigrant women and men who regularly “performed” their artistry and crafts in the Labor Museum, in the education of young boys and girls. This was an innovation pedagogically. The elders took on young men and women as “apprentices.” The products of the work were made available for sale, with the same split between the House and the artisan. There are no statistics to measure how much any artisan “earned” or how many students transitioned into a permanent industrial job. The dissemination of the craftsman ideal to the youth of the neighborhood was much more important to Addams than running industrial shops that saw a profit or adapting youth to fit the specific employment needs of industry. [33]

Three black and white photos show people engaged in hands-on industrial and arts education, with a quote highlighting Jane Addams support for vocational learning and crafts in the humanities context.

The Labor Museum and Industrial Shops were inaugurated by Addams at the peak of the arts and crafts movement in Chicago and at a time when “exhibition” to educate the public on industrial conditions, model housing, and municipal planning was a key strategy of reformers and practitioners of the new fields of sanitation, urban planning, and public health.[34] It was also a period in which middle-class native born Americans were not convinced that the “New Immigrants” were assimilable. The charts that demonstrated the continuity and similarity of craft in the history of industry also depicted universality among the different ethnic groups whose techniques were both culturally specific and part of the universal story. There was a positive response from middle-class visitors, a key piece in Addams’s agenda. Addams expanded programs, added classes, and collected more artifacts and encouraged the collaboration of all the other departments of the settlement house in this pursuit of an educational medium that would successfully connect immigrants and their children in a positive way to the long history of industrialism, and as well, connect Americans with their new neighbors.

Two people place bricks into a large kiln at Hull-House, preparing it for production. Stacks of bricks are in front of the kiln, and one person is looking inside while the other hands over a brick.

Hull-House used art to advocate for democratic principles, to teach democratic values by living up to the highest standards of conduct with respect to the rights of others; and to encourage the broadest, most inclusive cultural as well as civic engagement of the whole community. Long before the New Deal programs for theater and art inaugurated a period of intense public support for the arts in a democracy, Addams critiqued the narrow eighteenth century notion of democracy as being equated almost entirely with representation through voting, and sought to make democracy relevant to the cultural needs of the masses.

A man stands behind a table displaying handcrafted pottery, including bowls and a decorative plate, in a workshop. Text below describes Mexican artisans teaching pottery at Hull-House in 1927.

Assorted colorful ceramic bowls and pots are arranged in a group. A caption explains their origin and connection to Fiesta Ware.

[1] Here I have not the time to interrogate the authenticity of traditional craftwork of the neighbors. In my chapters in Eleanor Smith’s Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams’s Chicago co-authored with Graham Cassano and Jennifer Payette (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), I deal with the more complicated performance of craft that went on. I called it constructed craftsmanship. See, Eleanor Smith, 278.

[2] William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Union of All who Love in the Service of All who Suffer (Review of Reviews: 1894).

[3] Graham Cassano, Rima Lunin Schultz, and Jessica Payette, Eleanor Smith’s Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams’s Chicago (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), 170.

[4] Nancy E. Green, Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony. Ithaca, New York: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2004 catalog, 231.

[5] “From Sweden to Woodstock: The Art and Career of Carl Eric Lindin” by Tom Wolf. Catalogue: David Cook Fine Art, Denver, Colorado, 2005, 5.

[6] “From Sweden to Woodstock” 5-10. In 1904 Lindin exhibited thirty-two paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. He married Louise Hastings in 1911; she was the daughter of a wealthy banker and civil engineer and was part of the Hull-House circle. She learned bookbinding from Ellen Starr. Carl and Louise wed at Hull-House. (Wolf, 10.) Louise Lindin worked on her bookbinding as well as weaving and sewing. (Wolf, 11.)“In 1911 he [Lindin] had an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago consisting of thirty-eight paintings, all landscapes.” (12) In 1923 and 1924 Carl and Louise spent the winters in Ojai, California, where they taught at the Ojai Valley School, founded by their old Hull-House friend, Ed Yeomans. (Wolf, 16.) Note: Lindin painted a portrait of Jane Addams and also one of Hervey White.

[7] Listed “In Memoriam,” Hull-House Residents 1889-1929. Note: Bruce Robert Kahler, “Art and Life: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Chicago, 1897-1910,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Purdue University, August 1986, lists Twose as the secretary of the Arts and Crafts Society. However, Eileen Boris, Art and Labor, says that George Twose was the society’s first president (pp. 45-46) and that its secretary was Ellen [Ella Raymond] Waite.

[8] In 1906, she was recruited by Dr Wilfred Grenfell, the medical missionary, to teach weaving to women at St Anthony, a small community at the northern tip of Newfoundland, and for four years she painstakingly laid the groundwork for a variety of craft industries. Jessie Luther at the Grenfell Mission is an annotated edition of a travel journal that Luther wrote from 1906 to 1910. Edited by Ronald Rompkey, author of the most authoritative biography of Grenfell, Luther’s journal provides an unusually intimate account of Wilfred Grenfell during these four years.

[9] “Occupations of the Residents of Hull-House,” 1935-36. She is listed in Hull-House Yearbook Forty-Fifth Year.

[10]

[11] Vincent L. Michael, “Recovering the Layout of the Hull House Complex,” Urban Experience in Chicago: Touring the Buildings: Inside The Complex, http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/urbanexp (Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum website, UIC.

[12] Jane Addams, “Labor Museum at Hull House,” Current Literature Oct. 1900, Vol. XXIX, No. 4; American Periodicals Online, p. 423.

[13] Mary Ann Stankiewiez, “Art at Hull House, 1889-1901: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.” Woman’s Art Journal (Spring-Summer 1989), vol. 10, No. 1, 37.

[14] Jane Addams, Twenty Years, 375. Addams, however, proudly displayed the arts and crafts produced in the shops at the 3rd annual exhibit of arts and crafts held at the Chicago Art Institute: Catalogue, Third Annual Exhibition of Original Designs for Decorations and Examples of Art Crafts having Distinct Artistic Merit, The Art Institute of Chicago, December 6 to December 21, 1904, 53-55.

[15] Starr quoted in Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 180.

[16] Elizabeth Palmer Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1981, 30.

[17] “Chicago’s Hull House.” Report on an Address by Ellen Starr, 1895, Hull-House Scrapbook, III, JAMC, Spec. Col. Daley Library, UIC.

[18] “I have thought of the possibility of my dying [before] the experiment [Hull-House settlement] is in full sway,” Addams wrote her sister Alice. “As Ellen has given up her regular teaching and trusts all her future to the affair, I should like her to be given $1500.00 enough to support her for a year or more until she could get back into her regular work. I have now made a will and . . . know you would see to that for me.”[18] Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, August 31, 1889, JAP reel 2-1079-1080.

[19] In 1904 Starr’s pupils Peter Verburg and Mary Kelley exhibited bound volumes: Catalogue, Third Annual Exhibition of Original Designs for Decorations and Examples of Art Crafts having Distinct Artistic Merit, The Art Institute of Chicago, December 6 to December 21, 1904, 53-55.

[20] Starr was one of the founding members of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 33, 45-46. When the arts and crafts community, Byrdcliffe, was established in Woodstock, New York, in 1902, Starr was a visitor. Nancy E. Green, “Byrdcliffe and the ‘Dream of Somewhere,’” The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 –the Present. No. 28, ARTS & CRAFTS ISSUE (2004), pp. 56-81.

[21] Starr reconciled to her displacement by Mary Rozet Smith as Addams’s partner and remained in residence at Hull-House until 1930, when illness forced her to relocate. Even then Addams and Starr remained deeply attached. Rima L. Schultz, “Smith, Mary Rozet,” in Women Building Chicago, 817-819.

[22] “Fine Work in Binding Books,” Chicago Chronicle, Apr. 22, 1900, 19; Suellen Hoy, Ellen Gates Starr. Her Later Years (Chicago: Chicago History Museum, 2010,) 5-7. Starr was a talented bookbinder and her work was exhibited along with the top artisans in the field. One of her best students, Peter Verburg, went on to have an outstanding career. Boris, 181.

[23] This was the Waitresses’ union strikes against the downtown Chicago popular restaurant, Henrici’s, that began in February of 1914: “Girl Pickets Open Boycott Fight on 35 Cafes in Loop,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 6, 1014, pg. 13; “Ellen G. Starr’s Trial on Today,” Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1914, pg. 7. Suellen Hoy indicates Starr’s public activism troubled her fellow Hull-House residents. Suellen Hoy, Ellen Gates Starr. Her Later Years (Chicago: Chicago History Museum, 2010), 16-17.

[24] Carrell, 357-358. Lila Weinberg, “Wilmarth, Mary J. Hawes, “in Women Building Chicago, 982-986.

[25] Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror,” 398-400. Starr to Wager, Hull-House, Feb. 12, 1917, Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Box VIII, Smith College. Among her periods of depression, in 1896, after a garment workers’ strike, the first in which she was actively involved, Starr became exhausted and left for New York for a prolonged period. In 1907 she collapsed from nervous exhaustion, spent a month in a sanitarium, and spent 1908 abroad, living in relative isolation on a farm in Ireland. For her conversion to Roman Catholicism, see: Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” Catholic World vol. 119, May 1924.

[26] Ellen G. Starr, “College Settlement Work: Hull-House,” 4^th paper published by the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross [Adelynrood, Byfield, Massachusetts: 1895], 1-3. Starr most likely was disappointed in the other group to which she attempted to meld art and labor: the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts. Historian Eileen Boris found that “By 1910 it [the Chicago Society for Arts and Crafts] had dwindled to 26 members, who concentrated on running their own studio-shops rather than promoting cooperative ventures. Crafts workers increasingly were alumni of the School of the Art Institute, which had replaced Hull House as the center of the movement in Chicago. With this shift, the crafts—while flourishing as profession, personal avocation, and part of an appealing lifestyle—lost their more intimate relation to the reform impulse.” Boris, Art and Labor, p. 51.

[27] Carrell, 357.

[28] Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, “The Politics of Vocationalism: Coalitions and Industrial Education in the Progressive Era,” The Historian, Vol. 46, No. 1 (November 1983), 43.

[29] Charlotte E. Carr, headed Hull-House from 1937 to 1942, at the height of the settlement house’s engagement with the New Deal Popular Front and Cultural Front movements. Discussion of these developments follows.

[30] Addams was so concerned about the fate of young girls, fourteen years and older, that in 1912 the Hull-House Trade School for Girls was opened and used the area of the industrial shops and other classrooms. Dressmaking was emphasized and girls were placed in dress-making shops after completing a summer course. By 1915 a new department, The Hull-House Design Shop, prepared girls to work in children’s clothes shops. Anne S. Davis, “The Hull-House Trade School for Girls,” The Educational Bi-monthly, 207-208.

[31] Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), 107.

[32] Washburne, 571.

[33] Washburne, 571. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

[34] The 1893 Columbian Exposition, the Tenement House Exhibit of 1900 (New York City), the Chicago Child Welfare Exhibit in 1911, just to name a few. Addams was one of the jurors at the Paris Exposition of 1900 where she attended the lectures given by evolutionary sociologist Patrick Geddes, accredited with pioneering urban planning and took great interest in his exhibit. She had met him before and he had visited Hull-House during a lecture tour of the U.S. Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Paris, France, June 14, 1900, Swarthmore College Peace Collection Jane Addams Papers Series 1, JAP reel 3-1585-1588; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Paris, France, June 27, 1900, Swarthmore College Peace Collection Jane Addams Papers series 1, JAP reel 3-1597-1601; Geddes work was known to Addams. I’m not sure when they met for the first time.

August 19, 2020October 14, 2025

Guest Post: Jane Addams’ Pragmatist Theories of Democracy and Education

A black-and-white photo of a large group of men and one woman seated at tables in a formal setting, possibly a classroom or meeting room, with papers and books in front of them.

This is a guest post, written by Parysa Mostajir, a Teaching Fellow in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. She is currently researching the role of experience in diverse human practices like science, art, and democracy, and setting up an academic blog, Woman is a Rational Animal, dedicated to diversifying syllabi in the history of ideas.

Jane Addams is deservedly well-known for her tireless activism, having spent her life engaged in efforts to improve her society: She served on the boards of national and international organizations like the International Association for Labor Legislation, she campaigned for the rights of women, children, and workers, and she offered educational, recreational, and organizational resources to the immigrant communities surrounding Hull House. Although she spent most of her time in the world of action rather than the world of ideas, fewer people (including philosophers) give Jane Addams due credit for her role in developing a philosophical movement called ‘pragmatism.’

A man with glasses and a mustache sits in an armchair, holding a stack of papers on his lap. He rests his head on one hand, and a tall statue is visible behind him. The scene appears to be from an old photograph or painting. — John Dewey (Wikimedia Commons)

Jane Addams was admired by some of the most celebrated pragmatist philosophers of her time, including John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and William James. The correspondence of these professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, show that they recognized Addams as an imposing intellect from whom they had much to learn. In a 1908 letter on the Jane Addams Paper Project Digital Edition, George Herbert Mead describes “how deep an impression” Addams’ speech on ‘War and Progress’ made on him and others in the audience. In a 1902 letter, William James describes Addams’ Democracy and Social Ethics as “one of the great books of our time” and claims he “learned a lot” from it. Dewey’s correspondence reveals years of extensive visits and engagements with Hull House, during which he exchanged ideas with Jane Addams, the latter of whom he described as “the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual & moral faith I ever saw” [1894.10.10 (00206): John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey]. He even attributed to Addams the first definite statement of the pragmatist thesis “that democracy means certain types of experience,—an interest in experience in its various forms and types” [Volume 1: Political Philosophy, Logic, Ethics p. 2379].

An older woman in a dress sits outdoors on a ledge, surrounded by a group of children who are listening attentively. Other children sit in the background on a brick wall. The image is in black and white. — Jane Addams with Hull House children (ca. 1930)

So what is pragmatism, and how does Jane Addams’ work fit in? Pragmatism is a tradition of philosophy that began in the United States in the late 19th century and was characterized by several core beliefs to do with action and experience. Addams’ major contributions to the tradition of pragmatism were her theories of democracy and education, which contained substantial developments on these core principles of pragmatist philosophy. Pragmatists believed that knowledge and theories should be based on our practical experiences, and be constructed in such a way as to take our practical experiences into account. Most striking about Addams’ writings in philosophy is the extent to which she adhered to the pragmatist conviction that knowledge and theories should be consistent with practice. While other pragmatists were involved in practical applications of their theories, such as John Dewey’s founding of the Laboratory School in Chicago, none of them were quite so embedded in everyday society as Jane Addams was at Hull House. Addams’ theories were derived from her practical activities at Hull House, instead of becoming lost in philosophical speculation. It was appropriate and inevitable, she wrote, that her experiences at Hull House would affect her convictions (Twenty Years, p. 308).

Pragmatists believed not only that theories should be derived from practical experiences, but that they should be applied to practical experiences in attempts to improve, enrich, and make sense of our lives. Unlike many contemporary philosophers who engaged in highly abstract theories having no relationship to the everyday world, pragmatists believed that theories gained their value by serving as instruments for empowering us to successfully take action in the world—this is the practical aspect of ‘pragmatism,’ from which the tradition derives its name. As a pragmatist, Jane Addams therefore rejected the idea, popular among sociologists of her time, that settlements like Hull House were ‘laboratories’ from which to derive pure theory (Deegan 1988, pp. 34-5; Twenty Years, p. 308). She wrote that her energies were directed “not towards sociological investigation, but to constructive work” (Hull House Maps and Papers, pp. vii-viii). Her pragmatist goal was to use the knowledge she gained from her experiences at Hull House in the application of practical changes and improvements to society and the lives of the people she served, not to derive knowledge for its own sake or out of pure curiosity.

These core pragmatist convictions concerning knowledge, practice, and experience are evident in Addams’ theories of democracy and education. To begin with her theory of democracy, Addams did not believe that democracy was a matter of ticking a ballot box once every few years. In her celebrated book on Democracy and Social Ethics, she argued that democracy was not just “a sentiment” or “a creed,” but “a rule of living,” which needed to be integrated practically with people’s everyday lives (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 6). Many failures of contemporary democracy, she claimed, could be linked to the isolation of different sectors of society from each other, preventing familiarity with each other’s experiences. In order to resolve them and make our democracy more robust, we needed to ensure the connectedness of diverse types of people who shared the same society. For that reason, democracy could not be compartmentalized as a handful of remote political institutions, with the citizens’ democratic participation reduced to a single act of casting a vote. Democracy had to be an active practice for all citizens, embedded in their lived experience as a way of life. This would only be achieved by “mixing” the diverse members of society together and giving them “a wider acquaintance with and participation in the life about them” (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 5). Addams argued that it was through exposure to the different ways of life, struggles, and needs of the many people with whom we share our society that we can develop attitudes of sympathy, respect, and a democratic sense of moral obligation towards each other. For example, she mentioned the importance of newspaper and literature in giving people the chance “to know all kinds of life” (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 8). This kind of “diversified human experience and resultant sympathy” were, for Addams, “the foundation and guarantee of Democracy” (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 7).

Black and white scanned page titled A Modern Lear by Jane Addams, featuring an image of Pullman buildings before the 1894 strike, with decorative initials and text discussing the social climate in Chicago in 1894. — Jane Addams described her views of the Pullman Strike in her 1912 article, A Modern Lear.”

As a true pragmatist, concerned with the connection between theory and action, Addams based her theory of democracy on what she encountered in her practical experiences, and applied her theory of democracy to suggest resolutions to the problems she encountered. For example, Addams was involved in mediating the 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago, in which the workers of a large factory went on strike to demand better wages. What Jane Addams saw in this conflict was a failure of the democratic practice of connecting with the experiences of others. Pullman, the owner of the factory, had built a town for the use of his factory employees, with parks and recreational facilities, believing that he was acting generously. The factory workers, on the other hand, resented the extension of Pullman’s control into the private lives. When the workers went on strike, Pullman was confused by their anger, and he felt that the factory workers were being ungrateful for the resources he had given them. In her philosophical work, Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams wrote that the “good deeds” Pullman thought he was conducting were in fact incomplete, because they were not conducted democratically. By not “calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or self-government,” he ended up lacking any familiarity with the experiences and desires of the workers (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 143-4), and had operated undemocratically in making his decisions. “To attempt to attain a social morality,” Addams wrote, “without a basis of democratic experience results in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide” for actions—the daily experiences of other human beings (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 176).

Addams’ theory of education was also deeply pragmatist in its commitment to connecting educational experiences to the practices and experiences of the individuals being educated. At that time, it was common for people to assume that manual laborers had no need of general education. When education was sometimes offered as part of universities’ charitable efforts—for example, University Extension Programs which sent professors to give general courses to the working class on topics like evolution, astronomy, psychology (Twenty Years, Chapter XVIII), or philanthropists who supported children in receiving clerical education—the idea was that such education either gave laborers a temporary mental escape from the mundanity of their work, or gave them the opportunity to leave their lives as factory workers and enter into more respected professions. Such educators did not consider education as having any possible genuine connection to the ordinary lives of factory workers.

A black-and-white photo of a large group of men and one woman sitting at tables in a formal classroom or meeting room, looking toward the camera, with books and papers on the tables. — Hull House class on immigration, held at the Coffee House, 1920s (Wallace Kirkland, Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago)

Addams, unsurprisingly, rejected these assumptions. Her pragmatist theory of education was based on extensive practical experience providing educational resources to the working-class neighborhood surrounding Hull House. In Democracy and Social Ethics, she insisted that factory workers could, and should, be provided with education on topics like history and economics which directly connected to their everyday practical experiences. Because of the division of labor, industrial workers spent most of their waking life operating machinery and manufacturing products to which they had no connection. They had no opportunities to understand the history of the invention and development of the machines they operated; they did not know the uses to which the products were put; and they did not understand the sales and distribution aspects of the businesses they worked for. Addams argued that this contributed to the poor quality of life of industrial laborers, and that education in how they fit into the workings of society would help to improve and enrich their daily experiences of manual labor. If educators, the state, and business owners were to take the value of their employees seriously, they needed to provide them with opportunities to connect their own experiences with the wider social, economic, and historical processes of which their manual labor was an important part. Such education would allow workers to make sense of the significance, purpose, and utility of their work, and would positively alter their sense of self, and their estimation of their own worth. In this way, education could be used not as an escape (either as temporary mental relief from monotony, or as an opportunity to move into a different line of work), but as a way of connecting to the ordinary lives of factory workers in such a way as to improve, enrich, and make sense of their everyday practical experience.

