This post was presented by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Newberry Library Seminar on Women and Gender, December 5, 2008.

In the 1980s and 1990s, historians Kathryn Kish Sklar, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and Robyn Muncy identified a new women’s culture at Hull-House.[1] Their work focused on the early years, analyzing the networks and alliances (across classes and across different sectors of the reform movement).  Active support by clubwomen (for example through volunteer work and financial contributions) allowed Hull-House settlement women to have an autonomous, nurturing, synergistic space from which to help build national and international reform networks.  Seeing Hull-House as a community of women continues to influence our ideas about social reform in the Progressive Era.  Hull-House continues to dominate the reform literature even as historians have attempted to recover the history of the multifarious social settlement movement. [2]

Building on the earlier work of scholars who have focused on the role of women at Hull-House, Mary Jo Deegan, Charlene Haddock Seigfried and Dorothy Ross have focused on the way Hull-House functioned as a place where women were able to carve out an intellectual domain different from the emerging male academic model.[3] Addams argued that she could learn about what the neighbors’ reality consisted of through lived experience and she claimed her work was scientific: she and other residents offered their studies “not as exhaustive treatises, but as recorded observations which may possibly be of value, because they are immediate, and the result of long acquaintance.” Addams made it clear that the authority for her political activism comes from having lived in the neighborhood not as a theoretician or scholar but as an activist engaged in constructive work. This manner of knowing the neighborhood is valorized by Addams and is the hallmark of the sociological investigation undertaken by settlement houses independently of universities or government agencies. Thus Addams created a new role for herself (and for other activist women) without being a professor at a university, a government official, an elected politician, or a captain of industry.  [4]  Jane Addams, in particular, has been recast as a public intellectual, a sociologist, and her writings seen as influential in the development of modern social policy on the industrial state and democracy: her educational ideas and innovative assessments of democracy and social ethics linked to the American pragmatist, John Dewey. [5]

This paper does not aim to dislodge the valuable scholarship mentioned above. Rather, it proposes to provoke some questions about how our interpretation of Hull-House might need to be revised if we factor into our analysis new scholarship that brings men from the periphery of settlement life into the center as influential residents, favored advisors, trustees and financial contributors, and important political allies.  Acknowledging that the notion of Hull-House as women’s space was a powerful concept for the emerging field of U.S. women’s history, to what extent did the concept gain its power from the need of the field? To what extent is it still a valid analytic tool? How might it be modified in the light of new research, both research that has been done and research that remains to be done?

Most readers are familiar with the early stories of the two women—Addams and Starr—who set up housekeeping in the old, dilapidated Hull homestead located in a Chicago neighborhood teeming with immigrants. “As the years went on,” Alice Hamilton, who had lived at the settlement for twenty-two years, recalled, “Hull-House grew till it covered more than a city block and its activities increased in variety as the little group of residents came to include many people of many interests. We had Gerard Swope and his wife, Frederick Deknatel, whose son [William] now continues his father’s devoted service, George M. R. Twose, Edward and Charles Yeomans, George Hooker, William l. Chenery, Edith and Grace Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, the Robert Morss Lovetts, Harriet Monroe, and many others.”[6] Hamilton named an interesting group. Most of them are individuals not associated with Hull-House. There are quite a few men; and there are married couples.  The following is a shorthand identification of Hamilton’s group: Gerard Swope, later the president of General Electric, met his wife, Mary Hill, a student of John Dewey, when the two were residents.  Co-officiating at the marriage in 1901, Jane Addams proclaimed the two exhibited exceptional social citizenship—the highest form of civic engagement in democracy. “Because all of us here have known Gerard and Mary so intimately, because they have each shown so genuine a sense of social obligation, and because each has for years striven to fulfill something of the social claim, we may perhaps venture to emphasize the social aspects of this marriage.”[7]  Frederick Deknatel was a local manufacturer who became a Hull-House resident after the death of his first wife; he met Wilfreda Brockway, who taught in the kindergarten, and they married. The Deknatels remained residents living in one of the apartments set up for married couples. Twose, an Englishman who taught manual training in the public schools and woodworking at the Hull House shops, was the first president of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts founded in 1897; he lived at Hull-House until his death.  The Yeoman brothers owned a pump factory in Chicago and both married women they met at Hull-House.  William Chenery was a journalist who after his Hull-House years became the editor of Collier’s Weekly in New York . The Abbotts and Sophonisba Breckinridge are well-known for their work and need little introduction here.[8] Ida Lovett had heard Jane Addams while she was a student at Radcliffe; she and Robert, who was appointed in 1893 instructor in English at the University of Chicago, had visited Hull-House in their earlier years in Chicago and after WWI became active residents; Ida helped Addams administrate and was, according to her husband, “one of Miss Addams’ close companions, sharing her company on journeys and giving her always the watchful care which became more necessary as the years passed.”[9] Lovett had a long career as a professor of literature at the University of Chicago, was an associate editor of The New Republic, and a radical liberal who defended First Amendment rights during the 1920s.  Poet and editor Harriet Monroe was one of many talented people who found kindred spirits in the Hull-House complex. 

