Jane Addams and the Long 19th Amendment Project

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!

 

 

Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks –An Audio Musical

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.

Dr. Harriet Rice: First Black Resident at Hull-House

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.

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.

Thanks to the Ramapo College Foundation!

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!

Segregation At Hull-House: A Closer Look

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.

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.

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 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.

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.”

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.

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).
Boys at the Bowen Country Club camp run by Hull-House, ca. 1946. (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).
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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

“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.

The Jane Addams Memorial Tollway?

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 19th 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 150th 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.

Me and Jane’s Books

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)

Excavating the History of Women and the Peace Movement

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.

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.

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.