Sepia-toned portrait of Jane Addams, circa 1910, showing her with short, wavy hair, a serious expression, and wearing a high-collared dress. Text in the bottom right corner reads, Jane Addams, ca. 1910. — Jane Addams, ca. 1910

Amidst her extensive social, political, and community work, Addams found time to write several books threaded with innovative philosophical ideas and play a key role in establishing the new, pragmatist philosophical tradition in the United States—a tradition which was characterized by its beliefs in the importance of connecting knowledge with action, enriching individual experience, and solving social problems. Because Addams had so much experience taking action in the world, her philosophical writings are, more than any other pragmatist, threaded with connections to social, political, and economic problems, and filled with practical suggestions for how to ameliorate those problems. She remains one of the greatest examples of how our philosophical ideas can impact the practical approach we take to politics, economics, and culture, and how politics, economics, and culture can influence the development of ideas. In a time like ours, when universities are highly specialized and losing touch with the needs of wider society, we can look to Addams as a model public philosopher, who put her theories into action and let her real-life experiences guide her theories.

References:

Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics. New York, London: The Macmillan Company, 1907.

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years At Hull-house: With Autobiographical Notes. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911.

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

Dewey, John. Lectures, Volume 1: Political Philosophy, Logic, Ethics. Ed. Koch, Donald F., and The Center for Dewey Studies, 2016.

July 29, 2020February 11, 2026

Monuments vs. Documentary Editions: How Best to Remember the Past

Bronze statue of a woman lifting a young girl who is reaching toward a globe, set outdoors among tall trees and buildings in the background.

A toppled statue lies on its side on a sidewalk, with people standing and walking in the background, some photographing the scene. — A statue of Christopher Columbus outside the Minnesota State Capitol was taken down by American Indian Movement members on June 10, 2020.

We have all been thinking and talking about monuments, about how they are created, what they mean, and when or whether they should come down. Whether it is the toppling of the likeness of Christopher Columbus in Minnesota, efforts to remove the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, or the removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from Planned Parenthood of New York’s downtown clinic, the meaning of monuments and our understanding of the past is being challenged. Monuments are a problematic way to understand history. They are a one-note, simplistic way of claiming that a person mattered to the people that put them up. Over time, they become something else, icons of the cities in which they are located, and a shorthand guide to a history that glorified mostly male and mostly white political and military leaders. They offer a simple message — hey, this guy was great! We understand the danger of this kind of simplification when talking about living people. We even have a phrase to warn us about the risks of doing it — putting someone on a pedestal — or to believe or behave as if someone is perfect to the extent that one ignores that person’s flaws or faults.

A statue of a person on horseback atop a large pedestal covered in colorful graffiti and messages, including Black Lives Matter, against a blue sky with clouds. — The Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond has been defaced with graffiti. The governor announced plans to take it down on June 4, 2020, but this has been challenged in court.

And it is the faults and the flaws of the people we have honored with monuments that are being exposed now. It is past time. No one, now or then, is perfect. How can we reconcile honoring an individual who owned slaves, or who fought against the Union, or who held racist, sexist, or eugenic views? On the flip side, how can we ignore the context of the times they lived in? Is it right to hold people to ahistorical standards of behavior? We have to place people in historical context, based on an understanding of what the world was like when they lived. This isn’t just making excuses or becoming an apologist for figures from the past. We have to stop seeing people as either good or evil, heroes or villains, and instead be able to see the grey, to praise what they did well and condemn what they did that was intolerable. We have to stop putting them on pedestals.

A Better Way to Learn About the Past

A street sign reading Margaret Sanger Square at the intersection with Bleecker St, with trees and a brick building in the background. — A name on a sign or a building, or a statue doesn’t tell much about the person, for good or ill.

If a monument is too simplistic — too one-note — to convey the complexity of a human life and the historical times they lived in, what is the alternative? I would argue that it is the documentary edition, made freely available, that brings understanding of the complexities of the past. My career as a historian has been as a documentary editor, first with the Margaret Sanger Papers, and now with the Jane Addams Papers, so I may be biased, but I also speak from experience.

A documentary edition is not a film, it is a compilation of historical documents, prepared by scholars, on a theme of historical importance. It is usually centered around a single person’s life, but occasionally describes a group, such as the Freedmen and Southern Society Project or the Yale Indian Project’s Native Northeast Portal.

We center the work around the words of the historical figure

Much of the work of the editor revolves around finding, selecting, and transcribing the letters, speeches, diaries, and other texts produced by a historical figure. We use our historical training and long hours of reading literally everything a person wrote to select documents that offer a nuanced and complex view of that person’s life and career.

We don’t shirk from the negative or controversial. When selecting documents for the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, we made sure that her views on race, on eugenics, and on abortion were included alongside her views on women’s rights, civil liberties, and reproductive freedom. With the Selected Papers of Jane Addams, we look to highlight Addams’s views on race, poverty and immigration, just as much as her ideas about social work and peace.

Three books titled “The Selected Papers of Jane Addams” and “The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide” are arranged on a desk near a keyboard and a roll of blue tape. — The Jane Addams Papers Project consists of a microfilm, print edition (6 volumes planned) and a digital edition based on the microfilm.

Many editions create two products. The first is a comprehensive edition, often digital nowadays, but in the past they were published on microfilm. These collections, resulting from years-long searches in archives and private collection, are extremely valuable for scholars because they bring together materials that were dispersed over the globe. The selected edition, often published in book form, though increasingly in digital form, takes the most historically significant materials and adds annotation, to create a readable series that tells a shorter, yet nuanced, story of the figure’s life.

We work really hard to make sure that the texts of the documents that you read in our editions are accurate and complete. You won’t find snippets of texts removed or taken out of their context in order to make an argument. We proofread the transcriptions as many times as is needed to get a good, accurate text. The focus is on the document, and by reading them, one after another, you gain a deeper, personal understanding of the subject.

We provide historical context, but leave interpretation to you

Editions use annotation (headnotes, footnotes, and introductory texts) to give the reader a sense of the times, to fill in the gaps when the texts don’t do it. Editorial annotation is not the same as historical interpretation. This was brought to my attention when working on an early draft of my dissertation on birth control clinics, when my adviser, Linda Gordon, pointed out that I wasn’t disclosing what I thought about all the materials. My text was descriptive and it needed to be analytical and interpretive. I was writing like an editor, carefully researching and describing situations, but not bringing my own views, ideas, and analysis to the foreground. Writing an interpretive narrative is a different animal, one in which your experiences and the times in which you live color the way that you approach a topic. Think about multiple biographies of the same person — the basics of their lives stay the same, but the questions we ask, the values we bring to the topic affect the way that we view and interpret the past. Editors aren’t immune to those same biases, but our approach is different.

Our annotation is document-driven. What I mean by that is that we look at the texts, written by our subjects, and explore their content. When a person or event or topic is mentioned, we add a footnote to explain who or what they are talking about. There is no better training than researching for a documentary edition. You don’t get to decide that the topic is too hard and you can’t skip over things or change your research direction, like you might do in a monograph or term paper. These notes are generally short and informational rather than interpretive, which teaches you to be precise and succinct. Reading the text with the footnotes helps the reader understand things that a contemporary reader would already know. I liken it to reading with the town busybody standing over your shoulder, providing you with the backstory for each document. Except that busybody is a historian.

A scanned, handwritten letter dated 1913 from Bar Harbor, Maine. The writing is slightly slanted and cursive, and the paper shows signs of age with darkened edges and faint ink in some areas. — Jane Addams to Theodore Roosevelt, August 24, 1912.

Annotation can also fill gaps in documentation. The nature of a selected edition is that we have left many, many documents out. For example, we selected a letter written to Theodore Roosevelt from Addams in 1912 about her role in winning women to the Progressive Party. This was not the first letter written about the topic, so we use annotation to summarize what already occurred before that document was written. It brings the reader up to the now. We also use annotation to refer readers to material in archives and in our comprehensive microfilm or digital edition where they can go deeper.

Where does interpretation fit in all this? After reading so much and researching every bit of a person’s life, editors do form opinions and interpretations. They might turn up in the introduction to a volume, a conference paper, a blog post, journal article, or monograph. The litmus test, for me, is whether a person who doesn’t like the subject can use our work with confidence. Will they trust that you haven’t hid or obscured documents or other materials that could make your subject look bad? My favorite review of the first volume of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger was from the Weekly Standard, where David Tell wrote:

Somewhere, amidst the sucker punches and cries of foul, the truth must reside. And “somewhere,” it turns out, is the enormous and altogether dazzling selection of public and private records just put out by the manuscript curators at New York University’s “Margaret Sanger Papers Project.” They too, like the earlier biographers, unambiguously admire the woman. But they have done their editing with scrupulous care, they have annotated the documents they reproduce with monk-like dispassion, and on the face of it they have held nothing back. (January 27, 2003)

History for the Masses

Digital scholarly editions, made freely available, are a far better monument to the life of a historical figure than statues or buildings could ever be. They provide a historically accurate, nuanced look at a life. They show the moments of weakness as well as moments of great strength and more than biographies or statues ever can, they render historical figures as real people. People with problems, people who have difficult family members, who follow fad diets, watch plays and movies, and fully lived in their times. They also foster critical thinking about historical figures and moments. While editions won’t fit easily into 140 characters or a 15-second TikTok video; neither does history.

Who we select to be the subjects of editions matters

Editions don’t stand outside society, and there has been a long history of privileging the papers of white male politicians and military leaders. Whether the founding fathers, presidents, or generals, the subjects of these editions sound much like the names on monuments, and the names we all learned in history books. The editions of these papers provide a more nuanced view of those lives, including co-workers, rivals, families, and in some cases, slaves.

A bronze statue of a woman lifting a child holding a globe, set outdoors on a pedestal. Buildings and tall trees are visible in the background under a clear blue sky. — A statue of Jane Addams lifting an immigrant child on the campus of Cal State Fresno.

In the 1970s, the field began to open up, adding a handful of projects featuring women and African-Americans. But it is not enough. We need to broaden the topics of editions to include the voices of marginalized peoples. And we need to broaden the range of people who become editors, because more voices will reveal a more vibrant story of America’s past. Smaller projects, based on intriguing people reveal lives and stories that have been erased from popular notions of history. It is happening, albeit slower than we would like.

Thinking again about monuments, I wonder if there might be an “edition-worthy” check before you put up a monument. Could you devote years of research, funding, and scholarly effort to create the Papers of Edmund Pettus? And after you had done so, exploring his ideas and providing context for his military career, his political views, and his leadership in the Ku Klux Klan, would you build a statue or name a bridge after him?

July 20, 2020October 14, 2025

Visualizing Jane Addams’ Social Networks

A network diagram showing names of historical figures, with lines connecting them. Addams, Jane (1860-1935) is centrally located in large text, indicating importance, with many lines radiating to other names.

I recently took a course on Gephi, an open-source network visualization tool offered by the Programming 4 Humanists group at Texas A&M University. This three-session Zoom-based course, taught by Katayoun Torabi was a great entry to a digital humanities topic that I have long been interested in.

One of our long-range goals at the Jane Addams Papers Project is to make the underlying data in the digital edition accessible so that digital humanists can use it for research. Having a chance to play around with network visualizations helped me to think through how we might use this tool to understand Jane Addams’s life and her causes in new and interesting ways. It also helped me better understand what we need to do to make data from our edition available.

A few ideas popped out immediately:

- a visualization of Addams’s correspondence, modeled on the ideas used to create the Mapping Republic of Letters project at Stanford.
- a visualization of how people in the Addams’ digital edition were connected via organizations, looking at for example, the interactions between women involved in the suffrage movement and the peace movement.

In this post we will look at correspondence networks.

Thinking About Data

The examples that Katayoun used in our class were all drawn from literature. We mostly worked with data from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, looking at instances of speech between characters to create visualizations of how the characters related to one another.

A network diagram of Hamlet characters, with nodes sized by importance. Hamlet is central and largest, linked to others like Claudius, Gertrude, Horatio, and Polonius; smaller nodes represent minor characters. — Here is my visualization of Hamlet using Katayoun’s data set. Central characters have larger circles and appear in the center, while less important characters are further out, smaller and have fewer appearances.

What struck me almost immediately was that the difference between this kind of analysis and what I hoped to do, was that with a literary work (or any single historical record), this analysis can provide an accurate representation of that text. As I thought about how we could this tool to understand the Jane Addams Papers, the problem of incomplete data reared its ugly head.

We have to understand that any visualization of the Jane Addams papers cannot fully be a visualization of Jane Addams’ life. Addams’s papers are incomplete. We are missing many of Addams’ most intimate letters between family members and her long-time companion, Mary Rozet Smith. At best, we might be able to visualize more of her professional life than her personal one. But we are also missing many, many letters sent to colleagues and acquaintances that never made it into archives and private collections. Many of the papers of Addams’s European counterparts did not survive World War II. So what we are left with is an impression, a partial glimpse into her world, but an imperfect one.

What can counts of letters tell us about Addams’ life? When I first took on editing the Addams Papers, I tried to estimate (by counting entries in the microfilm edition index) how many documents we had in the base collection so that we could estimate how long the project would take. Even as basic a visualization as the one below can help you see the broadening of Addams’s life as she moved from a local activist to one who operated on a global scale. It can give a rough visualization of when things happened in her life.

Line graph showing the number of microfilmed documents from 1901-1935. Four colored lines track Letters From, Letters To, Writings, and Diaries, with total documents peaking around 1927-1932 before sharply declining. — Counts from the microfilm index.

This red line (total documents) gives us a good sense of scale, and also the years where we could expect the heaviest number of documents. In the first ten years (1901-1910) we had low document counts, which rose dramatically in 1912 (Addams’s participation in the 1912 presidential election), 1915 (Addams’s establishment of a peace movement in the U.S. and international peace congresses). Her activity through the 1920s and early 1930s remains high, with peaks in 1927 and 1931 (Addams’s Nobel Prize).

Looking at the lighter green line (letters written by Addams), we see a fairly consistent output until the end of her life. The only outlier is 1923, a year in which Addams was on a tour of Asia and then suffered from serious illness. It is possible she wrote fewer letters, or fewer of them survived. Most of the dramatic peaks come from increases in incoming letters.

Anneliese Dehner, our web developer prepared a spreadsheet that represented the Item Relations for people in our digital edition. I was able to work with that in a rudimentary way to explore Gephi.

Nodes and edges

In network visualization there are two tables of information, nodes, which are unique objects, and edges, which link nodes by some kind of action. The hard work of network visualization is gathering all this data so that it can be displayed by Gephi or any other tools.

- For a correspondence network, the NODES are the people in the database. They get an ID (in our case the Omeka ID number on our database) and a LABEL (the name of the person).

A spreadsheet showing two columns: ID and Label. IDs 5 to 10 are listed with names and birth-death years, including Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emmeline Pankhurst. — Here is a snippet from the Nodes table. Each name in the database is assigned a unique identifier.

- The EDGES represent the letter. They contain an unique ID, a SOURCE (the ID number of the author of the letter) a TARGET (the ID number of the recipient of the letter) and a WEIGHT (the number of times that that same combination appears). They can also have a LABEL (the relationship — in this case “Written by”). The most common recipient, with 234 letters, is Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman (#50), the sister of Jane Addams. In second place is Emily Greene Balch (#501), a co-worker in the peace movement, donor Anita Blaine McCormick (#60) in third place, and social worker and settlement founder Lillian Wald (#33) in fourth place.

A spreadsheet showing columns labeled id, Source, target, weight, and Label. Rows contain numerical values under each heading, with “Written by” appearing multiple times in the Label column. — This table of edges show author Jane Addams’ (#5) most frequent recipients.

- Another table of EDGES describes the people who were Mentioned in a document, not just the authors or recipients. This might get at a more representative understanding of Addams’s network because one could surmise that important people might be mentioned in letters even if the correspondence between those two people might be lost. And here we do see different results. On this table Mary Rozet Smith (#164), Addams’s companion comes out at the top, with Woodrow Wilson (#4596) coming in second, donor Louise DeKoven Bowen (#814) in third place, and Addams’s niece, Marcet Haldeman-Julius (#30) in fourth place.

Spreadsheet showing six rows and five columns with headers: id, Source, Target, Weight, and Label. Each row has numbers under the first four columns and the text Mentioned in under Label. — This table shows the most commonly mentioned people in letters written by Jane Addams (#5).

Basic Visualization

My first visualization of the mentions data was, to be frank, underwhelming, unless you like big black boxes of goop!

A list of names and dates is mostly obscured by a large black rectangle in the center, making the majority of the text unreadable. Only partial names and dates are visible at the edges. — There are simply too many points in this data!

We have over 10,000 names in the NODES table. To get to a visualization that is more legible, I excluded edges with less than 10 mentions in the correspondence. Now that is readable! The weight of the line indicates the number of mentions.

A network diagram showing connections between various women, each labeled with their name and lifespan, with lines indicating relationships or interactions among them. The central figure is Addams, Jane (1860-1935). — These are the people mentioned the most in the digital edition, thus far.

I played with the appearances of our networks to make them easier to understand. Making the labels and the circle sizes proportional to the number of mentions allows you do see things more clearly.

The visualization is interactive. If I click on Paul Kellogg’s circle, only those names associated with him are highlighted– in this case a small subset of the network.

Network diagram showing names of influential figures, with Addams, Jane (1860-1935) and Balch, Emily Greene (1867-1961) in bold and largest font, indicating prominence. Faint lines connect to other names. — Paul Kellogg of the Survey’s network.

While Emily Greene Balch, a peace activist, is far more interconnected.

A network diagram with names and life spans of historical figures. Addams, Jane (1860-1935) is central and bold, with other names connected around her, including Balch, Emily Greene (1867-1961) and Karsten, Eleanor Daggett (1872-1946). — Emily Balch worked with Addams in the Woman’s Peace Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

The idea here is to explore the various networks that Addams built in her work for peace, social justice, social work, and other causes.

Next steps

Generating the data to build the NODES and EDGES tables requires some work, and filtering the data to get a meaningful result will be critical to creating data sets that the public can use. Our goal is to make this kind of data accessible to students and digital humanists to explore data visualization and Jane Addams.

We are still adding documents to the digital edition, so the first step may be building a dataset of correspondence for each year that we have completed.

In my next post, I’ll look at building a network using our data on people and organizational membership.

July 17, 2020July 29, 2026

Leading by Example: Hull-House, Jane Addams, and Social Change: Addams as a Political Woman

This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz on July 17, 2020.

One of the major pieces of legislation that would forever change the landscape of workers’ lives in the United States was the Social Security Act of 1935, passed just months after Jane Addams’s death. The U.S. was a latecomer among industrial nations in developing a system of social insurance and Jane Addams had advocated for such a system from the 1890s. This story I am going to tell you about her connection to the bill’s passage reveals much about her theory and practice of democracy. In the spirit of Addams, it is an optimistic story about the arc of social change. It is the story of how the head of General Electric, Gerard Swope led a small minority of businessmen to provide crucial support for the passage of social security. Swope was a protégé of Jane Addams.

Sometime in the 1890s Gerard Swope, the son of well-to-do German Jews who owned a manufacturing plant in St. Louis, Missouri, was working his way up in management at the Western Electric plant in Chicago. Enos Barton, Western Electric’s chairman had developed a close relationship with Jane Addams which shouldn’t surprise us. He was one of the local industrialists Addams had made it her business to bring into her social circle at the settlement.