One of the major findings of my study of residency at Hull-House is that there were a lot more men at the settlement, even in the early years, than historians have indicated.  Between 1889 and 1935, 33 per cent of the Hull-House residents were men.[10] An article in the 1934  Hull-House Yearbook  discussed the fortieth anniversary celebration that was held May 1930 (instead of September 1929) and summed up residency: “It was interesting that of the 350 surviving residents—naming only those men and women who had been in residence for at least six months continuously and had given substantial service to Hull-House—divided into occupations as follows: Business, 58; education, 52; authors and journalists, 25; artists and musicians, 34; law, 18; medicine, 21; government service, 17; social and civic work, 76; agriculturists, 7; home-makers, 42.” [11]  Male residents dominated the categories of business and law and were quite visible in government service and social and civic work, absent only from the category “home-makers.” My study of residents at Hull-House between 1889 and 1961 finds that 41 percent were men.[12]

What about other settlement houses in the United States? (Of course, we know that Toynbee Hall in London only had male residents and was the model for settlements worldwide.)  In 1911, the first year that statistics on male and female participation in settlements in the United States was available, “53 percent of the 214 settlements reporting to investigators housed women only; less than 2 percent only men. The rest accommodated both sexes.”[13] That meant 45 percent of American settlements housed women and men.  There are no statistics on what percentages of men were resident in the 45 percent of sexually integrated settlements. So it is speculation to conclude that Hull-House was unusually rich in male residency, although this “community of women” in fact was significantly populated by men.

There is no evidence that Jane Addams and Ellen Starr ever conceived of their settlement experiment as an effort to develop a new kind of sex-segregated space for women to inhabit.  During the several months prior to renting space in the old Hull homestead, Starr and Addams were busy introducing their “scheme” to circles of reform-minded Chicagoans, clubwomen, clergy, and college-educated women and men who might be candidates to join the two founders as residents.  Starr gleefully reported to Addams that lots of young men had attended a reception held to talk about the plan. This was comforting because both Starr and Addams did not want to be perceived as some sort of “Protestant nuns.”  Edward L. Burchard, Hull-House’s first male resident, came to Hull-House in 1891. He had heard Addams talk about Toynbee Hall in 1888 or 1889.  “I wonder if you remember the time as a young lady you spoke on Toynbee Hall in the parlors of the First Presbyterian Church at Freeport. This was before you projected Hull-House. Your description of the hungry crowd around the huckster wagon in east London, I shall never forget.”[14] Burchard, who eventually served for many years as secretary of the Chicago Recreation Commission, was part of the small circle of women and men at Hull-House who first conceived and then implemented the “belief that through the exhibit method” immigrant citizenship could be promoted.[15] Burchard  later worked at the Field Museum of Natural History, developed innovative educational tours for the Chicago public schools, and with Milton Foreman, Harriet E. Vittum, Lea Taylor, Neva Boyd and others promoted a vast array of cultural, recreational, and civic programs for the Chicago [parks] field house system.[16]