Living close also to the heart of Chicago’s garment industry, Hull-House threw itself into the then raging anti-sweatshop fight and welcomed the embryonic clothing workers’ unions to the settlement. The liberal reform Governor of Illinois John Peter Altgeld, who had pardoned the Haymarket martyrs, had just appointed Hull-House resident Florence Kelley the Illinois Chief Factory Inspector. Kelley had studied in Germany and London where she had developed a friendship with Frederick Engels whose book on the English working class she had just translated from the German. Her familiarity with Marxist theory could be seen in her analysis of the sweatshop system in her Hull-House Maps & Papers chapters.

Western Electric’s Barton found the atmosphere stimulating and encouraged his “most promising young men” from the company to live at Hull-House as residents and sent Gerard Swope there. “Let them see all they can of all kinds of people and of their requirements,” Barton told Addams. “It would be the best possible preparation in this business of electricity which is pushing out so rapidly into so many new fields in response to the incredible variety of human needs.”[1]

Swope, a graduate of M.I.T., taught arithmetic and English at Hull-House in the evenings, paid his room and board, as Hull-House residency required, and entered fully into the communal activities of the group of residents. Swope soon became a mentor to an ambitious Russian Jewish immigrant, Philip Davis, later a labor leader sympathetic to the kind of mediation of labor conflicts Addams favored. Davis wanted help with his English. “Up to the time that I met [Gerard] Swope, I had associated only with workers and trade-unionists,” Davis explained. “Their doctrine that all bosses were evil men and, by inference, that all trade-unionists were righteous, appeared absurd when I saw what sort of individual Swope was.” [2]

In a few years Swope was given the responsibility of reorganizing Western Electric’s factory.[3] When a strike threatened, Swope consulted with his Hull-House colleagues and took their advice to negotiate honestly with his workers.[4]

Moving up in the industry, as head of General Electric, Swope employed Dr. Alice Hamilton, who had done her earliest studies of industrial toxins while living at Hull-House, to oversee the environment of the GE factories. He began experimenting with stock options for his employees, another idea discussed at Hull-House. [5]

Meanwhile Addams had become an advocate of more business and labor cooperation.[6] She even looked with hopeful anticipation of the globalization of American business. Visiting General Electric plants in China and Japan she reported positively on the workers whose standard of living was being improved.[7]

Swope privately unveiled his GE unemployment plan for employees to Addams in a letter that acknowledged her influence.[8]

And now to the end of the story of Swope and Social Security. In 1935 the National Chamber of Commerce voted to deny support for FDR’s programs, including unemployment insurance and other aspects of the proposed social security legislation. Swope and a handful of industrialists broke with the Chamber, formed a subcommittee that voiced a minority opinion and offered their support to President Roosevelt. Swope’s advocacy of Social Security was, perhaps, the highest example of the kind of enlightened industrial relations Addams had envisioned and worked to achieve starting with her efforts in the 1890s when Hull-House had been the incubator of a new social citizenship.

Is the cup half empty or half full? Addams voiced her own misgivings and doubts in 1929 about her work and its results:

“We go on doing what we can in various ways in our Settlements, and some of the things have certainly proved their social utility. But there are moments when our hearts are covered with great doubt as to the basic thing itself as to what we might do as Settlement people to change perhaps the attitude towards immigrants, or towards poverty itself; towards industrial relations, towards dozens of things concerning which we are unhappy. And that, I imagine, is the mood that will at moments urge us all to the end of the chapter. And when we no longer have these moments I doubt whether we are fitted to go on, because, after all, it is our salvation, is it not, that we are continually filled with a holy discontent?” [9]

This is the Jane Addams less known. Almost seventy years old, she is self-reflective; besieged by critics for her wartime pacifism, and surveilled by the FBI in the postwar Red Scare for her defense of civil liberties and her support of international causes, she had not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Personal defeats were not as important to Addams as the loss of the reform spirit and the attacks on liberal policies and progressive social programs. Undaunted, an aging Addams rallied her allies to expand their work rather than retreat and the founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was built by women who had participated in domestic social justice initiatives for decades; now they awakened to a global perspective.

Addams feared that postwar social and political conditions were planting seeds for the next conflict. Rebuked by an increasingly hostile press, Addams challenged the rise of militarism, the KKK, government suppression of free speech, immigration quotas and the deportation of thousands. She called out the hypocrisy of the justice system that protected Jim Crow violence: “Our own States Attorney” Addams wrote in a letter to the Chicago Tribune in February 1920, “ who …made numerous arrests [of radicals and aliens] … never caused to be arrested nor indicted a single person connected with the throwing of twenty bombs in Chicago during the last eight months, bombs which had been planted in order to destroy the homes of colored people or of white men who had rented houses to colored people.” [10]

Much of what Addams hoped to achieve remains unfinished. But pathways were laid out by 1935 the year she died.

She had argued that what was missing in democracy was the social expression of democratic living—and to get beyond the antiquated notion of politics imbedded in a limited, unrepresentative and corrupt system, she and others had to get back to the people and redefine social relations; she also realized that the pressures of a cosmopolitan neighborhood seemed to be the simple and inevitable foundations for an international order. She had transcended boundaries of class, gender, nationalities, religions in the expression of a new social citizenship expressed by Swope.

Yet she lived in a segregated world and neighborhood no matter how much she was able, from time to time, to construct interracial space and promote interracial social intercourse. In the postwar era when she failed in her own eyes to prioritize racism, a failure to which she admitted in The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, it was in large part a failure of her not finding ways to overcome the cultural, social, and political segregation in which all Americans lived and to a large extent still do.

She went into the hospital for the last time in May 1935, knowing the deteriorating situation in Europe. At home she was working on a deal with her old friend and ally Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to locate one of the first public housing projects in her Hull-House neighborhood, finally she believed, dealing with the slums she had mapped more than forty years before. And she knew there was a good chance that social security was about to be realized.

Returning finally to Addams as Political Woman writ large, her skill in redefining the roles of men and women in her reform circles was undogmatic and liberating for both sexes. It made her unique among leaders of the woman’s suffrage movement, and often controversial, especially in her view of how to be nonpartisan. Addams made waves when she seconded Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination as the presidential candidate of the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party in 1912 and simultaneously remained vice president of the suffrage association pledged to nonpartisanship. Her undogmatic, nonideological decision to risk support of the imperfect candidacy of TR related to her understanding of social progress. He was a racist, a militarist, an imperialist. Yet Addams’s social settlement and suffrage networks converged to become a dominant influence in the Progressive Party platform. She saw the opportunity for dissemination of social policy ideas nationally. From our standpoint, and from hers—as she looked back, Addams fell short, however, in her goal of fully democratizing the social policy discourse in which she did her political work. She had not been able to bring Blacks fully into the social circle and into full political empowerment. This is a message to us. It reminds us how hard the struggle to live democratically was for Jane Addams and is for us today. And it calls us to ask who has not yet been brought into the circle.

[1] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 394.

[2] Philip Davis, And Crown Thy Good (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), 89-90.

[3] Ellis W. Hawley, “Swope, Gerard,” Dictionary of American Biography, John A. Garraty, editor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), Supplement Six, 614.

[4] David Loth, Swope of G.E. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 58-59.

[5] “Employes [sic]to Help Manage Business of Electric Co.” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 17, 1923, pg. 16; “Financial Notes.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 5, 1923, pg. A10.

[6] Ibid.. 391.

[7] Ibid., 396.

[8] Gerard Swope to Jane Addams, December 10, 1930, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1 in JAMC (reel 21-1443-1447), Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[9] “The Settlement as a Way of Life.” Addresses by Jane Addams, Mary E. McDowell, Graham Taylor. Neighborhood 2, no. 3 (July 1929), 145-146. [Bold added.]

[10] Jane Addams wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Tribune protesting “against the flagrant misrepresentation in the report of my address as given in this morning’s Tribune [Feb. 23]” and this letter appeared on Feb. 24^,, 1920 in the paper under the column, “Voice of the People.”

July 1, 2020October 23, 2025

Jane Addams, Vachel Lindsay, and Me

History is, essentially, the stories of individual people and the interconnectedness of their stories to each other and to the broader history of their communities, their societies, and their world. The intersections of the lives of the historical figures who occupy my historical imagination are fascinating to me, and the people who inspired them are always central to the development of my understanding about their lives and the historical space they occupied. Jane Addams, for example, was an inspiration to an entire generation of female reformers who lived and worked at Hull-House, and the individual work those women pursued made an important impact on Addams’s world view, her writing, and her advocacy for social and economic justice. As well, her fascination with Tolstoy and her childhood memories of Abraham Lincoln offer us insights into the development of her ideas, her ideals, and her visions for reform.

As a historian, I spend a great deal of time thinking about these human connections of the past. The close relationships of the historical figures I study—like the intimate friendship between Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith or the professional relationship Addams shared with reformer and settlement worker Lillian Wald—offer obvious clues about Addams’s personal and professional life. The intersection of these particular personal stories tell me much about the lives of women in the first part of the 20th century, the network of Progressive Era reformers, and the conditions of life in the urban environments of Chicago and New York City. But as an enthusiast of the past, it really gets interesting for me when I chance upon an unexpected or less obvious historical connection. It is particularly thrilling when that connection also resonates in some way with my own personal story or relates to other historical interests I entertain.

Recently, I was doing some editorial work on a set of documents dated just days after American entry into WWI. One document was a letter to Jane Addams, dated April 9, 1917:

My Dear Friend:

What shall I do? This war breaks my heart. Send me what you have written since [William Jennings] Bryan enlisted — for instance. Are you with Bryan? Do you accept President Wilson’s war message on its face value? Is that final with you?

I hate a hyphenated American. I hate war. But I owe no one in Europe a grudge. I would rather be shot than shoot anybody. If I had been in Congress I would have voted with Miss [Jeannette] Rankin and would have considered it a sufficient reason to say “I will not vote for war till she does.”

Please write me a tract, or send a clipping. With all respect

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay was a poet and performing artist who is relatively unknown today. He lived and worked in Springfield, Illinois, where I lived and worked myself for more than twenty years; and, therefore, I am well acquainted with his body of work and the story of his life. When I read his letter to Addams, I recalled that Lindsay had written a poem about her, inspired by her peace trip to Europe in 1915. However, I was unaware he knew Addams personally nor that he had corresponded with her. The Jane Addams Digital Edition includes four letters from Lindsay to Addams, each revealing something of the poet’s respect for and fascination with Addams and with Hull-House. In an October 1916 letter, Lindsay proclaimed: “I have loved you a long time dear lady.”

That love had, indeed, inspired the poem I had remembered, “To Jane Addams at The Hague,” which Lindsay first published in the Chicago Herald in May 1915 and later as part of his popular 1917 collection The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems.

Yellow and blue ornate book cover with Asian-inspired designs, including a dragon and decorative border. Title reads: The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay.

A book spread showing two poems titled To Jane Addams at the Hague by Sara Teasdale. Page 22 contains I. Speak Now for Peace and part of II. Tolstoi Ploughing, with page 23 continuing the latter poem.

In the 1910s, Lindsay spent time in Chicago performing his poems and seeing his literary friends, including the poet and magazine editor Harriet Monroe, with whom Addams was also acquainted. Lindsay frequented Hull-House, where his good friend George Hooker was a resident, and it seems likely he enjoyed at least one or two good talks with Addams. It is unclear when he might have been formally introduced to her, but in April 1916 he wrote her a letter indicating they had been corresponding for some time. That letter was a reply to a letter from Addams, and in it Lindsay sent her his wish that they may soon see a moving picture show together. There are no known extant letters of Jane Addams to Vachel Lindsay, but the content of his letters to her indicates she had some interest in the young man and his work, and in a speech in 1922, she quoted Lindsay’s analysis of the new medium of the movies in modern society.

Lindsay, who was associated with a group of celebrated Chicago writers that included Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg, was a creative and somewhat eccentric young man. He traveled the country on foot, selling his poems to support himself, and he popularized for a time the chanting and singing of poems, often performing them with musical and dance accompaniments. In December 1916, Lindsay invited Addams to one of those performances at the Little Theatre in Chicago. It is unclear if she attended, but there is evidence she invited Lindsay to Hull-House on a few occasions. In October of that year, Addams sent Lindsay a copy of her book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, and in his letter of thanks he wrote: “I sat down and read it all morning and half the afternoon the minute it arrived. It is a lovely book—the work of a Greek, a woman more Greek than Christian.”

The fact that Lindsay, who was a progressive thinker, admired Jane Addams and her work is not surprising. Addams and Hull-House inspired many artists and writers, as well as reformers and social workers. Nor is it surprising that Lindsay, who spent time in Chicago and who interacted with people in the orbit of Hull-House, had a personal acquaintance with the famed settlement worker. What is surprising, and fascinating, too, is that Lindsay experienced a strong emotional connection to Addams. His friendship with her touched his soul, as one biographer put it. Lindsay looked to Addams for answers about his anxieties related to the war, sought her approval of his work, and shared with her his fears about failure. “Back of it all is the hope that my book shall be a live thing—a piece of ink-dynamite, not just a book pleasantly discussed by people who read my verses,” he wrote Addams in 1916. “With so many books dying before my eyes—I cannot bear to write a dead one.”

Lindsay had experienced his first hallucinations in 1904, initial signs of the future mental illness that would ultimately cost him his life; and his breakup with the poet Sara Teasdale in 1914 had been emotionally traumatic for the poet. But by 1916, Lindsay was enjoying considerable literary success, winning awards and selling books. Although four letters is far, far, far from enough evidence to evaluate the emotional importance Lindsay may have been attaching to his friendship with Addams, a close reading of the letters, however, evokes a whisper of the mental distress that was coming. There is a breathless quality to the words and the sentences, and the letters leave me wondering what kind of advice or encouragement Jane Addams may have offered Lindsay in their face-to-face interactions with each other. It is unlikely we will ever know.

What I know for certain, however, is that the relationship between Lindsay and Addams, despite what it may have meant to her on a personal level, is an example of the richness of the interconnectedness of human stories, the broader sphere of one person’s influence in the world. In this case, it speaks to the significance of Jane Addams as an inspirational figure. But it is also one of those delightful connections I am happy to chance upon, which light a spark in my historical imagination and connect my own story to the stories of the past.

Notes: Anna Massa, Vachel Lindsay: Fieldworker for the American Dream, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970, 17, 46, 100-101, 202; Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life O Vachel Lindsay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 240, 247, 258; “Lindsay, Vachel (1879-1931), American National Biography; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, October 15, 1916; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, October 29, 1916; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, April 9, 1917; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, June 26, 1917, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition. William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) was a Democratic politician from Nebraska. In April 1917, he offered his services to the government in the war effort. American National Biography. Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), a peace activist and Republican politician from Montana, was the first woman to serve in Congress. She voted against the American declaration of war against Germany in 1917. American National Biography; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. The image of Lindsay is courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

April 1, 2020September 29, 2025

The Politician and the Old Women of Hull House

Black and white portrait of an older man with short hair, a mustache, and wearing a suit with a bow tie. The image appears vintage and slightly grainy.

Once upon a time in Chicago, there was an ambitious little politician who decided to make a name for himself by picking a fight with the women of Hull-House. For a man who built things for a living, perhaps he should have known better than to employ a political strategy of burning down the house. But he was new to politics, and he did not know better. He saw his path to power in the persona of “Battling Peter,” who would rattle the foundations of the city’s social reform structures to raise his voice above the progressive din. His political strategy was to attack social reformers in the city, particularly the female ones, and the institutions they supported.

Peter Bartzen, a 61-year-old proprietor of a mason and carpentry business, was that politician. The office he sought was President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. During the fall of 1910, the fiery Democrat campaigned for that office by denouncing what he called the “hypocritical horde of reformers,” particularly the women of Hull-House. Politically ambitious with his eyes on a future gubernatorial run, Bartzen was a political novice. His only political experience was a four-year stint as an appointed building commissioner. To be governor, he needed a political victory and a message to launch his political career. With an “aggressive personality,” Bartzen decided to make a name for himself by whipping up foment against his city’s “child savers” and meddling do-gooders.

Bartzen was not a popular candidate, but the incumbent he hoped to unseat was not all that popular, either. Bartzen, who was not widely known, won the election on the coattails of a historic Democratic sweep, the county Democrats upsetting Republicans who had held power for sixteen years. The women Bartzen had maligned during his campaign for office had no direct say in the election, because women in Chicago, in Illinois, and in most states across the country, could not vote. No doubt that is precisely why Bartzen was so comfortable in his attacks against them. But when Bartzen took his seat, many prominent women reformers in Chicago set their watchful eyes upon the pesky, provocative politician.

During his first year in office, Bartzen did much to earn the disdain of Chicago reformers. For instance, he took aim at many of the county’s social service institutions, arguing that they were doing more harm than good to the county’s children and their families. In particular, he launched a full-scale investigation of the Chicago Juvenile Court in July 1911 in an effort to dismantle it. At the same time, Bartzen wholeheartedly embraced the long Chicago tradition of the spoils system by appointing his political allies to various posts under his authority, including some within the court itself. When Bartzen removed the juvenile court’s chief probation officer John Witter, a professional hired through the civil service system, he renewed his personal attacks against Hull-House, as well. In a public statement about Witter’s firing, Bartzen said: “It looks as if Mr. Witter has been under the influence of Hull-House. He ought not to be listening to a bunch of old women all the time.”

Three women in early 20th-century clothing and hats stand together in front of a stone staircase, posing for a photograph. One woman holds gloves, another has a floral hat, and the third carries a small bag. — The “Old” Women of Hull-House (Julia Lathrop and Jane Addams with friend Mary Wilmarth, who was, actually, kind of old, but she didn’t live at Hull-House)

That bunch of old women was led by the 51-year-old Jane Addams, a nationally respected and beloved social reformer, and the 53-year-old Julia Lathrop, who helped found the influential Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and was one of the city’s most prominent proponents of the Chicago Juvenile Court. Both of the women were a decade younger than Bartzen, but he dismissed them as members of the weaker sex, with no right to their opinions let alone their influence. Bartzen’s position was a powerful one. He presided over a fifteen-member board that controlled some $10 million and managed much of the county’s infrastructure and its public institutions, including its civil service system. But the city’s community of social reformers was also powerful, and Bartzen underestimated the women who led them.

In September 1911, Bartzen’s fight with the women of Hull-House escalated. When he made a particular play to discredit the work of the Chicago Juvenile Court and the Illinois Industrial School for Girls, Julia Lathrop fired back. In a public speech, Lathrop responded: “Both attacks have been made for the purposes of political capital…The noble minded women who have been working for the salvation of Chicago’s children made some errors. They were not serious errors, but they were enough to give politicians a peg on which to hang an investigation.” The court had suffered some growing pains, but the court’s founders and supporters were willing to recognize problems and work to correct them. As well, the Chicago Woman’s Club and the Juvenile Protective Association, which included some very well-heeled and outspoken women, loudly reaffirmed their support of the institution in the wake of what they believed were unwarranted, politically motivated attacks against it.

Reformers in Chicago were eager to defend the court and its mission to help disadvantaged youth escape the harsh justice of the criminal courts. They were growing particularly concerned about Bartzen replacing qualified probation officers working with the juvenile court with political hacks. Just days after Lathrop’s defensive stand against Bartzen, Dr. James A. Britton, the chief medical officer of the city’s juvenile home, resigned his post in protest. He charged that Bartzen was thumbing his nose at civil service law, which provided qualified professional probation officers to the juvenile court, and that Bartzen was “loading up the county service with political friends.” Britton was a Hull-House resident and the husband of Gertrude Howe Britton, another Hull-House resident, who was also affiliated with the Juvenile Protective Association. Mrs. Britton was just 43-years-old, but Bartzen no doubt dismissed her, and likely her husband, too, as meddling Hull-House do-gooders. Bartzan was leaving in his political wake a long list of scorned old women at Hull-House.

During the next year, Bartzen did not change his colors, and neither did the old women of Hull-House. Bartzen continued to undermine the civil service system and threaten the life of the city’s social institutions; and the city’s reformers grew increasingly certain Bartzen was a dangerous political incumbent. In the fall of 1912, Jane Addams decided to beat Bartzen at his own game: politics. She led a group of the city’s reform-minded citizens, most of them men with political clout, to select a candidate to defeat Bartzen in the November 1912 election. The committee chose Alexander A. McCormick, a former newspaper editor and progressive thinker. In August, Addams sent a telegram home to Chicago while she was vacationing in Maine, indicating the reformers’ choice: “Social workers have much to do in persuading A A McCormick to run for president of county board.” Addams believed a failure to defeat Bartzen would spell the “destruction of juvenile court.”

Three women, dressed in early 20th-century clothing and hats, stand in an open car during a suffrage parade. A banner reading “Votes for Women” is draped on the side of the car. Crowds are visible in the background. — Jane Addams (at right) in a parade for woman suffrage.

McCormick agreed to run on a Progressive Party ticket, and Addams’s political committee went to work. The campaign against Bartzen was ruthless, focused as it was on exposing him as a danger to the county’s most vulnerable citizens. Women led the charge, giving speeches and writing letters. On Nov. 2, 1912, on the Saturday just before the election, Addams and her committee behind McCormick published in the Chicago newspapers a signed circular entitled “Call to Public Service in the Interest of the Poor, Sick, Aged and Injured, and the Helpless Children of Chicago and Cook County.” The document skewered Bartzen’s policies, accused him of wasting public funds, asserted his guilt in “crimes of neglect and mismanagement of the Cook County Hospital,” and called his attack on the juvenile court “misleading and fraudulent.” In summary, the circular cautioned readers: “A vote for Peter Bartzen means a vote for the continued demoralization of all the public service institutions of the county, on which Bartzen and his henchmen have feasted while the dependents of the county have starved and been neglected.”

It is true that 1912 was a weird political year, with the role of a spunky third party mixing things up at the local, state, and national levels. The “Bull Moose” factor definitely influenced the Cook County elections. However, Bartzen’s particular reelection chances appeared to have lost traction on the heels of Chicago’s old women weighing in so loudly on his political record. Bartzen’s political strategy of picking a fight with Hull-House and Chicago’s most respected citizen backfired, and he lost the election.

The ambitious little politician had underestimated the old women at Hull-House and the political power they could garner, even without the right to vote for themselves. Bartzen not only lost this election, but he did not become the governor of Illinois, either. Even his obituary in 1933 dismissed his brief political career as minor, remembering his tenure as “anything but peaceful.” In the end, “Battling Peter” lost his battle against the battle-tested old women of Hull-House. While those women continued to make their positive marks on the history of Chicago, history resigned Bartzen to the political dustbin.

In 1914, Jane Addams published an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal in which she hailed the value of women over the age of fifty. “The weariness and dullness, which inhere in both domestic and social affairs when they are carried on by men alone, will no longer be a necessary attribute of public life when such gracious and gray-haired women become a part of it,” she wrote. “Ever-widening channels are gradually being provided through which woman’s increasing moral energy may flow, and it is not too much to predict that in the end public affairs will be amazingly revivified from those new fountainheads fed in the upper reaches of woman’s matured capacity.”

In the article, Addams shouted praise to “old” women like Ella Flagg Young, the Chicago Superintendent of Schools; novelist Edith Wharton; and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the long-running president of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. Jane Addams knew the fight that resided in the hearts of experienced, capable, older women. She understood the beautiful extent of possibilities for women who used their talents for the betterment of their communities and the world. Peter Bartzen probably didn’t read that Ladies’ Home Journal article, and he may have never admitted to himself or to anyone else that he had been undone by women. Who knows if he harbored any regrets about his brief political career or the choices he made to conduct it.

The story of the politician and the old women of Hull-House is not a fairytale in which the villains are defeated and heroes in the story live happily ever after. Real life is more complicated than that. But this story is, perhaps, a fable Aesop himself may have written if he had lived in Chicago during the Progressive Era, when Jane Addams and scores of smart, capable, and commanding older women roamed the city’s dirty streets in order to clean them up. The moral of that fable is this: Beware the people you look past in your blind ambition; beware the people who seem to be precisely what you assume, unthreatening and unworthy of your respect. They might just turn out to be the clever, unrelenting, powerful force that becomes the fatal obstacle you never expected.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Notes: David S. Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 82-110; Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., Book of Chicagoans, 1911 (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Co., 1911), 42-43; Illinois, Deaths and Stillbirths Index, 1916-1947; Witter v. County Commissioners, 256 Ill. 616 (1912); “Editorial Musings,” The Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), Nov. 4, 1910, p. 1; Letter, Nov. 5, 1910, “Busse-Deneen Ring Is Smashed in Cook County by Democratic Victory,” Nov. 9, 1910, p. 1; “Would End Juvenile Court,” Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1911, p. 7; “Fight New Child Court Idea,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 1, 1911, p. 4; “Bartzen Scored by Julia Lathrop,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 24, 1911, p. 5; “Physician Quits Bartzen Regime,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 26, 1911, p. 3; “Call to Public Service,” Nov. 2, 1912, p. 5; “Sociologists Say Bartzen Is Menace,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Nov. 2, 1912, p. 5; “Chicago Women, In Humane Plea, Flay Bartzen,” The Inter Ocean, Nov. 2, 1912, p. 1; “Save the Helpless From Bartzen,” The Inter Ocean, Nov. 4, 1912, p. 6; “Old and New County Board Presidents Shake Hands,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 1, 1912, p. 3; “Peter Bartzen, Old Political Battler, Dead,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 8, 1933, p. 1; Jane Addams to Julia Clifford Lathrop, August 7, 1911; Endorsement for Alexander McCormick for Cook County Board of Commissioners, 1912; Jane Addams to Alexander Agnew McCormick, August 21, 1912; Jane Addams to Charles E. Merriam, August 21, 1912; Jane Addams to Raymond Robins, August 21, 1912; Raymond Robins to Jane Addams, August 22, 1912; Need a Woman Over Fifty Feel Old?, October, 1914, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

March 13, 2020September 29, 2025

Survey on Digital Editions

Black-and-white photo of Jane Addams sitting and speaking to a group of children. Text below reads: Survey on Editions. Help the Jane Addams Digital Edition! Website menu is visible above the photo.

Digital flyer promoting the Jane Addams Digital Edition survey, featuring a black and white photo of Jane Addams with a group, and offering a chance to win a $10 Starbucks gift card for survey participants.

Click here for the survey!

The Jane Addams Papers Project, in partnership with the University of Michigan School of Information, is exploring the user experience for both the Jane Addams Digital Edition and scholarly digital editions in general. If you are a student or a scholar who has used at least one print or digital scholarly edition in the past, we would be grateful if you could take 5–10 minutes to participate. The survey will be open until Wednesday 3/18. Responses are anonymous, but we will gather your email address at the end to enter you in a drawing for a Starbucks gift card!

March 9, 2020February 11, 2026

Each for Equal: International Women’s Day 2020

A group of six women in early 1900s attire stand on a cobblestone street holding signs and a banner advocating for womens suffrage, with buildings and a car in the background.

Each for Equal

This year’s International Women’s Day theme is #EachforEqual; an equal world is an enabled world. There are many women we could discuss today: Jane Addams, of course, for her work in the immigrant communities of Chicago, among many other areas she championed in the name of equality. Carrie Chapman Catt, who heavily campaigned for women’s suffrage rights. Lillian D. Wald, who taught women valuable skills out of the Henry Street Settlement. And Emily Greene Balch, a staunch supporter of peace as a central leader in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. But there is, I believe, a group of women whom we often forget to include when discussing Addams, especially her work for peace — the women who aided Addams outside the United States.

It is easy to forget that many of Addams’s contemporaries were

located outside the United States. Dr. Aletta Henriëtte Jacobs, a Dutch physician and suffrage activist, had multiple achievements to her name, including her life-long struggle for women’s equality. Jacobs was the first woman to attend a Dutch university, inspired by her father, physician Abraham Jacobs. Jacobs became a pharmacy assistant, continuing on to University of Groningen. In 1879, Jacobs set up a practice in Amsterdam, offering free appointments to poor residents, struggling to maintain large families. In a controversial move, in 1882 Jacobs offered birth control advice at her clinic, the first clinic ever to do so in the world. She paved the way for Dutch women to seek an education outside finishing school, and control the size of their families, lowering the infant mortality rate and improving women’s health in the process.

Chrystal Macmillan was a British pioneer, one of the first woman to graduate from the University Edinburgh in 1896 then finishing her studies in Berlin and Edinburgh. MacMillan fought for women’s rights at Edinburgh University. When World War I began, Macmillan threw her energies into providing food for Belgian refugees. Her staunch pacifist views made her a leader in

the English movement against war, and brought her into the international drive to end war. Macmillan was one of only three British women who attended the 1915 International Congress of Women and throughout the war worked for peace and a negotiated settlement. In March of 1919, Macmillan attempted to lessen the surrender terms to be implemented for Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, but no changes were made. Chrystal Macmillan dedicated her life to the equality and fair treatment of women and oppressed peoples, regardless of their country of origin.

A group of women sit at a long table covered with a cloth and flowers, with large palm plants behind them, suggesting a formal gathering or conference. — International Congress of Women, 1915. Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science

Rosika Schwimmer, a Jewish-Hungarian activist, was a powerhouse in the peace movement; her unswerving belief in peace and women’s equality were seen by some as abrasive and they found her difficult to work with. Before becoming a peace activist, Schwimmer worked as a governess, and bookkeeper, a correspondence clerk, and finally became president of the Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete (National Association of Women Office Workers), in 1901. After an international mentorship with American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, Schwimmer returned to Hungary, founding the Hungarian Feministák Egyesülete (Feminist Association). Their goals included equality for women in education, employment, and healthcare. Schwimmer was a driving force in the efforts to stop World War I. She convinced Henry Ford to mount a peace mission in 1915, and attended meetings to the Women’s Peace Party and the International Congress of Women in 1915. Schwimmer fought against anti-Semitism and sexism during the early twentieth century to secure better living conditions for Hungarian women and beyond.

With so much history right here in the United States, it’s easy to push international affairs out of our minds, preferring to learn about our own country’s struggles. But, as Jane Addams and her contemporaries have shown, the fight for equality for women encompasses is an international fight and women need to keep working until equality has been secured for all. As Addams wrote: “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” This International Women’s Day, we remember the women working abroad for the equality of women worldwide.

— Victoria Sciancalepore, Assistant Editor

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

A stack of U-Haul moving boxes and a Florida Citrus box are seen in front of a wall with a poster featuring a stylized face. A window with blinds is partially visible on the right.

When the Jane Addams Papers started work in 2015 at Ramapo College, in many ways it felt like a brand-new project. We were focused on the digital edition, developing metadata rules, learning how to read Addams’s charming handwriting, and immersing ourselves in turn of the century Chicago and the work of Hull-House. But we were not a new project. We built our edition standing on the shoulders of the original Jane Addams Papers Project, founded by Mary Lynn Bryan in 1975.

Working with a team of dedicated editors, Mary Lynn produced an amazing microfilm that became the basis for our digital edition. We scanned that microfilm in 2015 and started working with the images, beginning in 1901, on our digital edition. The microfilm edition represented decades of work; they conducted an international search for Addams documents in archives, private collections and published sources, organized the documents and indexed them. At the start of our project, they had published two volumes of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams (since then Volume 3 has been published).

The microfilm headers that her team created gave our undergraduates a real head start when working with the texts. A letter to “Alice” was in fact a letter to Addams’ sister “Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman,” carbon copies of letters that had no signatures were identified clearly in the targets. They also identified the place where the letter was written from and sometimes the correct date.

A scanned document with typed text at the top showing a date (1901 Jan 10), sender, recipient, and library information, above a handwritten letterhead from Hull-House, dated January 10, 1901, with cursive writing below. — We left the microfilm headers on the scans showing the work of the founding project.

And even more, we had the index to the microfilm. Unlike most other editing projects, the Jane Addams Papers Microfilm Index identified not just the authors and recipients of letters, but most time, the people mentioned in those letters, and in some cases the subjects. So, if “Edith” was mentioned in a letter and the students (or editors!) did not know who Addams was talking about, we could consult the microfilm index, and with a little adjustment, convert a microfilm reel and frame citation to our digital image files. This really helped in the early days of the project, when most of the correspondents and associates were not in our system.

This January, Assistant Editor Victoria Sciancalepore took a road trip to North Carolina to get some of the archives of the original Jane Addams Papers Project. We brought the precious boxes, filled with index cards, copies of the documents and targets that were used to create the microfilm, and archival search records. It was exciting to unpack them and fill our file cabinets (and then some!) with these records, which we immediately put to use.

An office room with a desk, computer, and two chairs. Stacked U-Haul moving boxes form a tall column near the bookshelves. Books, wall art, and office supplies are visible around the room. — Boxes, we had boxes!

A cardboard box filled with stacks of old library card catalog cards, some bundled with rubber bands, showing handwritten and typed information on the cards. — Index cards… databases the old fashioned way!

While most of the scans from the microfilm are good quality, there are some that are difficult to read. In the past we identified documents with poor images with an “Onsite” tag. Slowly but surely we contacted or traveled to the archives to get a new image. Some were penciled originals or light blue carbon copies that had been copied, then microfilmed, and then scanned. To our delight, we were able to substitute the copy in the Addams Project files for a number of light scans, which will save us time and money.

Even more valuable, and appreciated by student transcribers, many of the files also included handwritten transcriptions for some of the more difficult to read handwritten documents. While the first three volumes of the Selected Papers only carry the story to 1900, these transcriptions are throughout the collection. It has helped clear up a lot of [illegible]s from our early transcriptions.

Our debt to the editors that went before us, finding, organizing, transcribing and editing these documents cannot be overstated, and we want to thank each and every one of them!

December 18, 2019October 14, 2025

Women’s Hoops at Hull-House

A group of women in old-fashioned clothing play basketball in a gym with wooden floors and brick walls; one woman crouches over the ball while others gather around her.

Six women in vintage sports uniforms stand in a row indoors, posing for a team photo. A soccer ball is on the floor in front of them. Handwritten text is visible above their heads on the background. — Hull-House Women’s Basketball Team, 1907

Women played basketball at Hull-House. Well…they played basket ball, two words. In bloomers, wearing long sleeves and lace collars, and with hair coiffed into neat buns. Early on, female players of this thrilling new game also competed under the regulation of girls’ rules, which restricted their movement across the court. There were many people in those days who deemed the game unwomanly and fretted about women overexerting themselves. However, women’s basketball at Hull-House quickly got real. What would become one of America’s favorite sports made an early start in Chicago on Hull-House hardwood, and women were on the court from the start. Who knew Jane Addams, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, helped birth the first generation of female athletes in the city?!

James Naismith invented and promoted the game of basketball in 1891, and two years later women at Smith College were playing it with modified rules to “avoid physical roughness” and to maintain at least the appearance of femininity. When Hull-House resident Rose Gyles became director of the Hull-House gymnasium in 1895, she brought the game to the men, women, and children of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. Under her guidance, Hull-House fielded one of the first girls basketball teams in Chicago. At Hull-House, the women’s players shared the facilities right along with the three Hull-House men’s teams. By the late 1890s, Hull-House had two competitive women’s teams, a growing group of interested girls playing the sport for recreation at the settlement, and a winning record in Chicago’s burgeoning basketball league. A generation of “new” women were growing up at Hull-House, and competitive sport played a role in their changing relationships with the world around them. For many Hull-House girls, like reformer Florence Kelley’s daughter Margaret (who was partly raised at the settlement), basketball was a part of their coming-out party.

Black and white photo of young girls in old-fashioned gym uniforms standing in a row indoors, each holding onto gymnastic swing ropes suspended from the ceiling. Large windows and brick walls are visible in the background. — Image 2: Female Physical Education at Hull-House

Women of the upper classes long had access to organized sports, like tennis, croquet, and archery. However, in the context of a growing belief in the benefits of fresh air, physical fitness, and physical education programs, interest in sports for the masses increased, and basketball became a popular activity. Public and private schools fielded recreational and competitive teams, churches and private organizations like the YMCA offered athletic facilities, city parks built playgrounds and athletic fields, and even settlement houses jumped on the sports bandwagon. Hull-House maintained a gymnasium from the start and continually worked to improve it over the years, offering girls, boys, men, and women in the neighborhood a variety of athletic programs.

Hull-House was famous for its social settlement and reform work, but in Chicago it was also famous for basketball. And at Hull-House, the basketball program, like most all of its other programs, did not discriminate against girls and young women. Hull-House celebrated female athletics. Women’s basketball games at Hull-House were announced in the Chicago papers, encouraging attendance, and scores were published the next day.

Black and white photo of eleven women in early 1900s attire, some holding dumbbells, posing formally in two rows. Most are standing, with a few seated in front, looking toward the camera. — Image 3: Hull-House Women’s Basketball Team

In 1906, Jane Addams’s Hull-House girls beat Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons girls 26-3 in the Hull-House Gymnasium. Over the years, Hull-House sort of owned Chicago Commons where women’s basketball was concerned, and I wonder if Addams ever teased her good friend and fellow settlement worker across town about Hull-House domination. Hull-House teams did not only compete against other settlement houses, however. They also played Chicago high schools, church teams, and other organizational teams, as well.

Jane Addams was herself a proponent of exercise and recreational activities for women. In a speech in 1908, she praised Chicago for establishing and maintaining “fifteen parks with playing fields, gymnasiums and baths, which at present enroll 18,000 young women and girls.” Addams was very supportive of the developing basketball program at Hull-House, although she did question the wisdom of the sports’ less-than-adequate venue. In 1902, when sixteen-year-old Margaret Kelley was injured during a game, Addams wrote her mother: “She hurt her head playing basket ball you know—and I am in doubt as to whether she ought to play in a gym full of posts!”

Historic black-and-white photo of a large brick building with steep gabled roofs, tall chimneys, and arched windows, situated on a street corner with a few people and a horse-drawn carriage nearby. — Image 4: Hull-House Gymnasium, c. 1900.

Jane Addams was, of course, merely joking, and basketball carried on at the settlement. Regardless that male and female athletes might get hurt, the Hull-House gymnasium remained a popular gathering place for basketball players and for spectators, alike. In the first decade of the twentieth century, basketball was a quickly growing sport. It was popular with men and children, but it was also becoming a favorite activity of college coeds. The captain of the University of Chicago women’s team said of the sport in 1896: “It calls into play every muscle in the body, and besides the real benefit we get out of the exercise it is quite the nicest game we play.” Another aficionado of the sport noted that it tended to quiet the nerves of restless young women.

Others believed women should avoid sports like basketball. Some medical professionals argued that the sport was too athletic for women and, according to one University of Chicago physician, the exertion the sport required of women led to “enlarged, irritable, and overactive hearts.” His assertion is, of course, ludicrous from the viewpoint of our modern medical perspective, but it was alarming to many people in the early 1900s. In 1907, the Illinois State High School Athletic Association barred girls from playing basketball, arguing:

“The game is altogether too masculine and has met with much opposition on the part of parents. The committee finds that roughness is not foreign to the game, and that the exercise in public is immodest and not altogether ladylike.”

Fortunately for the female basketball players in Chicago, the ruling did not affect them, as Chicago schools were not members of the state association. Thus, women’s basketball continued on in the city, and women played it with increasing gusto. Early women’s basketball in Chicago had followed Smith College rules, which positioned seven players in designated areas of the court to limit physical exertion. However, in 1903, the Chicago girls basketball league adopted boy’s rules instead, and thereafter five players for each team took the court for each girls basketball game, and the physicality of the play increased. In 1909, the Chicago Tribune reported on a particularly athletic came between the Evanston Girls Athletic Club and the Evanston YMCA team:

“Frizzles, pompadours, marcel waves, psyche knots, corkscrew curls, and Aunt Mary’s wavelets were all mauled in a strenuous context last night…Bangs, rats, and other feminine fixings became segregated from their original compositions and several times it was necessary to stop the carnage to make repairs. The athletic girls won, 9 to 8, but this was merely one of the hair raising incidents.”