Burchard credited Addams with his interest in public service. Hull-House brought idealistic men as well as women into the widening circles of progressivism and modeled for men an alternative professional route of public service. Other male residents’ careers attest to the existence of a male dominion of public service that was incubated in social settlements and had far-reaching results. While Robyn Muncy and others are correct in emphasizing that college-educated women were very limited in opportunities to pursue careers instead of traditional womanly work, men who were not interested in the commercial or industrial world and who, like idealistic young women, hoped to work for the betterment of society, faced a variety of problems. If they were inclined to do their work in a religious context, as Graham Taylor, founder of Chicago Commons settlement and professor of applied sociology at the Congregational seminary, chose to do, they still needed a community of kindred spirits who would support new methods of dealing with modern problems. They needed new kinds of educational institutions, which was why Taylor joined with other Chicago settlement leaders to establish the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. [17] In the case of Burchard, who taught at the School of Civics and Philanthropy, his niche was in the new field of adult and public school education outside the traditional classroom in newly created public spaces in urban America. The proliferation of parks and recreation centers, for example, created opportunities for persons who would manage these facilities. New theories about the importance of play in child development, ideas about constructive leisure for adults, and reformist agendas to provide wholesome entertainment as a substitute for saloons, dance halls, and pool rooms in immigrant and working class neighborhoods came out of the experiences of men and women residents of settlement houses.  It is not surprising that by 1912, the high point of progressivism, an infrastructure of theoreticians and researchers, practitioners, and public officials was in place that was implementing the settlement workers’ commitment to a series of closely related reform movements. Men who had been residents at Hull-House found themselves in key positions in this new world of playgrounds, summer camps, programs for the prevention of juvenile delinquency, and programs in public schools like manual training.  Former resident Alexander A. McCormick had been elected president of the Cook County Board in 1912.  Addams had campaigned for his election. “One of his first undertakings,” Addams recalled, “was to reorganize the Civil Service Board and to appoint as a member of it an able woman, long identified with the Chicago settlements.”[18] The appointee, Anna Nichols “did much to dissociate civil service from the conception of a cold and correct public official versus the kind-hearted and open-handed politician” approved Jane Addams. The settlement crowd had learned that the good government type reformers who did not have the benefit of residency in immigrant and working class neighborhoods “overemphasized the usefulness in keeping the rascals out and had thus allowed [the merit system] to become stranded in the shallow water of negative virtue, failing to launch it upon the deep seas of popular affection.”[19] As Addams had cautioned in her analysis of local politics, “it is most difficult to hold to our political democracy and to make it in any sense a social expression and not a mere governmental contrivance, unless we take pains to keep on common ground in our human experiences.”[20] Men like A.A. McCormick, then, Addams might have argued, benefited from the settlement experience and the interaction of male and female perspectives.  

Male social reformers who emerged from the social settlement movement instead of men’s good government clubs that met in downtown office buildings and had remote connections with neighborhood life, one can speculate, might not share the same agenda; perhaps the male reformers who experienced settlement life developed a viewpoint closer to the female political culture. [21]  George E. Hooker, mentioned above, was one of the few advocates of city  planning who criticized the Burnham Plan for its failure to deal with the urban housing problem. He wrote for the Review of Reviews and other periodicals including the Chicago Tribune, Hooker held degrees in law and the ministry. He was as comfortable with the City Club of Chicago as he was with the Hull-House Men’s Club—a neighborhood organization—and his sensibilities about urban problems gained from his long residency in Hull-House and daily exposure to the realities of working class life.

Another Hull-House male resident, Ernest Carroll Moore, who later became the president of the University of California, Los Angeles, did his investigation of the saloons of the Nineteenth Ward –Johnny Power’s fiefdom and location of the settlement house—for the Committee of Fifty while he was in residence at Hull-House. He lived at Hull-House with his wife, Dr. Dorothea Moore, a physician, while he was working toward a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His contact with skilled, ambitious workers in the neighborhood was extensive; he taught college extension courses to the English-speaking Americans of Irish and German descent who had not yet abandoned the old neighborhood and to whom the classes and educational offerings of the social settlement answered their strivings for self-improvement.  Moore’s unconventional conclusions about the role of the saloon in working-class life—more empathetic and democratic in attitude than the typical temperance reformer—were not unlike Addams’s realistic assessment of why the ward boss survived. In both cases the traditional institutions were performing necessary functions in the social life of people. If reformers wanted to transform popular culture and uplift the masses, they had to find effective substitutes that met the everyday needs of people.  

Numbers of males and females, of course, do not tell the whole story of the gender of institutions. Public schools are notorious as institutions with overwhelming majorities of women teachers but are dominated in the nineteenth and for more than half of the twentieth century by male administrators and male school board members. Would we call public schools a female dominion? There is no question that during the first twenty years of its existence, Hull-House was dominated by strong, independent women who emerged as leading figures in diverse fields and who influenced national events.  It is also clear that the environment at Hull-House was fertile for the development of individual careers and for alliances and lifelong and sustaining friendships among women. 

Much has been made of the way in which traditional domestic space at Hull-House was transformed into a new kind of cultural and social space that was liberating for women. Hull-House residents were freed from domestic chores [which other working-class women performed instead], and were able to actively engage in community affairs as single women without benefit of male sponsorship or guardianship.  Women settlement workers were treated like nurses or religious sisters and allowed to roam the neighborhoods, use public transportation, and come and go as they pleased without losing status or respectability as middle-class women in Victorian America.  On the other hand, there were many aspects of the Hull-House physical complex that adhered to the conventional gendered space relationships in the society as a whole.  The Hull-House Women’s Club was housed in a building just for that purpose; the Hull-House Men’s Club had its own building and the interior spaces of both clubs conformed to notions of masculinity and femininity that most late nineteenth century Americans would recognize.  Children’s care was done by women. While there were bohemian aspects to the complex—artists’ studios; salon-like parlors where men and women residents discussed politics, religion, and sex; and there was a constant flow of visitors whose political and social views were controversial—there was also decorum and modesty. Women residents lived in the main house; men had a cottage where they roomed; married couples were housed in apartments that were more private. Additional sex-segregated housing for working-class women and men was established at the Jane Club and at a male residence that was a short-lived experiment. The sexual orientation of the residents did not appear to be a matter for discussion, nor were other personal matters, according to Alice Hamilton. “We knew each others’ opinions and interests and work and we discussed them often and freely, but the atmosphere was impersonal, rather astonishingly so for a group composed chiefly of women.”[22] Everyone acknowledged the special relationship Jane Addams had with Mary Rozet Smith; yet the two lived separately, with Mary remaining in her family’s townhouse on Chicago’s fashionable North Side.[23]

It was in the governance of Hull-House where the nature of gender at Hull-House becomes more complicated. There is no question that the case for Hull-House as women’s space can best be made from the model of leadership provided by Jane Addams. This was an institution run by a woman—or was it? In 1935, the Hull-House settlement had existed for forty-five years as a private, not-for-profit association governed by a board of seven trustees, including Jane Addams who called herself “head resident” and did not take a salary. She was, until 1907, both the president and the treasurer of this board. The majority of the trustees had held their positions from the 1890s—when the system was put into place—until Jane Addams’s death in 1935, or, if they preceded her, their own death. The trustees, during the Addams’s years, were women and men who overall can be described as wealthy civic-minded progressives who were responding to the evils of the industrial city. Addams, one of their class,[24] had established the settlement with her own funds and they backed her “experiment” and accepted her leadership. Since Addams was a volunteer who invested her own money in the settlement, she fit a model of womanly benevolence not one of professionalism. The trustees were there to offer advice and counsel, not to supervise or to develop policy, unless asked directly. Addams, then, had a great deal of personal discretion and reigned almost completely unchallenged by the close-knit group of trustees.[25] In addition, Hull-House was not affiliated with a religious denomination or a university so had an enviable independent position. This may be one of the most significant sources of female empowerment at the settlement.  At Hull-House Jane Addams did not have to report to the kind of traditional male-dominated board and administrative hierarchy that ran settlements affiliated with religious denominations or universities.