In spite of the possible physical dangers of athletics and in the face of public, medical, and media scorn for women who engaged in sports, more and more girls and young women wanted to play games and to be physically active. There may have been a decline in public enthusiasm for the sport as an acceptable pursuit for women, but basketball was still popular with young women, particularly on college campuses. College women were not only playing the sport for healthy recreation, either. They were also gaining a competitive spirit and making demands for proper equipment and equity with men’s teams. In 1902, for example, Northwestern University women basketball players demanded the college provide them with uniforms and allow them to travel outside of Evanston, IL, for games. The woman ultimately won their fight to travel, and the team played in their first away game in Pontiac, IL, the following year.

By 1916, 900 young people were enrolled in programs in the Hull-House gymnasium, many of them girls and women, and many of them playing on sixteen organized basketball teams. Title IX—sweeping federal legislation that sought to equalize women’s access to educational opportunities of all sorts, including sports—was still decades away. In the first half of the twentieth century, there remained, as well, widespread concern that organized sports defeminized women. Society also placed a stigma upon women who dared to step outside of gendered norms which sought to constrain them. However, women and girls played on, at Hull-House, in Chicago, and across the country.

Women who had the opportunity to engage in physical activities like basketball in the Hull-House gymnasium took those experiences out into the world with them. Playing the sport gave them confidence in their bodies and developed in their spirits courage and grit and gumption. Emma Karstens, a Hull-House basketball player and coach went on to direct other athletic programs in the city, inspiring girls and young women to be physically active and to play sports. In 1920, she was involved with a city-wide sports fest, which encouraged girls and boys to take part in athletics. In less direct ways, girls who played basketball and other games at Hull-House were also shaped by those experiences. The settlement’s early encourage of girls to engage in sports and other activities previously thought to be the domain of men inspired thousands of women and girls to be more, do more, and raise daughters differently than they themselves were raised. Hull-House was on a grand scale a locus of serious social, economic, and political reforms; but Hull-House was also a place where girls could stretch the boundaries of their own imaginations.

Hoops at Hull-House could arguably be credited with establishing the popularity of basketball in the city of Chicago. We might also accurately call Jane Addams one of the mothers of the first generation of female athletes. But one thing is certain. Hull-House offered girls and women opportunities about which they may have never dared to dream. On the hardwood or elsewhere on the settlement campus, girls and women mattered. Girls and women were considered capable. And, most importantly perhaps, Hull-House set the bar high for girls and women and expected them not only clear the bar, but to set it even higher for themselves.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sad Epilogue: Margaret Kelley was definitely a young woman who grew through her experiences at Hull-House. She was a courageous and energetic young woman when she arrived at Smith College in 1905, determined to take advantage of college athletics even though she had been “cautioned against violent exercise.” Unfortunately, Margaret’s ailing heart failed her, and she suffered a fatal heart attack that year.

Notes: Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis, eds., 100 Years at Hull-House (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 73-74 (Image 3); Peggy Glowacki and Julia Hendry, Hull House (Chicago: Arcadia, 2004), 26 (Image 2); Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 306; “The New Athletic Girl and Interscholastic Sports,” in Robert Purter, The Rise of American High School Sports and the Search for Control (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 145-53; “Before the Sports Bra: A Short History of Women’s Sports through the 1970s,” in Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 119-22; Joan S. Hult, “Introduction to Part I,” 6-7; Betty Spears, “Senda Berenson Abbott: New Woman, New Sport,” 24-25; “Clara Gregory Baer: Catalyst for Women’s Basketball,” 45; Lynne Fauley Emery and Margaret Toohey-Costa, “Hoops and Skirts: Women’s Basketball on the West Coast, 1892-1930,” 50, all in Joan S. Hult and Marianna Trekell, eds. A Century of Women’s Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four (Reston, VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 1991); Kathryn Kish Sklar and Beverly Wilson Palmer, eds., The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931 (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2009), 134n1; Emma Karstens in 1910 U.S. Federal Census; Hull-House Basketball Players, 1907 and Hull-House Basketball Players, 1909, photographs, Chicago History Museum, Explore Chicago Collections (Images 5 & 6); “Many Athletic Coeds,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 30, 1896, p. 8; “Talks of New Woman,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Dec. 29, 1900, p. 12; “’Coed’ Team Wants Uniforms,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 11, 1902, p. 13; “Girls Adopt Boys’ Rules,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 11, 1903, p. 10; “Girls to Play Basketball,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 10, 1903, p. 6; “Athletics at Northwestern,” The Inter-Ocean, Apr. 15, 1903, p. 4; “Drops Dead in Gymnasium,” The Bedford (IN) Daily Mail, Oct. 23, 1905, p. 2; “Hull House Girls Win,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 4, 1906, p. 11; “Hull House Girls, 25; Gads Hill, 13,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 10, 1906, p. 10; “Armour Mission Girls Win,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 18, 1907, p. 12; “Bars Girls from Basketball,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 3, 1907, p. 25; “Great Wreckage of ‘Fixings,’” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 28, 1909, p. 31; “Women’s Gymnasium,” Suburban Economist (Chicago), May 2, 1919, p. 3; “Chicago Pauses for Day’s Romp with 5,000 Kids,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 1920, p. 11; Selected Papers of Jane Addams,(Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2019), 3:xxxii (Image 4), 345n6, 346 (Image 1); Hull-House Bulletin 1 (No. 4, April 1896), 5, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, reel 53:897; Jane Addams to Florence Kelley, December 29, 1902; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Address to the Playground Association, March 31, 1908; Hull-House Year Book, January 1, 1916, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

October 18, 2019September 29, 2025

From Lincoln Rubber Ducky to Addams Signed Note

A handwritten note reads: Faithfully yours, Jane Addams / Dec-Home, Chicago.

For the twenty years I edited Abraham Lincoln’s papers, I never had a strong desire to own a Lincoln document. Well, let’s be honest, I never made enough money to buy a Lincoln document. Even a clipped Lincoln signature will set you back a few grand. Instead, my Lincoln collection included a bookcase full of Lincoln mass-market biographies and edited volumes, a nice bust, one significant historic print, a few mugs, salt and pepper shakers, and a weird-but-adorable Lincoln rubber ducky.

My Lincoln collecting was not at all sophisticated, based as it was on a scholarly editor’s pocketbook, but it was great fun and it still gives me much joy. Looking back on my collection now, I understand the value of my kitschy Lincoln stuff for the giggle it inspired in me as I conducted my serious scholarly work and for the little breather it provided from the rarified air of academic history. History should be fun, darn it, and part of the reason I think so many Americans find history boring is because they had teachers who squeezed no fun out of history at all.

I am a historian who squeezes a great deal of fun from the work I am lucky to do. I am also a historian who embraces my historical subjects with a big hug, leaning in and opening my heart as well as my head to my work. I am passionate about finding the humanity of the historical figures I study. I think at least in part, the fun I had collecting Lincolniana humanized Lincoln for me and humanized the scholar in me, too. It allowed me to see Lincoln as a man (and a bobblehead), not as a god or a myth, and to allow my work to delight me. My editing work made an important contribution to Lincoln scholarship, but allowing humor and humanity into the work provided me with balance. My joyful approach to Lincoln rooted my feet to the ground, where history actually lives, and kept my head out of the ivory tower, where history is sometimes self-important and inaccessible.

When I started working for the Jane Addams Papers Project in January 2017, I naturally approached Jane Addams in the same way I had approached Lincoln. Joy and a sense of fun balanced my very serious effort to get to know the woman and the social reformer Addams was, to understand her era, and to learn all I could about the fascinating historical contexts of her life. In the beginning of my work with the project, I immersed myself in biographies about Addams, and I studied her surviving correspondence, the speeches she delivered, and the articles and books she published. However, I also immediately coveted the Jane Addams doll that was sitting on a shelf in the project’s offices in New Jersey. All work and no fun is just not my style.

It took a few weeks, but I found said doll on eBay for $10, and Jane the Doll has been sitting next to or on my desk ever since. In her smart gray frock and sensible black hat she stands, with a slight muppet-like smile, holding her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House under her arm and wearing her Nobel Peace Prize medal around her neck. To me, Jane the Doll is a muse, of sorts, juxtaposed as it is to the ever more solemn nature of the life-changing reform work in which the real Jane Addams was engaged. I also like that the doll is the silly to Jane Addams’s serious. It is, as well, a daily physical reminder that while my work may be a scholarly business, it is also an honor and a pleasure. I actually get paid to do work I love, so why not embrace the passion and the fun within it.

As I did with Lincoln for twenty years, I now do with Jane Addams. I balance the serious with the silly. I admit it is sometimes harder to find the funny bone in Miss Addams than it was to find it in Mr. Lincoln, but that is no bar to my finding levity in the painstaking and labor-intensive scholarly editing work I do. Collecting my subjects is my way of bringing fun into my life as a historian, so it was exciting for me to learn it will be well within my financial reach to collect first editions of each of Jane Addams’s published books (five already down six to go!). Although memorabilia of Addams is far more rare than it is for Lincoln, in my growing collection of Addams kitsch, I have already added a peace poster for the wall, buttons with “I Love Jane Addams” and “I love Peace,” a coffee mug, and a “Peace, Love, and Jane Addams” t-shirt. Only recently, however, did I realize that a Jane Addams document could be available to me for purchase.

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Springfield, Illinois, for a Lincoln event and to meet up with a group of people who have come into my life through our shared interest in Abraham Lincoln. One of those people who joined me in the sunny beer garden across from the Lincoln Home that afternoon brought me a surprise from the rare bookshop where he works: a printed calling card signed by Jane Addams! It is not a historically important note or a romantic letter to Jane’s beloved Mary Rozet Smith. It is not large, measuring just a 3½ by 2¼ inches. It is not in perfect condition, either. In fact, it has some damage on the printed side from glue which held it in position in an album or adhered it to matting within a frame, and one blob of gluey residue obscures the printed script of “Hull-House.” However, the handwritten side is pristine and features legible-for-Jane-Addams scrawl and her characteristic loopy signature. It is a humble document, indeed, but its imperfections do not lessen my enchantment with it.

Holding that little note in my hands for the first time tendered a tangible spark through my fingers and up to my heart, sending me back in time 100 years. To noisy, dirty, Progressive-Era Chicago. To Hull-House in the city’s impoverished and overcrowded 19^th Ward. To Jane Addams, “the world’s best-known and best-loved woman” of her time, standing in the doorway. Handling a historic document has always been for me a kind of handshake with the historical figure of the past who wrote it. Over the years of searching for Lincoln documents in repositories across the country, I shook hands with Lincoln a great many times. But because I work with digital copies of documents at the Addams Papers, this was the first time I had the pleasure of this special and particular introduction to Addams. My day trip to Springfield got even better when I carried that little scrap of Jane Addams handwriting home for fifty times less than it would have cost me had Abraham Lincoln been the one who had penned it.

It annoys me to know that the manuscript market is as sexist as the world. To deem as practically worthless a handwritten note with a fine signature, written by a woman who was the most significant reformer of the Progressive Era, is, I think, almost a crime. But the market’s misjudgment and loss is my gain, allowing me to own a piece of historical magic. My little Jane Addams note is priceless to me. It is the star of my collection of Addamsiana, and I plan to have it conserved and encased in a two-sided archival frame. I do not have aspirations to collect additional documents in the hand of Jane Addams. This one will be enough for me (at least for now, I think). It conjures the handshake, inspires my joy, and provides a palpable human connection to a woman I get to hang out with five days a week.

Anyway, from the perspective of historical memorabilia, in going from a $1 Lincoln rubber ducky to a signed Addams note worth about 100 bucks, I’ve come a long way, baby. Maybe not the equivalent of Jane Addams getting the right to vote, but still super cool for this historian, who is having way too much fun.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

A cream-colored card with elegant cursive text reading Miss Addams. Four prominent brownish stains are scattered across the card.

September 23, 2019September 29, 2025

Guest Post: Striving for Social Justice: Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge

Sepia-toned portrait of a woman with light-colored, wavy hair styled back, wearing a high-collared patterned blouse, and looking slightly to the side with a neutral expression.

By Anya Jabour, Regents Professor of History, University of Montana

The subject of my new book, Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women’s Activism in Modern America, worked closely with Jane Addams for decades. The two women, along with other reformers affiliated with Hull House, championed labor legislation, provided services to immigrants, promoted woman suffrage, and advocated for world peace. Together, they were a powerful force for social justice.

Born and raised in Kentucky, Breckinridge came to Chicago to pursue higher education at the coeducational University of Chicago. After earning her M.A. (1897) and Ph.D. (1901) in political science, she graduated with her J.D. (1904) at the top of the Law School’s first graduating class. After completing her coursework, Breckinridge taught a pioneering course on “The Legal and Economic Position of Women” that brought her into contact with the Second City’s labor organizers and social reformers.

Breckinridge’s concern about the plight of working women initiated her long association with Hull House and its head resident, Jane Addams. In 1905, at Addams’s suggestion, she accepted an appointment as Inspector of Yards, investigating the working conditions of women in Chicago’s infamous stockyard district. Breckinridge spent more than four months inspecting the facilities and interviewing the employees of “Packingtown,” mostly immigrant girls and young women between the ages of 16 and 22. Working in cold, windowless rooms and standing on “dirty, blood-soaked, rotting wooden floors” for ten hours a day, the workers “toil[ed] without relief in a humid atmosphere heavy with the odors of rotten wood, decayed meats, stinking offal,” and human waste from the doorless privies that vented directly into the workrooms. Breckinridge found her task exhausting, both physically and emotionally. To Addams, she confessed, “I was getting where I could not sleep—the vision of the day’s work presses in so! Not my own day’s work—but that of the crews of girls I see marching past me now.”

Breckinridge translated her emotional response to women workers’ abysmal working conditions into social scientific scholarship and policy recommendations. In addition to publishing her study on women workers in the stockyards, she reported her findings to the U.S. Labor Department. With the support of settlement house workers, clubwomen, and trade unionists, she helped persuade the department to provide funding for a full-scale investigation. Ultimately, the nineteen-volume report on the working conditions of wage-earning women and children, published between 1910 and 1913, provided the basis for the establishment of two new federal bureaus, the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the U.S. Women’s Bureau. These government agencies would advocate for a ban on child labor and better working conditions for women for decades to come.

Two women in long dresses stand on an ivy-covered building’s porch, surrounded by plants. In the background, a large church or university tower is visible across a lawn. The photo is black and white. — Breckinridge (right) with Julia Clifford Lathrop (left) University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-02244], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Breckinridge’s work with Addams on behalf of working women soon led to an invitation to live and work at Hull House. As Russell Ballard, one of the few male residents of Hull House, expressed it, “a brilliant company of women were drawn to the settlement to pioneer in the promotion of social change. The scholarly and talented Sophonisba Breckinridge joined the company in 1907 to become one of Miss Addams’ closest friends and most helpful associates.” Although her responsibilities at the University of Chicago prevented her from living at Hull House full-time, Breckinridge spent all of her vacation quarters—and much of her limited free time—at Hull-House, where she was listed as an official “resident” from 1907 until 1921.

Breckinridge became one of Addams’s closest colleagues. She helped to raise funds for the settlement, served as a substitute speaker when Addams was unavailable, and assisted Addams with her correspondence. Breckinridge’s papers are filled with hastily scrawled notes from Addams, invariably beginning with the exclamatory greeting “Dear Lady!” and closing, “Hastily yours, Jane Addams.” In response to such letters, Breckinridge assisted Addams in innumerable ways, both large and small, leading Addams to close one typical letter asking Breckinridge to perform a task, “I do hope that I am not putting too many things ‘off’ on you.” Breckinridge always came through for Addams, signing one letter, “Yours to command always.”

Soon after Breckinridge took up residence at Hull House, she joined a special committee investigating the conditions confronting young single immigrant women who arrived in the city, lost and alone and vulnerable to both sexual and economic exploitation. A typical case was that of Bozena, “a nice young Bohemian immigrant girl” who was “so eager for work . . . that she had taken the first job she could find—in a saloon.” As fellow Hull House resident Edith Abbott, Breckinridge’s colleague at the University of Chicago, explained: “The saloonkeeper had abused her shamefully and then turned her out when he found that she was to become the mother of his illegitimate child.”

Hull House residents helped Bozena file charges, obtain childcare, learn English, gain citizenship, and find work. But Breckinridge and Addams soon realized that the problem of “lost immigrant girls”—as well as the difficulties confronting immigrant men and children—was too widespread for existing service agencies to address. As Addams explained the problem:

Every year we have heard of girls who did not arrive when their families expected them, and although their parents frantically met one train after another, the ultimate fate of the girls could never be discovered; we have constantly seen the exploitation of the newly arrived immigrant by his shrewd countrymen in league with the unscrupulous American; from time to time we have known children detained in New York and even deported whose parents had no clear understanding of the difficulty.

With Addams’s enthusiastic support, Breckinridge proposed the creation of a new organization, and the Immigrants’ Protective League was established in 1908. As Abbott recalled: “This problem of the unaccompanied girls proved to be challenging; but nothing that ought to be done seemed impossible to Miss Breckinridge!”

A woman in academic regalia stands on stone steps in front of a large wooden door, with ivy-covered walls in the background. She wears a long robe with dark stripes on the sleeves and a cap. — Breckinridge at Green Hall at the University of Chicago. (Courtesy of University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-02252], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.)

The Immigrants’ Protective League provided essential assistance to Chicago’s immigrants—women, men, and children. One of the League’s first major accomplishments was establishing “a kind of immigration station” to welcome new arrivals. Immigrants who arrived in Chicago by train met with League agents—chosen to represent the nationalities and speak the languages of their clients— who helped orient newcomers to the city. Agents provided new arrivals with information about employment opportunities, social services, and evening classes. One of the principal goals of the League was to protect immigrants from exploitation. At the welcome station, agents helped new arrivals steer clear of unscrupulous cab drivers, fraudulent employment agents, and the ever-present “cadets” who recruited young women into prostitution. Breckinridge also persuaded local women’s clubs to provide funds for the League to provide temporary lodging for young immigrant women. In only four years, the League served close to 80,000 immigrants at its welcome station.

Breckinridge and Addams continued to team up to advance social reform. In 1911, they were elected vice-presidents of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Under their leadership, the Second City quickly became a “stronghold for the cause.” However, internal dissension caused both women to dread meetings of the national board, which Addams compared to being immersed in “boiling oil.”

Tensions came to a head in Fall 1912, when Breckinridge and Addams, in defiance of the suffrage organization’s traditional commitment to non-partisanship, declared their support for Progressive Party presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Addams, Breckinridge, and other activists not only convinced the third-party candidate to support woman suffrage, but also helped to shape the Progressive Party’s agenda. The third-party platform, known as the “Contract with the People,” was modeled on the “Platform of Industrial Minimums” adopted at the 1912 National Conference of Charities and Corrections, where both Breckinridge and Addams played prominent roles. The platform included demands for a “living wage,” unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation for all workers, as well as special protections for women and children in the workforce.

However, Breckinridge and Addams failed to convince NAWSA leadership that the suffrage movement should use party politics to promote either women’s rights or social welfare. Instead, president Anna Howard Shaw publicly denounced “party ties.” This uncomfortable situation led both Addams and Breckinridge to resign their posts after only a year in office.

Although they remained active in the suffrage movement, after leaving office, Breckinridge and Adams shifted their focus away from NAWSA and toward the Woman’s Peace Party, which they co-founded in 1915 in response to armed conflict in Europe—what would later become known as World War I. The Woman’s Peace Party was the first U.S. pacifist group to treat “peace as a women’s issue.” Many members believed that women had a special responsibility to protect life and thus to prevent war. The party preamble and platform called on women, as “the mother half of humanity,” to oppose the “reckless destruction” of human life resulting from warfare. At the same time that they emphasized women’s special responsibility for peace work, feminist pacifists also demanded equal political rights for women. Believing that women’s full participation in the political process was essential to ending global conflict, members of the Woman’s Peace Party worked for both women’s rights and world peace.

As chairperson and treasurer of the Woman’s Peace Party, respectively, Addams and Breckinridge represented the new organization at an international feminist-pacifist gathering known as the International Congress of Women and held at The Hague in 1915. The Congress enthusiastically adopted many of the measures proposed by the U.S. representatives, calling for the creation of an international peacekeeping body, national self-determination for all countries, and equal political participation for women. Following the Congress, two delegations visited political and religious leaders of both neutral and belligerent nations. When Addams, who participated in the visits, returned home, she did so as the first president of the new International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace.