The Hull-House trustees also were among the settlement’s major contributors: multi-millionaire heiress and leading civic reformer Louise Bowen, who continued to dominate the trustees until her death in 1953; Mary Rozet Smith, Jane’s life partner; Helen Culver, the heir of the Charles Hull real estate empire, and owner of the Hull homestead[26] and the property surrounding it; Mary Wilmarth[27], a feminist clubwoman and one of Hull-House’s earliest supporters; William H. Colvin,  retired businessman and chairman of the executive committee of the Municipal Voters’ League; Julius Rosenwald, who owned Sears Roebuck, Co., and was a leading philanthropist known for his support of education for African Americans in the South and his sponsorship of the NAACP; and Sewell Avery, president of the U.S. Gypsum Company and Chairman of the Board of Montgomery Ward & Company. Completing the list of trustees were the philosopher John Dewey, wealthy businessmen and art patrons Edward B. Butler and Charles L. Hutchinson, and Allen B. Pond, architect and social activist whose life had been animated by the ideals of the arts and crafts movement.  When old-timers died, they were replaced by other family members or individuals well-known to those on the board. Charles Hull Ewing “replaced” his cousin, Helen Culver; Louise Bowen added her daughter Helen Bowen Blair in 1929 when the number of trustees increased from seven to nine.[28]

From the earliest days of settlement life, Addams relied on Pond, Colvin, and Mary Rozet Smith’s father, Charles Mather Smith, in an on-going “conversation” about the plans she had for Hull-House’s expansion and development. Colvin probably reminded Addams of the best men of her father’s generation.  A Civil War veteran, Colvin was the son of a New York shipper. Initially the young man Colvin worked for a large and established importing house in New York City before following a pattern of many East Coast business families by moving to Chicago to take advantage of the westward expansion of commerce. He became, by 1887, the largest importer in the city. Never involved in politics, he was one of sixteen good government reformers who established the Municipal Voters’ League of which he served as chairmen of its executive committee. He was just the sort of enlightened capitalist who Addams cultivated and from which she obtained financial support. When trustee William Colvin died unexpectedly in 1896, Addams was in Russia.  She received word of Colvin’s death and wrote Gertrude Barnum, a resident who was more or less in charge of daily activities at the settlement during Addams’s six-month sojourn in Europe. “Of course you know as well as I what a blow [Colvin’s death] … is to H.H. and what a genuine personal sorrow it is as well” Addams acknowledged. Indicating how much the settlement relied on Colvin (who was “developing in all sorts of directions mostly in the direction of money getter for general expenses”[29]) she imagined Barnum feeling “perfectly bereft . . . as if the prop had fallen out.” [30] On her part Addams, who had just visited Tolstoy in his country estate and was scheduled to remain away from Hull-House for another six to eight weeks, lost interest in the rest of her trip and wanted “to be at home.”[31]

While it is true that the major funding of Hull-House came from a handful of women who developed extraordinarily close relationships with Addams, the male trustees, who also contributed considerable amounts, made significant contributions,[32] especially Julius Rosenwald, Joseph T. Bowen, and Charles Mather Smith, the last two mentioned the husband and father respectively of Louise deKoven Bowen and Mary Rozet Smith.[33] More than any quantifiable amount, the visibility of such well-known Chicago industrialists and capitalists like Charles Hutchinson and Sewell Avery legitimated the institution in the eyes of society. These men  demonstrated to wealthy women like Helen Culver and Louise Bowen –who were the major contributors in absolute figures—that they were investing in an institution that was a going concern.  Bowen and Culver were fiscally conservative women. Their support for Hull-House was not automatic but had to be earned. Bowen had been impressed by Addams’s judicious assessment of George Pullman during the 1894 Pullman Strike.[34] The daughter  and granddaughter of wealthy capitalists on both her maternal and paternal sides, Bowen had faith in Addams because she sensed that at heart the reformer was not a revolutionary and could see both sides of the labor and capital conflict.  Bowen would have been the last person to invest in an enterprise that was attempting to construct a space for women that was in opposition to family values or was some utopian scheme with no demonstrable practical value.[35] She felt comfortable with the male trustees because they were very successful capitalists and industrialists like her kinsmen and her husband. In a sense, the same could be said for Mary Rozet Smith. Addams understood that it was important to cultivate the entire Smith family and that Charles Mather Smith, had to be assured of the rationality and stability of the Hull-House enterprise.[36]

The case of architect Allen Pond also demonstrates how the presence of men performed a salutary role for the female trustees. Addams met Pond before she had selected the dilapidated Charles Hull homestead as the site for a settlement house.  He was one of the many reform-minded Chicagoans to whom Addams and Ellen Gates Starr introduced their scheme to open a settlement house and, from the beginning, Pond embraced the idea. Pond was the architect for the twelve additional buildings that were constructed from 1889 to 1907 as the settlement complex took shape and he served as secretary of the settlement’s board of trustees for thirty-four years, until his death in 1929. Pond had other commitments in Chicago—he was the architect for most of the city’s settlement houses—but he served as the “go-between” in Addams’s initially difficult relationship with Helen Culver. Culver, who had inherited the substantial real estate business of her cousin, Charles Hull, in 1889, was a shrewd woman who had been the actual manager of the real estate firm for many years.  Culver owned the Hull homestead and all of the property that later became the settlement complex. As a landlady she was tough; eventually she warmed to the work that Addams and Starr had inaugurated, donating the land and in 1920 an additional quarter of a million dollars worth of securities. It was Culver who pushed a reluctant Addams into “institutionalizing” the “experiment” by demanding it be incorporated under Illinois law (if Addams wanted her support). And part of the agreement was that Culver, or a relative of Culver, would always have a seat as a trustee of the Hull-House Association.  Without Allen Pond’s skillful, persistent, and sensitive handling of Culver, it is conceivable that the enterprise would not have flourished in the manner which it did.

So the realities of institution-building brought Addams into close association with men and women who were rich and influential people.  Instead of clipping her wings, they managed to protect Addams. The meteoric rise to international prominence that Addams and the settlement achieved also gave her a protected status.[37] After her death, there were no head residents (now called directors) of equal stature or, obviously, whose relationship to the trustees had an equivalency.[38] Her relationship with male and female trustees and contributors was very empowering for Addams and gave her the ability to speak out on many controversial stands without fear of reprisal, and to defend the rights of political dissidents worldwide. It allowed her to personally ally herself with unpopular causes and individuals, to establish radical organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and to maintain a large degree of freedom for the individual residents who came to live in the Hull-House complex.[39]