Addams, Breckinridge, and other members of the Woman’s Peace Party took the lead in attempts to find a peaceful solution to the ongoing war. After Addams returned to the United States, she and Breckinridge worked with both male and female pacifists in Chicago and New York to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to intervene in the European conflict as a neutral intermediary. Addams hand-picked Breckinridge for a special committee assigned to consult with other pacifists within and beyond the U.S. on strategies to “make propositions to the belligerenets [sic] in the spirit of constructive internationalism.”

Throughout the war, Addams, Breckinridge, and other members of the Woman’s Peace Party pressured President Wilson to intervene in the war to produce a “negotiated peace.” Wilson had made initial overtures in this direction at the war’s outset, but his offer was rebuffed. Thereafter, Wilson adopted a pose of watchful waiting. Although he steadfastly maintained his intention to offer mediation when the time seemed propitious, that time never arrived. However, Wilson’s willingness to meet with pacifist delegations, his cordial relationship with Addams, and his assurances that he considered the women’s proposals at The Hague “by far the best formulation” for world peace, encouraged the pacifist women to continue their efforts.

A black and white photo of a large group of women in early 20th-century attire, many wearing hats and coats, gathered on the steps outside a brick building for a formal group portrait. — Addams and Breckinridge co-founded the Woman’s Peace Party, later to become the U.S. chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, in 1915. (Courtesy Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library)

Addams and Breckinridge continued their search for ways to prevent U.S. entry into the conflict, to end the war, and to prevent future wars. In the aftermath of the Lusitania episode, they urged President Wilson to steer clear of what they called “a preposterous ‘preparedness’ against hypothetical dangers” and instead to provide “the epochal service which this world crisis offers for the establishment of permanent peace”—that is, to offer his services to mediate the ongoing conflict. Subsequently, they appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee of Foreign Affairs to express their support for a House Joint Resolution proposal to establish a “Commission for Enduring Peace.”

A group of women in early 20th-century clothing stands on a wooden deck, holding a large banner reading PEACE. Some wear hats with plumes, and ship structures are visible in the background. — The U.S. delegation to the International Congress of Women in 1915 on board the Noordam. Jane Addams in center behind the banner, Breckinridge is on the far right. (Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

Despite their best efforts, American pacifists were unable either to halt the ongoing war or to prevent the United States’ entry into it. Once hostilities ceased, Breckinridge and Addams—now part of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—sought new routes to “enduring peace.” They achieved a partial victory in the establishment of the League of Nations, which incorporated many of the principles adopted at the International Congress of Women. Although the U.S. failed to join the new organization, Addams and Breckinridge persisted in promoting their vision of a peaceful postwar world. In 1923, they discussed submitting “our” set of principles for the American Peace Award. The plan that Breckinridge and Addams proposed called for the United States to join the World Court and the League of Nations. They also demanded that the U.S. military refrain from defending the interests of private businesses abroad, that the U.S. end both the production and the sale of armaments, and that the U.S. cooperate with other nations in a process of universal disarmament. Finally, they recommended “cancelling or reducing debts due to the United States” from the other Allied countries in return for an agreement to “divide the costs of commissions hitherto charged against Germany alone equally between Germany and the former allies” and offering “a long moratorium to Germany” to allow that nation “eventually to pay the balance on her reparations debt as estimated by an impartial commission of experts to be constituted for the purpose.” Addams’s and Breckinridge’s joint plan thus called for the United States to promote peace not only by agreeing to abide by arbitration in future disputes and participating in a process of universal disarmament, but also by removing the reasons for rising resentment in Germany that would soon allow Adolf Hitler to rise to power. Sadly, their plan was never implemented. Nonetheless, in the years after the Second World War, many of their ideas would be adopted by the United Nations.

Addams and Breckinridge were not always fully successful in their efforts to promote social justice, but they shared a passion for justice that allowed them to persist in the face of difficulties and setbacks. Their collaboration with one another and with fellow reformers also enabled them to meet challenges with strong resolve and good cheer. Together, Addams and Breckinridge were a powerful force for social justice.

Coda: Because Breckinridge’s own papers, while extensive, are comparatively scant for the Progressive Era, to conduct my research on these decades of her life, I relied heavily on the 82-reel microfilmed edition of the Jane Addams Papers and the accompanying “Pink Bible,” the 674-page guide to the microfilm collection, created with the guidance of Jane Addams Papers Project founder Mary Lynn Bryan. I am delighted that future researchers’ work will be facilitated by the next generation of the Jane Addams Paper Project, spearheaded by Cathy Moran Hajo, which will make the Jane Addams Papers accessible in a digital format.

Anya Jabour is Regents Professor of History at the University of Montana. Her books include Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children and Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South

Sources:

Abbott, Edith, and Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. “Women in Industry: The Chicago Stockyards,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 19, No. 8 (October 1911), 632-654.

Addams, Jane. “Woman’s Suffrage and the Progressive Party,” Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1912, pg. 9.

Addams, Jane, Balch, Emily G., and Hamilton, Alice. Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (New York: Macmillan Company, 1915).

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993).

Ballard, Russell. “The Years at Hull House,” Social Service Review, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1948), 432-433.

Brush, Mary Isabel. “Society Leaders Will Promote Suffrage Cause in Chicago’s Fashionable Circles: National Association to Open Branch,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 24, 1911, pg. 13.

Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, et al., eds., The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)

Buroker, Robert L. “From Voluntary Association to Welfare State: The Illinois Immigrants’ Protective League, 1908-1926,” Journal of American History, Vol. 58, No. 3 (December 1971), 643-660.

“Charity Honors for Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1912, pg. 13.

Commission for Enduring Peace: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Sixty-Fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 6921 and H.J. Res. 32, Statement of Miss Jane Addams and Others, January 11, 1916 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916),10-12.

“Conditions in Stockyards Described in the Neill-Reynolds Report,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1906, pg. 4

Costin, Lela B. “Feminism, Pacifism, Internationalism, and the 1915 International Congress of Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3-4 (1982), 300-315.

Gonzalez, Suronda. “Complicating Citizenship: Grace Abbott and the Immigrants’ Protective League, 1908-1921,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 56-75.

Hull House Collection, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Jane Addams Papers, 1860-1960 (microfilm edition).

Leonard, Henry B. “The Immigrants’ Protective League of Chicago, 1908-1921,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Autumn 1973), 271-284.

“Meet of Suffrage Chiefs: Chicago Women to Attend Executive Committee Session Today: Officers Will Be Chosen: Members Enthusiastic in Praise of the Progressive Party,” Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1912, pg. 5.

Patterson, David S. The Search for a Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Records of the Immigrants Protective League, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Papers (microfilm), Breckinridge Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Sorensen, John, ed., A Sister’s Memories: The Life and Work of Grace Abbott, From the Writings of Her Sister, Edith Abbott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

“Urge Home for Immigrants,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1911, p. 5.

Wade, Louise C. “The Heritage from Chicago’s Early Settlement Houses,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter 1967), 411-441.

“Warns Women of Illinois: Dr. Anna H. Shaw Advises Suffragists to Avoid Party Ties,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1912, p. 5.

“Will Ask Parties for Living Wage,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1912, pg. 7.

“Woman Puts O.K. on Neill Report,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1906, pg. 2.

September 12, 2019October 14, 2025

Data Visualizations and Jane Addams

Last spring I had the pleasure of working with two undergraduate students, Taylor Lundeen and Catie Olson, enrolled in the University of Michigan’s School of Information. They worked on a capstone project on data visualization, using our Jane Addams digital edition databases. Anneliese Dehner, our web developer, helped out with the some technical aspects of the collaboration.

One of the many great things about digital publication is that the information we create can be reused and repurposed in ways that we might not have thought of. Making our data available to researchers to explore has been one of our goals from the start of our work on Jane Addams, and with this investigation we have learned what we can do fairly easily, and what is more complex.

Accessing the Data

Our first step was to get a copy of our data exported out so that Taylor and Catie could work on it. What they found worked the best was an Omeka plugin (Omeka Rest API) that allowed them to export data in a format that worked well with data manipulation software.

Our ultimate goal is to have a utility on the digital edition that will enable users to download all or parts of the data for investigation.

One problem that reared its head immediately is that we have a very large dataset, and it is growing larger every day. This made it difficult, using the tools they had available to work with the whole set.

Natural Language Processing

One of the approaches, which Catie worked on, was seeing what we could learn from analyzing the “Text” field in our database, where transcriptions are stored. This kind of analysis can track the frequency of words, or compare word usage over time. Eventually it could be used for topic modeling, where a digital tool tries to make sense of words that appear together. These groupings can uncover connections that we sometimes don’t expect.

An important step in working with our texts was data cleaning, the process by which HTML and special characters were cleaned out and text was split word by word. Then Catie built bar charts that displayed the most common words. She built a separate chart for each year to allow us to compare years to see what Addams was thinking and writing about.

The most obvious finding to me, was that we needed to think about stop words — words that are excluded in the results because they are too common or have no analytical meaning. Articles, like “a” and “the” are common stop words– we also had to consider “page” which we use to signify the next page in our transcriptions, and, gulp, even “Hull House” because we transcribed the letterhead that Jane Addams used. Other words like “Mrs,” “Mr.” and “Miss” and salutations like “Dear” are candidates for being pulled from the analysis.

We also got to see the frequency of that nemesis of editors – “illegible.” This comes up far more frequently than I would like, but I was gratified to see that in the years where we have proofread the texts, the frequency is much lower.

It will surprise no one that “peace” and “war” shot to the top in 1915.

Bar chart titled “Most Common Words 1915” showing “peace” as the most frequent word, followed by “war,” “women,” “page,” and others. Bars indicate the number of appearances in text, ranging from 500 to 2500. — Frequency of words in 1915.

In 1905, the most frequent words deal more with the plight of children and represent Addams’ work on child labor and welfare in Chicago.

Bar chart titled Most Common Words 1905 showing Chicago and people as the most frequent words, followed by work, children, great, need, clear, and others, based on their number of appearances in text. — Frequency of words in 1905.

Catie also worked on another way to show the content of Addams’ writings, plotting the frequency of a word over time. Similar to the Google n-gram viewer that can compare the frequency of words in Google Books over time, this gives you a sense of the chronology. We did not have the capacity at this point to allow users to type the words they want, but were able to produce n-grams for some of the most popular words.

Seen together, it is a little frightening, but on the live version on the site, you can select a single word to analyze.

A colorful line graph titled Top Fifty Words shows the relative frequency of various words over time from 1890 to 1920. Each line represents a different word, with a legend on the right identifying the words. — The Top 50 Words, all in one place!

Line graph showing the relative frequency of the word peace from 1900 to 1920, with a sharp spike peaking around 1918, then a rapid decrease by 1920. The y-axis represents frequency; the x-axis represents years. — Tracking “peace” from 1901-1917.

The n-gram for “Illegible” shows the power of proofreading! When the data was downloaded for use, we had just finished proofreading 1915!

A line graph shows the relative frequency of the word illegible from 1900 to 1920, with a sharp increase around 1915 and a steep decline just before 1920. — An n-gram of words we could not read.

Social Network Analysis

Another approach was to see what we could learn from social network analysis. Using Omeka’s Item Relations plugin, we have been tracking relationships — mostly between documents and the people, organizations, and events that are mentioned in them. We also are building connections between people and organizations, tracking which people were members of which organizations, for example, or who participated in a specific event. We wondered whether the relationships between people and organizations might yield some interesting insights, or whether we could find other connections between people and the metadata gathered about them. Taylor was responsible for this project.

Our large dataset proved to be problematic for developing a meaningful social network based on shared connections. We think there is promise for this in future by controlling which people are included in the network, but the sheer number of people and the amount of common tags produced a daunting graph.

A colorful network graph with labeled nodes connected by lines, representing various professions and fields linked to Hull-House, with a legend listing categories like Journalism, Law, and Woman Suffrage on the right. — This plot includes only 270 Addams connections associated with Chicago. The full data on 8,000 names was too complex to load.

Instead, Taylor created a geographical visualization of Addams’s social networks related to several topics. We used our tags for movements like “Woman Suffrage,” “Child Labor,” and “Peace” and plotted their geographic locations. Compare Addams’ Settlement Movement network and her Peace network below to see the expansion of her work internationally.

On the live version of these maps, you can zoom in and out and mouse over each dot to reveal the name of the activist.

Going Forward

It was amazing to see what two talented students could do in such a short period of time! The experience has helped us think more about how we want to make our data accessible, and has uncovered challenges that we need to think about. Our database is large and complex and developing means to limit the queries is going to be important.

We are looking forward to working with other UMSI students and any digital humanists interested in advancing this work.

July 1, 2019September 29, 2025

Jane Addams, Mary Rozet Smith, and the Disappointments of One-Sided Correspondence

Two women with light skin, wearing high-collared dark dresses, sit closely side by side in soft light. One woman has curly hair; the other wears glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. Both gaze thoughtfully to the left.

Mary Rozet Smith was well-loved by a long list of extraordinary, historically important women who came through the doors of Hull-House in Chicago. From 1889, when she first visited the settlement and met its young, then unknown founder Jane Addams, until 1934, when she died suddenly of pneumonia at the age of sixty-five, Smith was an unwavering supporter of Hull-House, its residents, and its activities. She became, along with her wealthy and generous family, one of Hull-House’s most important donors. She was also for nearly forty years the dearest friend and most intimate companion of the incomparable Jane Addams. Yet Mary Rozet Smith remains something of a mystery.

Black and white portrait of a young woman with curly hair, wearing a high-necked Victorian dress with puffed sleeves and lace details, looking slightly to her right. — Mary Rozet Smith, c. 1880s (image: Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Smith College)

Despite her importance to the story of Hull-House and to the personal life of Jane Addams, Mary Smith is an elusive wisp of a historical figure. She was, apparently, content in the shadows, wanting nothing more, or so it seems, than to be generous, to be a devoted daughter, to be a cherished friend, and to be a special confidant of Jane Addams. Mary Smith’s proximity to the most famous social experiment in American history could have made her a valuable witness and informant of that history. Instead, she left historians very few clues about her life, and the loss of her letters to Jane Addams deprive us not only of her voice in that relationship but also of her own importance as a Chicago philanthropist. As Jane Addams’ nephew James Linn wrote in his biography of his beloved aunt: “the interests of [Hull-House] remained the center of her own interests, and the friendship of Mary Smith soon became and always remained the highest and clearest note in the music of Jane Addams’s personal life.”

Just after Mary Smith died, long-time Hull-House resident Dr. Alice Hamilton wrote her sister from Chicago: “I can’t look at my grief over Mary because I should lose my grip. When I came out here I told Mary that she must get well, that she could live on without J. A., but J. A. could not live without her.” Jane Addams had suffered a second heart attack and died just thirteen months after Smith, so the statement was, perhaps, prophetic. But more importantly, what resonates in Hamilton’s words and in Linn’s words, too, is the centrality of Mary Rozet Smith to the Hull-House universe. She was embedded in the heartbeat of the institution and its women, and to one woman in particular, Jane Addams, she offered quiet domestic solace to balance the chaos of public life. However, we cannot truly know who Mary Rozet Smith was, because there is so little evidence of her activities found in newspapers, pubic documents, and organizational records; and, most unfortunately, very few of her own words survive her.

As I work on the annotation for Vol. 4 of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams, covering the years 1901-1913, and as I research and write the more than 100 footnotes about Mary Rozet Smith that will appear in the volume, I am missing her voice. When I read any of the seventy-three letters Jane Addams wrote to her during that period, I mourn the loss of her letters to Addams. Not a single letter of hers to Addams survives from those years, and I sometimes curse Jane Addams for destroying correspondence which would, I suspect, provide rich context not only for their relationship but also for Smith’s engagement as a sister of Hull-House. I am editing Addams’ papers and not Smith’s, I know, but I also know we are impoverished in our ability to fully contextualize Addams’ letters without Smith’s corresponding letters. One-sided correspondence is always a disappointment to the historian, who is left by the absent voice of one of the correspondents to answer the historical questions they raise and to ponder the important historical contexts they inspire with half of the pieces of the puzzle missing.

We have selected thirty of Addams’ letters to Smith for Vol. 4, and on their own they are rich, filled with the details of Addams’ reform activities, her writing habits, her ideas, her public speaking, and her daily life. They are also filled with details of the travels of Addams and Smith, of their health, of their shared concern for each other’s families, of their shared network of friends, and of their frequent separations from each other, due to Smith’s illnesses and Addams’ extensive lecturing and involvement in national and international organizations. However, without Smith’s letters, we are left wanting more to fill in the details, gaps, and silences that are an unfortunate characteristic of one-sided correspondence.

When Addams wrote to her “Dearest,” her “Darling,” sometimes her feelings of love and longing for Smith are clear. In a 1902 letter she wrote: “You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time—and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folk keeping together. Forever yrs.” In a 1904 letter, she opined: “Your letters are the most cheerful things that I have and you must know that I am mightily empty hearted without you.” And in a 1909 letter she offered three little words that she offered to no other correspondent: “I love you.”

Jane Addams’ letters to other women among her close circle of friends and Hull-House residents, such as Lillian Wald and Julia Lathrop, were filled with affection. Addams wrote with the intimate language that was the natural and ordinary way of letters between women during this period in American history, when half of all college-educated women did not marry and the kinship of female friends was loving and strong. In a precious few letters, the reader cannot help but to see Addams’ particular tenderness for Smith. However, in most of her letters, Addams’ language is more muted, her tone more guarded, and the content merely practical and informative, many the hasty missives of a busy woman. In those less intimate letters, Addams almost always addressed Smith as “Dearest,” a moniker of affection she reserved for her alone, and she closed all letters with very tender words, but these letters offer far fewer clues about the relationship between the two women and the various contexts of their lives together.

I wonder if the language Smith employed in her letters to Addams mirrored the language Addams used. Was there a tonal difference in her letters to Addams than what she employed in letters she wrote to their mutual friends? What words did she use to express her feelings for Addams? What terms of endearment did she choose to begin her letters to Addams, and did she often write “I love you.”? When Addams shared with Smith her doubts and fears about a book manuscript or an important speech, did Smith respond with a pep talk, a gentle critique, or some soothing, emotional refrain? Did Smith share her own doubts and fears with Addams in her letters, and did she share her hopes and dreams and opinions on the reform topics that occupied the minds of Jane Addams and other Hull-House residents? Did she provide details of her asthma attacks and nervous anxiety and other philanthropies, as well and her travels, and did she offer gossip or news that might explain a vague reference we cannot define and may never define without her letters? What was the character of the letters Smith sent that Addams reported as “a great comfort,” and what were the words Smith offered to soothe that others could not?

Maybe Jane Addams destroyed Smith’s letters because they were too intimate or too emotionally embarrassing. Or maybe she destroyed them because she was a private person, despite her celebrity, and she wished to keep her special relationship with Smith from the prying eyes of the modern world that was pressing in on Hull-House in the early 1930s. I don’t really care what her reason was, but I am quite mad at her for doing it. I can’t help it, but it makes me sad to know so little about the woman to whom Jane Addams spent so much of her personal life.

I do not bemoan the loss of Smith’s letters to Addams simply because I think they would for certain answer the big question about their relationship. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, and then again if they did we would still have to be very careful about projecting our modern notions of female sexuality onto women of the past. As an editor, who contextualizes historical documents as windows to the past, it is not for me to interpret the nature of the relationship that existed between Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith. Whether they were the dearest of platonic friends or enjoyed a sexual relationship is not for me to decide. No matter, besides, because in the historical record of their relationship, there are far more questions than answers. That fact is, after all, the frustrating reality of one-sided correspondence.

I am missing Smith’s voice and her words for what they might have brought to the big Jane-Addams-Hull-House party. If we had Smith’s letters to Jane Addams, I would use Smith’s words to answer Addams’ words, to balance Addams’ particularly romantic phrases, to provide our readers with the dialogue between two women who were emotionally close to each other for four decades. But I would also use them to better understand Smith’s role in the Hull-House community, to glean some clues about who she was as a person, what she believed in, what intrigued her, and what made her smile. I would employ them to understand for myself why she was so dear to all of the extraordinary women who knew and loved her.

From Hull-House financial records, we know the scope of Smith’s contributions to the settlement and its activities. From the correspondence and personal accounts of her friends, we know something of her kindness, deportment, gentle nature, and the various physical and emotional illnesses from which she suffered. And from the extant letters Jane Addams wrote to her, we can understand a little bit about her emotional importance to the woman who is the subject of our documentary edition. Ah, but alas, there is so much of whom Mary Rozet Smith was which is lost to us because her letters to Jane Addams are lost to us. Mary Rozet Smith may well have been the “highest and clearest note in the music of Jane Addams’s personal life,” but why she was and who she was as a person will likely remain elusive. She is a woman whom historians have defined entirely by her relationship to Hull-House, and that is all well and good, I suppose, because Hull-House needed her thrive.

But darnit, I wish Jane Addams would have allowed us the chance to know her dear friend better. I wish we had Mary’s words to tell us a little bit more about Jane, and to tell us a little bit about herself, as well. I wish I had thirty or ten or even two of Smith’s letters to Addams to enhance the thirty letters to her we have chosen to annotate. They would not likely answer all of the questions I have, nor would they likely fill in all of the gaps and silences in Addams’ letters; but I suspect they would fill in a whole lot of missing details and offer a nuance or two. I know they would enlighten, enrich, and contextualize, because back-and-forth correspondence usually does. And I bet they may even offer some evidence of those highest and clearest notes in the music.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Allen F. David, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 85-91; Gioia Diliberto, A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams (New York: Scribner, 1999), 182-87; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 23-24; Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 217-18; James Weber Linn, Jane Addams: A Biography (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935, 147; Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 817-19; Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 346-47; Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation and Friendship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 158-66; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, May 26, 1902; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, August 13, 1904; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, October 5, 1904; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, February 12, 1909, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

May 15, 2019September 29, 2025

Cassandra and Bread Givers – The College Speeches of Jane Addams

Black and white portrait of a woman with curly hair pulled back, wearing a high-collared blouse with lace trim, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression.

by Patricia M. Shields, PhD, Texas State University

Jane Addams attended Rockford Female Seminary and was among the first class to receive a Bachelors degree. At Rockford she honed skills that would later be used in her career as the founder of Hull House, leader of the Suffrage, Settlement and Peace movements and her literary career as author of 11 books and hundreds of journal and magazine articles. At Rockford she was the Valedictorian, Editor of the school newspaper, President of the Debate Club and President of her class.

Her addresses at Rockford show that even at ages 20 and 21, Addams saw a new, exciting and complicated future for the women in her class. In her Junior Class Oration (1880), entitled “Bread Givers” she catalogued “the change which has taken place … in the ambition and aspirations of woman.” As women developed their intellect and direct labor something new had emerged. “She wishes not to be a man, nor like a man, but she claims the same right to independent thought and action … [She] has gained a new confidence in her possibilities, and fresher hope in her progress.” At age 20, Addams recognized that women of her generation were poised to cross boundaries. Yet they were not interested in a complete break with the past, woman’s traditional role and experiences had great value. “As young women of the 19th century, we assert our independence … we still retain the old ideal of womanhood – the Saxon lady whose mission it was to give bread onto her household” (Addams, 1880). Over her entire life, Addams acted in accordance with these insights. She, indeed, developed her intellect and claims of “independent thought and action”. She also understood the Bread Giver’s role as she brought an ethic of care to her work at Hull House and organized efforts to feed the starving children of post WWI Europe (Addams, 1922).

In her Valedictory speech (1881), Addams had a cautionary and hopeful message. Here she drew on Greek mythology and the tragic story of Cassandra a princess who was cursed to share true prophesies that no one would believe. As educated women entered the broader world, their gift of intuition and sense of morality could be dismissed as Cassandra’s prophesies. Women should guard against this and bring “force to bear throughout morals and justice, then she must take the active, busy world as a test for the genuineness of her intuition.” Addams believed that educated women had the ability to help establish “actual justice” in the world through their “trained intelligence” and with their “broadened sympathies toward the individual man and woman… Only an intuitive mind has a grasp comprehensive enough to embrace the opposing facts and forces,” and meet future challenges. If women like she and her fellow classmates are able to balance their intelligence and intuition “the story of Cassandra will be forgotten”. Addams certainly foresaw the difficult struggle she and her future sisters would have to be taken seriously as full participants in the modern world.

—————————-
Addams, Jane. (1880). “Bread Givers” (Junior Class Oration). Dailey Register (Rockford April).

Addams, Jane (1881). Cassandra (Valedictory Speech). Rockford Seminary Magazine (July).

Addams, Jane (1922). Peace and Bread in Time of War. New York: Macmillan.

Patricia Shields is the author of the 2017 book, Jane Addams: Progressive Pioneer of Peace Philosophy, Sociology, Social Work and Public Administration published by Springer.

March 11, 2019September 29, 2025

Dangerous Jane author Suzanne Slade Talks Inspiration for Children’s Book

Book cover illustration for Dangerous Jane shows a woman with brown hair in a bun, wearing a blue and green shawl. In the background, there are war-torn buildings and people in distress. Title and author names are displayed.

Suzanne Slade is no stranger to Jane Addams, who is commonly referred to as “the mother of social work.” Addams was a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, public administrator, protestor, author, and leader in women’s suffrage and world peace. Continue reading “Dangerous Jane author Suzanne Slade Talks Inspiration for Children’s Book”

February 24, 2019September 29, 2025

Fame, Love, and Murder: The Story of Actress Mary Miles Minter

Black and white portrait of a young woman with wavy, light-colored hair, gazing slightly to the side. Soft lighting highlights her delicate features and creates a vintage, classic atmosphere.

by Sara Catherine Lichon.

A young woman with wavy, light-colored hair gazes softly into the distance. She is wearing a light, sheer blouse and resting her folded hands on a surface, illuminated by soft, gentle light. — Mary Miles Minter, silent film star and suspect in her lover’s 1922 murder.

Sometimes the stories and scandals of celebrities come up when researching for the JAPP. Oftentimes, the famous are only mentioned briefly in one of Addams’ letters, and their scandals become known when we research their lives to write their biographies. Continue reading “Fame, Love, and Murder: The Story of Actress Mary Miles Minter”

February 17, 2019October 14, 2025

Jane Addams’ “Helping Hands”

A circular garden features five large, rough stone sculptures arranged on a dirt area, with an informational plaque on a stand in front. The garden is bordered by brick pathways and lush greenery.

Chicago, Il. is home to “Helping Hands,” the city’s first monument devoted to Jane Addams and those whom she helped. Addams fought for equality and is best known as the founder of Hull-House and the mother of the social work movement. She was also a passionate advocate for the rights of immigrants, the poor, and women, and a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. It’s safe to say that Jane Addams deserves recognition for her humanitarian and legendary work. Continue reading “Jane Addams’ “Helping Hands””

February 10, 2019October 14, 2025

Women and the Nobel Peace Prize

A sepia-toned portrait of an older woman with light-colored hair pulled back, wearing a high-collared blouse and a dark vest, looking slightly to the side with a calm, serious expression.

Jane Addams was the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in the peace movement and social work, but who were the other women who have won the prize? Learn a little bit about each of the 16 total women winners and when they won their prizes. Continue reading “Women and the Nobel Peace Prize”

February 6, 2019October 14, 2025

Democracy for Women and Democracy for Peace: A War on Two Fronts

A decorative black and beige quote card features the text: The War for Peace must mean... a successful, victorious war, long-drawn out if necessary... and continues about peace, democracy, and American ideals. -Bristow Adams.

One of the most interesting things about transcribing for the Jane Addams’ Papers Project is reading about people’s ideas or dreams of the future. The feeling is analogous to reading a book where you already know the ending. Continue reading “Democracy for Women and Democracy for Peace: A War on Two Fronts”

January 30, 2019October 14, 2025

Celebrity Bachelor at Hull-House

Vintage illustration titled “Matrimonial Chances for Chicago Girls” shows women fishing for men in a pool, surrounded by text and smaller groups of men and women, depicting the marriage market metaphorically.

In April 1907, Hull-House was likely abuzz when its very own Mr. Le Moyne was named one of Chicago’s most eligible bachelors. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 45-year-old Louis V. Le Moyne—a “good” landscape gardener “fond of the esthetic”—was quite a catch with his $10,000 annual salary. Continue reading “Celebrity Bachelor at Hull-House”

December 13, 2018September 29, 2025

Modern Marriage of the Twentieth Century: A Companionate Union

A black-and-white photo of a young woman resting her face on her hand, sitting beside a young man in a suit and bow tie who is looking at her. Both appear thoughtful and serious.

On November 22, 1927, the grand-niece of Jane Addams was married at her home in Girard, Kansas. Josephine Haldeman-Julius, the daughter of Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, was joined in a “companionate” union to Aubrey Clay Roselle. Continue reading “Modern Marriage of the Twentieth Century: A Companionate Union”

October 24, 2018October 14, 2025

The 1915 Trojan Women Tour

A grayscale vintage photo of a woman standing between two large structures, holding out her long, flowing dress with arms extended, creating a dramatic, wing-like effect.

1915 was a momentous year for women’s efforts for peace and suffrage. Jane Addams and others established the Women’s Peace Party (WPP), met at the International Congress for Women, formed the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), (known today as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]), and held a massive Suffrage parade in New York City, N.Y. While they worked together for one ultimate goal — equality — they used a variety of methods, one of which was revisiting Ancient Greece.

Continue reading “The 1915 Trojan Women Tour”

October 18, 2018October 14, 2025

Guest Post: “From Hull-House to Herland”

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with dark hair parted in the middle, wearing a dress with a lace collar, looking over her shoulder toward the camera.

I had the pleasure of asking Lorraine Krall McCrary about her new article “From Hull-House to Herland: Engaged and Extended Care in Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” (Politics & Gender, August 2018, 1-21). She examines the writings and activities of Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gliman and how the two activists’ opinions on the roles women have in politics, society, and family differed. Continue reading “Guest Post: “From Hull-House to Herland””

October 10, 2018September 29, 2025

Progressin’: My Experience Working for the Jane Addams Papers Project

A woman in a Victorian-era dress with puffed sleeves sits on an ornate wooden chair carved with dragons, looking to her left with a composed expression. The photo is in black and white.

by Paige Drews, Susquehanna University

What is the one word every college student is guaranteed to hear during their summer break? Internship. Everyone wants to know the details: what does your day look like? Do you like your boss? Did you get anyone their coffee or copy papers? No two experiences are the same, but if they’re lucky, that student learns new skills and tools, gains valuable insight from colleagues and even has a little fun. Through my internship with the Jane Addams Papers project at Ramapo College, I can proudly say that I was fortunate enough to accomplish all of these things and more. Here is a first-hand look inside my internship at Ramapo. Continue reading “Progressin’: My Experience Working for the Jane Addams Papers Project”

October 4, 2018October 14, 2025

Jane Addams, Alice Austen, and Virginia Woolf

Two women in old-fashioned dark clothing pose side by side in a sepia-toned, vintage photograph. One woman wears eyeglasses on a chain, and both gaze slightly to the left with neutral expressions.

This blog is a short exploration into the realm of female love and partnership within the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Jane Addams and Alice Austen, two women of notable character during this era, provided the main case studies for this research. Continue reading “Jane Addams, Alice Austen, and Virginia Woolf”

September 26, 2018September 29, 2025

Teaching with Jane Addams

A group of young boys with dirty faces and worn clothing stand close together, looking at the camera. They appear to be child laborers from an earlier era, possibly the early 20th century.

By Renee DeLora

Over the last year, the Jane Addams Papers Project has been working on expanding audience participation by creating National History Day guides and lesson plans. This effort was funded by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. I worked with Christina Dwyer and Mike Romano, Ramapo College teacher education students who work at the Jane Addams Papers. We were eager to apply what we learned in our courses and at the project for use in our classrooms. Continue reading “Teaching with Jane Addams”

September 12, 2018September 29, 2025

Give Peace a Chance: Some Ideas Sent to Jane Addams

A group of women, some holding flowers, stand on a ship’s deck holding a large banner that reads “PEACE.” The photo is labeled Peace Delegates on Noordam and features handwritten names and notes.

If you were given three wishes, what would they be? One of the most common answers is world peace. It’s only natural that people want peace, especially with the barrage of headlines screaming about war and conflict. Continue reading “Give Peace a Chance: Some Ideas Sent to Jane Addams”

August 29, 2018September 29, 2025

“Trolls” Have Been Around For Years

People blame the Internet for what seems like the spread of anger, meanness and bad manners. While the internet makes it easier to reach more people with much more speed, the things that people share is not so terribly different. Internet trolls, hecklers, and flame warriors seem to be modern phenomena, but it is the method, not the content that is modern. Continue reading ““Trolls” Have Been Around For Years”

August 22, 2018September 29, 2025

Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, and Racial Injustice in America

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with short, graying hair, wearing a pearl necklace and a dark garment, looking slightly to the side with a calm expression.

Jane Addams made the acquaintance of renown African-American journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells sometime in the 1890s, but in the summer of 1899 these two extraordinary women joined forces. In Chicago, each was engaged in different but overlapping endeavors to make the world a better place, but thinking about the two of them working together reinforces my fascination with the past. Continue reading “Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, and Racial Injustice in America”

August 16, 2018October 14, 2025

Guest Post by Taylor Mills on The New Women of Chicago’s World’s Fairs (1893-1934)

A black-and-white photo of a large domed building by a reflective pool, with a statue holding a staff and a figure raised in one hand in the foreground, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893.

I was fortunate enough to get in contact with Taylor Mills, current curator at the Chisholm Trail Museum and recent graduate of the University of Central Oklahoma, who wrote her MA thesis on the women of the Chicago’s World’s Fairs from 1893-1934. She spoke of her interest in the topic, what her research focuses on, and her thesis process. Continue reading “Guest Post by Taylor Mills on The New Women of Chicago’s World’s Fairs (1893-1934)”

August 8, 2018September 29, 2025

Jane Addams Papers Receives Federal Funding

I am delighted to announce that the Jane Addams Papers has received two federal grants, one from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are extremely grateful for this support! Continue reading “Jane Addams Papers Receives Federal Funding”

July 18, 2018September 29, 2025

The Tragic Case of Baby Bollinger

Black and white newspaper clipping with headline: Hes Going to Let Her Baby Die; This Woman Says Its for Best. Features portraits of Dr. H.F. Haiselden and Mrs. Anna Bollinger facing each other.

A woman lies in a hospital bed while a man in a suit sits beside her, holding her hand. The caption identifies them as key figures in a controversial case involving the death of an infant in Chicago. — Photo of Anna Bollinger and Henry Haiselden, Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1917.

A little over 100 years ago, the case of an infant allowed to die in a Chicago hospital captured the nation’s attention. Born on November 12, 1915, “Baby Bollinger” died five days later on November 17, after physician Harry Haiselden refused to operate to save his life. Haiselden made his decision because the child was born with deformities and he believed the the boy was was mentally and morally defective. He convinced the child’s mother, who said “the doctor told me it would be, perhaps, an imbecile, a criminal. Left to itself it has no chance to live. I consented to let nature take its course.” (Boston Globe, Nov. 17, 1915, p. 1.) Haiselden’s controversial decision led to a heated debate in newspapers across the country. Continue reading “The Tragic Case of Baby Bollinger”

June 16, 2018September 29, 2025

Addams’ Living Legacy in Color

Four hands of different skin tones and nail colors grasp each others wrists, forming a connected square shape. The background is plain and light-colored, emphasizing unity and diversity. — Giusti’s “Civilization,” made of india ink and gouache on paper, is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The inspirational legacy and work Jane Addams left behind is no secret; from Hull House to social reform to woman’s suffrage, Addams’ was a revolutionary thinker for her time and a true inspiration for so many people, including artist George Giusti (1908-1990) who was inspired to take Addams’ vision of equality and bring it to life in one of his best regarded pieces of art.

Jane Addams was an advocate for social justice including inclusivity regardless of skin color. Addams’ wanted to give every person and equal opportunity shown through her lifelong effort to fight for social reform and offer all an equal opportunity for a better life in Hull House. After her passing, her work was still unfinished but she gave hope and opened the door for true equality for all.

Flash forward 20 years after Addams’ death, Italian-born artist, George Giusti, created his Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.”–Jane Addams, Speech, Honolulu, 1933. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man in 1955. Giusti wanted to avoid classical art and focus on a more modern and relevant effect, which shows through many of his pieces. Giusti’s works did not relate to the time period he created them in, giving them a futuristic effect that modern society still relates to.

So why did Giusti pick Addams’ quote for the title? Well, Addams was a known advocate for equality regardless of race. The drawing that Giusti created illustrates a sense of community, unity and equality, all goals to which Addams had dedicated her life. Her goals were not realized in her lifetime and by the 1950s were still plaguing American society. Racial tension in American society divided the nation, and Giusti was inspired to visualize Addams’ quote as a call for equality.

Despite years of advocating and pushing for change, social reform is still an issue in today’s society. Giusti’s drawing received numerous awards and recognition, while Addams’ work has lead her to be one of the most historical and influential figures of the 20th century. Her unfinished business still inspires thousands to this day, with no sign of slowing down.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.”–Jane Addams, Speech, Honolulu, 1933. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. (Smithsonian American Art Museum.)

“George Giusti,” ADC Hall of Fame, 1979.

May 24, 2018September 29, 2025

Facing Death Twice: Lawyer Francis J. Heney

This is the last in Sara Catherine Lichon’s series of blog posts about interesting characters that she came across while working as a co-operative education student for the Project this semester. Her work involves identifying and describing the over 5,000 unique individuals mentioned in Addams’ correspondence.

Black-and-white portrait of an older man wearing glasses, a pinstriped suit, white shirt, patterned tie, and a pocket square, posing and smiling slightly with a neutral background. — Francis J. Heney, a lawyer and politician whose life was threatened twice during his career.

Life in law can often be exciting, especially when cases take a dramatic turn. For Francis Joseph Heney, a lawyer and politician from California, drama and excitement was part of the job — and sometimes his job even became a matter of life and death. Heney was known for many cases throughout his career, but he was most famous for killing an opposing plaintiff and for being shot in the head by a juror.

As a member of the National Committee of the Progressive Party, Heney’s name appeared numerous times in letters to and from Jane Addams that discussed the National Committee. Heney was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1912 and ran for U.S. Senator from California as a Progressive in 1914. Outside of politics, he was a lawyer in both Arizona and California, and owned a cattle business in Arizona with his brother. From 1893 to 1895 he was Attorney General of the Arizona Territory, and he also served as the U.S. District Attorney for the District of Oregon. Heney was a well-known lawyer, having worked as a prosecutor on famous cases such as the Oregon Land Fraud scandal, where U.S. government land grants were being obtained illegally by public officials, and the San Francisco gaft trials, where members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors were prosecuted for corruption.

Oval portrait of a bearded man in formal attire on the left, and on the right, a woman in a white dress with a veil kneeling at an ornate altar, viewed from the side. — Dr. John C. Handy and Mary Ann Page Handy

In 1889, Heney defended Mary Ann Page Handy, the abused wife of Dr. John Christopher Handy, in a divorce case. Handy was known for being violent and aggressive, having abused his wife throughout their marriage, threatening to kill her when she wanted to file for divorce, and causing her to become addicted to morphine. In July 1889, Handy filed for divorce himself and sent their children to live with his mother. Handy threatened to kill anyone who dared to defend Mary, scaring away most attorneys. Originally, C. W. Wright was to defend Mary, and he asked Heney to assist him. After Heney agreed, Wright withdrew from the case, and Heney decided to do the same. After some reconsideration, though, Heney decided to defend Mary, despite the anger of Handy.

Throughout the case, Handy threatened Heney numerous times, even trying to run him over with his buggy. Ultimately, Handy won the case and received custody of the children, which Heney was quick to appeal, and a new case soon started – and the threats continued. On September 24, 1891, Handy attacked Heney outside his office, grabbing his neck and pinning him to a wall. It’s here where there are different accounts of what happened next; some newspapers say Heney broke free, ran, and drew a revolver, which Handy tried to grab. During the struggle, Heney shot Handy in the abdomen. Other papers say Heney shot Handy while running from him. After the encounter, Handy was taken to Dr. George Goodfellow for an operation but died during the procedure. Heney surrendered to the police but was bailed out by three of his friends. In a hearing two days later, the court ruled Heney acted in self-defense and he wasn’t charged.

A black-and-white newspaper page with a headline about Roosevelt praising Heney, articles on citizens sympathy, and a photo of a man and woman standing together. Text and advertisements fill the page. — The San Francisco Call, Nov. 15, 1908

This was not the end of Heney’s exciting cases. During the San Francisco graft prosecution, Heney pointed out that one juror, Morris Haas, was ineligible to be a juror because he was an ex-convict. Heney also believed that Haas was planted by political boss Abe Ruef, who was being prosecuted by Heney at that time. Angered and resentful, Haas came into the courtroom a few weeks later while the trial was in recess and shot Heney in the head. Haas was then arrested, but found dead in his cell shortly after, leading some to believe he had been killed by one of Ruef’s gangsters. Others thought he committed suicide. Heney was expected to die, but he survived the attack. The newspapers of the time reveal how loved Heney was by the public; The San Francisco Call had an entire page dedicated to the story, describing how three thousand people gathered at Oakland’s town hall in support of Heney and how President Theodore Roosevelt sent Heney’s wife a telegram of sympathy.

Heney continued to be involved in law and politics after these incidents, and lived a fulfilling life. In 1906, he married Rebecca Wentworth McMullin. She died in 1911. Heney married to Edna I. Van Winckle in 1915, who managed his U.S. Senate campaign. Heney died in 1937.

Heney’s work with the Progressive Party and in law have gone down in history, especially the stories of his near-death encounters. And he is yet another fascinating person who has appeared in Jane Addams’ papers!

Sources:

Dexter Marshall. “Thrilling Chapters in Lives of Public Men.” The Washington Herald. April 19, 1908, p. 36.

“Hand to Hand.” Tombstone Epitaph. September 27, 1891.

C. Martin. “Territorial Divorce – as Turbulent as the Times.” Arizona Daily Star. November 12, 1972, p. 57.

Oliver Tatom, “Francis J. Heney (1859-1937),” The Oregon Encyclopedia.

“Roosevelt Wires Tribute to Heney: Messages of Sorrow from Friends Abroad: Leading Citizens of Country Praise Prosecutor.” The San Francisco Call. November 15, 1908, p. 23.

“When Francis J. Heney Shot His Man, Too.” The Des Moines Register. December 6, 1908, p. 10.

“Francis J. Heney,” Wikipedia.

May 16, 2018October 14, 2025

Guest Post: Addams’ Rhetoric on Home, City, and World

A black-and-white photo of an old weaving workshop with large looms, spinning wheels, and a person seated in the center, surrounded by tools and weaving equipment, with large windows letting in natural light.

Dr. Liane Malinowski is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Marist College. Her research explores Hull House residents’ rhetoric as it relates to their planning of domestic and urban spaces. This post derives from her recently-completed dissertation titled Civic Domesticity: Rhetoric, Women, and Space at Hull House, 1889-1910. Find her on Twitter @lianemalinowski.

My recent research on Addams and her Hull House colleagues focuses on how they reimagined urban space through visual, verbal, and material means. I was particularly interested in how women at Hull House claimed the authority to speak and write about urban space to local and national audiences, especially in the late-nineteenth century when women were not conferred the status of citizen, and rhetorical convention discouraged women from speaking in public.

I was motivated to take up this project in part because I think of Addams as an important but understudied speaker, writer, and theorist of concepts important to rhetorical studies, such as democracy, ethics, and memory. After surveying published and archival sources, I found that Addams and colleagues were prolific producers of experimental and hybrid texts that drew from parlor rhetoric traditions, domestic literature, social science genres, and city planning discourses. The Jane Addams Papers Project was a wonderful resource for studying documents related to Addams, Hull House, other residents, and the interconnected web of social welfare organizations in Chicago and beyond.

Regarding Hull House residents’ rhetorics of urban space, I argue Addams, along with Ellen Gates Starr, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley and others represented city spaces at a variety of scales as cosmopolitan, or nationally-diverse. These spaces included their West Side neighborhood and Hull House itself. An obvious example of this kind of representation is Florence Kelley’s “Nationalities Map,” in the collaboratively-written Hull House Maps and Papers, in which she visually locates families of varying national backgrounds in Hull House’s neighborhood.

Not only did residents represent urban space as cosmopolitan in documents, they also curated cosmopolitan spaces for rhetorical purposes. For example, upon founding Hull House, Addams and Starr curated it to reflect a cosmopolitan aesthetic through its artwork and artisan-made furniture and wares. They were motivated to do this in order to establish common ground with their immigrant neighbors with whom they believed they shared an interest in European art, music, and literature.[1]

Black-and-white photo of three women working in a textile workshop with large weaving looms, spinning wheels, and quilts hanging on the walls. The room has large windows and rustic wooden beams. — Hull House Labor Museum

Residents who represented spaces as cosmopolitan, however, did so with troubling political implications because they often spoke about and for their immigrant neighbors, and in so doing, flattened the specificity of their neighbors’ national identity in favor of emphasizing diversity. As part of this problematic history of claiming authority over cosmopolitan geographies, residents often extended their representations of urban space to include nationally-diverse people as objects of display. For example, in the early 20^th century, Hull House residents curated a Labor Museum that displayed local immigrants performing artisan labor such as spinning textiles and weaving baskets. Residents also disseminated texts about the museum, such as the First Report of the Labor Museum in 1902. In this report, Addams argued that the Labor Museum presented an evolutionary narrative of work to audiences, and showed manual, pre-industrial labor as preceding industrial labor. She hoped younger people in the neighborhood would learn to appreciate their parents’ and grandparents’ artisan skills that were rendered obsolete by the industrial economy in Chicago. At the same time the museum performed this teaching function, I argue it also objectified immigrant artisans and their cultural artifacts by reinscribing older, neighborhood artisans as outside the contemporary moment by placing them and their labor prior to present industrial conditions. And, while Addams constructed herself as an authority over the entire museum and its message in the First Report of the Labor Museum, neighborhood women were figured as objects of display through photographs, captioned to suggest they are representatives of different kinds of foreign womanhood (the captions read “Italian Woman,” “Syrian Woman,” and “Irish Woman,” for example). Through the museum itself, and also texts such as the First Report, Addams and other residents participated in a trend of American women asserting their privilege to claim knowledge over foreign places and people as a way to join in public discourse about civic space and identity.[2]

After researching Hull House residents’ representations of cosmopolitan spaces in the 1890s and 1900s, I appreciate there is still much to explore about Addams’ rhetoric, especially surrounding her theorizing of how culture and class identities play a role in enabling and constraining communication. Based on my research experiences, I would encourage others undertaking study of Addams’ rhetoric to look across the JAPP Microfilm Edition, the JAPP Digital Edition, and traditional archives dedicated to Addams and Hull House in libraries. Each of these resources is organized in different ways, which can help researchers make new connections between documents. For example, some of the traditional, library archives file documents organized by author name, whereas the JAPP Microfilm Edition is largely filed by the kind of text produced at Hull House (letters, meeting minutes, financial records, etc), and the JAPP Digital Edition gets even more specific because it tags documents by key terms. Triangulating my search for documents across these resources was incredibly generative for my reading of Addams’ rhetoric.

[1] To gain a sense of Hull House’s cosmopolitan aesthetic, see Nora Marks’s “Two Women’s Work: The Misses Addams and Starr Astonish the West Siders,” Chicago Tribune. 19 May 1890, or the photographs included in Hull House Maps and Papers.1895. Urbana: UI Press, 2007.

[2] Kristin Hoganson’s Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007, helped me understand the broader contours of American women’s claims to cosmopolitan geographies.

May 9, 2018October 14, 2025

“Peace, War and World Order”- Dr. James Marquardt’s Web-based Timeline

The influence Jane Addams had on society is no secret; we still talk about her beliefs, achievements and historical footprint today. Jane Addams has done so much in her life that Dr. James Marquardt, Associate Professor of Politics and the Chair of International Relations Program at Lake Forest College, and his students have created an online timeline of her achievements. The timeline is called Jane Addams- Peace, War and World Order: A Web-based timeline.

The abstract of the timeline acknowledges her strides to improve the lives and living conditions for immigrants and the poor, but this timeline focuses more on her “peace advocacy,” during World War I. After looking over numerous primary and secondary sources Dr. Marquardt and his students have completed their timeline, successfully illustrating Jane Addams’ pacifist beliefs and opposition to international armament and war.

“I started digging into her primary writings on the war,” said Dr. Marquardt, “and I decided that I wanted to do this a little more elaborately so I offered a course called Jane Addams Peace Advocate. It mostly focused on her international peace advocacy before, during and after the war.”

After Lake Forest College received a grant for the school to develop digital pages and Chicago-related events, phenomena and historical developments in the humanities and social sciences, Dr. Marquardt then applied for a grant to build a page dedicated to Jane Addams peace advocacy and her historical significance, which he received and then began hiring students. Together they began studying, analyzing and building the Jane Addams – Peace, War and World Order timeline.

The timeline focuses mostly on Addams’ involvement in WWI and her opposition of the war, but Dr. Marquardt plans to continue to study Addams with the hopes of continuing to expand the timeline from her involvement in the Peace Movement with it ending when Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize. He plans on taking all of his knowledge about Addams and writing a book entitled “Jane Addams: The Great War and Her Quest to Transform National Relations.”

He’s not the only one who feels passionate about Addams; Dr. Marquardt explained that his students are very passionate about her as well. “They’re really into [the project]. Addams is such an inspirational figure that they’re a little too generous towards her, in terms of their writing and their public presentations that they’ve made about her.”

Since the timeline highlights Jane Addams’ peace advocacy I had to ask Dr. Marquardt to define peace advocacy in his own words.

“I would define it as actions, writings, ideas related to efforts to end war. That’s my thinking about it, but my students have a much more generous viewing of peace advocacy, they see peace as not simply something we ought to strive for in our international relations in our social relations generally.”

Dr. Marquardt has learned a lot from his students during this process. “Their understanding was that advocating for peace is not simply a global issue but an issue of interpersonal relations. It’s about the end of violence along racial lines, it’s about the end of violence against women, violence against children, hunger, deprivation, unemployment.” They share the same vision and beliefs that Jane Addams did and they carry on Addams’ beliefs and visions for a brighter future for everyone.

The website went live last week and for those interested in viewing Dr. Marquardt and his students work the link is here: http://digitalchicago.lakeforest.edu/exhibits/show/jane-addams/our-purpose.

April 23, 2018September 29, 2025

Poet and Con-Artist: The Story of Scharmel Iris

A sepia-toned portrait of a young person with curly hair, gazing to the side. They are wearing an open-collared shirt and a jacket, with a soft, blurred background. — Scharmel Iris (Lyrics of a Lad (1914)

Sara Catherine Lichon is writing a series of blog posts about interesting characters that she comes across while working as a co-operative education student for the Project this semester. Her work involves identifying and describing the over 5,000 unique individuals mentioned in Addams’ correspondence.

As a student, I’ve heard many a time that academic honesty is of the utmost importance, and that plagiarism can end one’s academic career. But back in the early 1900s, plagiarism was responsible for the rise of poet Scharmel Iris’s career, who made a living by fooling others.

Iris was born in 1889 with the name Frederico Scaramella in Castelcivita, Italy. When he was three years old, his mother married a man who helped them immigrate to the United States where they settled in Chicago. Iris changed his name and in 1905, when he was sixteen years old, his first poem was published in a Chicago Catholic newspaper. Soon his career skyrocketed as he was published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, received positive reviews from Chicago newspapers, and published his own collections of poems. He received most of his funding and notoriety with the help of other famous poets and artists, such as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Salvatore Dali, and Picasso, who wrote praise-filled letters to Iris’s patrons.

There was one major problem with Iris’s success, though…it was based entirely on lies. Rather than being a great poet, Iris was simply a con-artist. Letters and praise from Eliot, Yeats, and Picasso were forged by Iris himself, and Iris even wrote about himself to publishers and patrons under the pseudonym Vincent Holme. Forgery and plagiarism, rather than talent, provided the base for Iris’s career and fame.

A typed letter dated Jan. 20, 1913, on Hull-House letterhead, addressed to Miss Harriet Monroe, Chicago. The letter discusses poets, critics, and charity, and is signed by hand at the bottom. — Jane Addams’ letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan. 20, 1913. Addams stated that Iris had “no right” to claim she advised him to reach out to different poets.

Jane Addams herself was a victim of Iris’s scams. Iris spent part of his life as a Hull-House resident, and when he published Lyrics of a Lad in 1914, he supposedly received praise from art critic John Ruskin and poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Edmund Gosse. In January 1913, Addams wrote a letter to Harriet Monroe describing how Iris claimed she had told him to reach out to Gosse and even Yeats. Addams stated, “Poor Scharmel Iris really has no right to say that I advised him to write to Miss Guiney, or to Edmund Gosse, or to Mr. Yeats.” Words had been put in Addams’ mouth by Iris, and she was only one of many.

Iris’s scams even extended to his living situation. He lived at Lewis College, a Catholic school near Joliet, despite not working or teaching there. He stayed there until he was asked to leave in 1966, and he spent the remainder of his life at St. Patrick Retirement Hotel. He died in 1967.

Excerpt from a poem titled After the Martyrdom, describing the act of throwing stones and the resulting emotional burden, with lines reflecting on guilt and remorse for participating in harm. — A poem by Scharmel Iris, published in Poetry in December 1914.

Regardless of Iris’s talent as a poet, it’s hard to deny that he had a talent for fooling others. Iris’s entire life and career was built on plagiarism, yet he lived the life he had always dreamed of — that of a successful, well-known poet . . . even if it was actually a lie.

Sources:
Announcement of Lyrics of a Lad by Scharmel Iris, 1914.
Inventory of the Scharmel Iris Papers, 1911-1964, The Newberry Library.
Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, January 20, 1913.
Nina C. Ayoub, “Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 17, 2007.

March 30, 2018September 29, 2025

Behind Closed Doors: The Divorce Case of Dr. Lydia Allen DeVilbiss

A grayscale, slightly grainy portrait of a woman with curly hair, smiling and looking at the camera, wearing a dark top. — Dr. Lydia Allen DeVilbiss, in News-Journal, Jan. 16, 1914.

Dr. Lydia Allen DeVilbiss was a doctor and surgeon in Shelby, Ohio, who wrote Jane Addams a brief letter on August 10, 1912, commending her for her speech to the Progressive Party Convention. DeVilbiss was an active civic leader, serving as president of the Shelby Equal Franchise Association, president of the Richland county Woman’s Suffrage Association, secretary and treasurer of the Shelby Medical Society, president of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society, and medical director of the Better Babies Bureau of the Woman’s Home Companion. In addition, she was the first woman to become a member of the Shelby Socialist local. These accomplishments alone were newsworthy for a woman during the early 1900’s. But in 1912, DeVilbiss made the news for a very different reason; a dramatic divorce case that pushed her private life into the spotlight.

On Christmas day in 1906, Lydia married Albert K. Shauck, a professor and musician who was twenty years her senior. Early on, it appeared as though their life was going well; in 1907, for example, there was news of Albert opening a music school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the same building as his wife’s medical practice. But in November 1912, the News-Journal in Mansfield, Ohio reported that Lydia was suing for divorce. She accused Albert of having verbally abused her, using “foul, indecent and threatening language,” and slandering her reputation by spreading rumors. Lydia surmised that Albert treated her cruelly out of jealousy, as he also “materially interfered with her practice as a physician and surgeon.” Albert had also threatened Lydia’s life, she said, saying he would “take her life” and “circulate such slanderous stories about her” if she tried to leave him. Despite the threats, the couple had been separated for the six months before Lydia filed for divorce. When she made the decision to divorce Albert, she made arrangements to stay with her sisters in Fort Wayne and work as a drug saleswoman for Strong, Cobb & Company in Cleveland.

Newspaper headline reads: Suffragette Asks Divorce. Mrs. Lydia DeVilbiss Shauck Begins Suit for Divorce and Alimony. Alleges cruelty and bad language. — The first news announcement of the Shauck divorce case, News-Journal, Nov. 29, 1912.

Shortly after this news broke, Albert came forward with his own accusations. The News-Journal reported in early December that Lydia “treated him [Albert] worse than a dog,” subjecting him to verbal and physical abuse. He claimed that while he never abused Lydia or threatened her life, she had done so to him; in a statement made to the press, Albert presented a record of threats Lydia had made against him, which included “I wish someone would kill you” and “I wish there was no law against killing. I would just like to kill you.” Albert also alleged that Lydia once threw a butcher knife at him, smashed a bottle against his head, and broke his finger. He also complained of how, due to Lydia’s work, most of the housework fell to him.

The dramatic news coverage of the divorce case did not end there. Only about two weeks later, Albert refused to eat, and his health rapidly declined. He was sent to the Marion, Ohio sanitarium, and Lydia collected money due to him in order to pay for his treatment.

Black and white newspaper clipping with bold headlines: Professor was a good dodger, Knife just missed him, and An unhappy life with suffragette, describing a narrowly avoided knife attack. — Albert K. Shauck’s account, News-Journal, Dec 2, 1912.

No news appeared on the Shaucks until one year later, when, in December 1913, Lydia dropped the divorce case. The case was dismissed without prejudice, but not because the couple had reconciled; rather, the courts believed that Lydia’s suit was not strong enough to warrant a divorce. Lydia chose to remain in Fort Wayne rather than return to Shelby. That was the last time the Shaucks’ marriage appeared in the news, but by 1920, Lydia and Albert were divorced.

After the divorce, Lydia moved to Miami, Florida, where she opened the Mothers Health Clinic in 1928. There, she conducted research on birth control and came up with inexpensive soap-based spermicidal jellies to be used with a sponge. However, Lydia believed only educated women could understand these methods. She practiced sterilization on those she deemed less intelligent. Most of the sterilized patients were African-American women who may have been forced or mislead into having the procedure. DeVilbiss initially supported the work of African American physicians who opened a black branch of the Mothers Health Clinic, but after disagreeing with their methods, she shut them down.

All that is known of Lydia’s private life after her divorce is that by 1930, she married to Dr. George Bradford. She died in Florida in 1964. We will never know the details of the Shaucks’ private lives, nor whose account held the most truth. For now, we are left with newspaper articles as the main glimpse into the life of Lydia Allen DeVilbiss, and what may have happened behind closed doors.

Sara Catherine is writing a series of blog posts about interesting characters that she comes across while working as a co-operative education student for the Project this semester. Her work involves identifying and describing the over 5,000 unique individuals mentioned in Addams’ correspondence.

Sources:

Cathy Moran Hajo, Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1939 (2010), pp. 70-71, 117.

Esther Katz, Peter C. Engelman, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Amy Flanders, eds. The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: Volume 2: Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939 (2006), pp. 230-1.

Albert K. Shauck, 1920 United States Federal Census.

“Dr. Shauck is Now Medical Director of Magazine’s ‘Better Babies’ Bureau,” News-Journal (Mansfield, Ohio), January 16, 1914, p. 7.

Lydia DeVilbiss Bradford, 1930 United States Federal Census.

Lydia D Shauck, 1910 United States Federal Census.

“A New Conservatory,” The Monroeville Breeze, August 15, 1907, p. 8.

“Professor was a Good Dodger,” News-Journal (Mansfield, Ohio), December 2, 1912, p. 5.

“Refuses to Eat,” News-Journal (Mansfield, Ohio), December 18, 1912, p. 9.

“Shauck Case is Dismissed,” News-Journal (Mansfield, Ohio), December 13, 1913, p. 8.

“Suffragette Asks Divorce,” News-Journal (Mansfield, Ohio), November 29, 1912, p. 5.

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