There was yet another influence which men at Hull-House brought to the female-run settlement. One of the largest occupational categories of the 350 residents who were still living in 1930, at the time that the survey was made, was that of business.  It could be argued that Addams and the settlement influenced young men who were headed for careers in business in a positive direction. At the same time, knowledge and understanding of such individuals, especially as they evolved in their careers, gave Addams an unusual perspective regarding what historians have identified as welfare capitalism. The fact that both businessmen and labor leaders felt they could have a role in Hull-House was in part a recognition of Addams’s approach to cross-class interactions and her commitment to bringing all sides together. Between 1894 and 1930 Addams had reacted to crises in industrial capitalism and to men like George Pullman by advocating negotiation: she called for strong labor organizations and for enlightened stewardship on the part of owners.  She disliked conflict and preferred arbitration and reconciliation. She was a relatively inexperienced young woman when in 1894 as the representative of the Civic Federation of Chicago she unsuccessfully attempted to bring George Pullman and labor leaders at his company who hoped to gain recognition of their union together to settle the Pullman conflict.[40] Her first significant article on the role of the settlement and the labor conflict, included in Hull-House Maps & Papers (1895)[41] prefigured her later support of the role of the State as arbitrator in industrial conflict. Refusing to accept the inevitability of class conflict, Addams differed from Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr.  Her analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Pullman and his planned town, for example, were based on her belief in the democratic process where workers’ rights to negotiate the conditions of the workplace and wages and hours were accepted by owners. Indeed, Pullman, by taking away the rights of his workers to determine how they would live outside of work, had stripped them of their citizenship. While she understood the reason why workers went on strike and even admired the solidarity of sympathy strikes, her goal of industrial harmony was paramount and often created misunderstandings about her positions from capitalists and workers. She was profoundly dedicated to democratic solutions to conflict and for Addams this meant the acceptance of the concept of interdependency and mutuality in all social relationships. [42] 

It is not surprising, then, that Hull-House welcomed industrial managers and businessmen as residents as well as labor leaders and radicals who advocated different political and economic solutions to the industrial conflict of the era. Addams’s major agenda, one that she articulated innumerable times in her writing, was to create a new kind of space where the expression of a democratic social intercourse was possible. “Up to the time that I met [Hull-House resident Gerard] Swope, I had associated only with workers and trade-unionists,” Russian Jewish immigrant Philip 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.”  Swope taught English and arithmetic at Hull-House and Davis, who was trying to improve himself, eagerly allowed his new mentor to correct his speech. “Oftentimes we went to his laboratory at Western Electric, where he showed me how to conduct experiments in physics and chemistry” Davis recollected.[43] All this prepared the young immigrant for college entrance examinations.  As did Addams, Swope encouraged Davis to take an interest in labor, the field to which he returned after completing his education. Swope was an example “of the future industrialist, at ease with labor men like [Abraham] Bisno, [Sidney] Hillman and others of his day, as well as with the prominent figures representing management” Davis concluded.[44] Both Bisno and Hillman were labor leaders with deep connections to Hull-House.

At the same time Addams was on good terms with the heads of many manufacturing concerns.  Enos S. Burton, who encouraged his “most promising young men” from Western Electric to live at Hull-House, had most likely sent Gerard Swope to Hull-House, currently at Western Electric and the future head of General Electric; he also pushed Walter S. Gifford, the future head of American Telephone & Telegraph in the direction of the settlement, where he, too, was a resident.  “Let them see all they can of all kinds of people and of their requirements,” Burton 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.”[45]

Swope had been a resident of Hull-House in the late 1890s. The son of German Jews from St. Louis, Missouri, Swope’s family had prospered (his father was a clock manufacturer in St. Louis) and Gerard graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895.  When Swope was President of Mercantile Electric Company  for a short period of time in St. Louis, he and his wife, Mary Dayton Hill also a resident, did not give up their interest in understanding the working class, and they rented two houses next to one another in a slum neighborhood very much like the one in which Hull-House was situated. There Mary Swope set up textile looms just like the ones she had used in her work with Italian women at Hull-House, and began doing crafts with the immigrant women and men who were her new neighbors.  Their stay in St. Louis was short, however, but the pattern of activity for the couple, as prophesized in Jane Addams’s wedding statement in 1901, had been established: the couple integrated raising children and homelife with Swope’s commitment to enlightened industrial management, and Mary and Gerard’s support of a democratic social ethics through social settlements, and engagement in civic affairs both nationally and internationally.

Back in Chicago, Swope was given the responsibility of reorganizing Western Electric’s Hawthorne factory. He “brace[d] Western Electric for the panic of 1907” giving him a chance to “test his theories about what to do in a period of diminishing business.”[46] When a strike threatened, Swope consulted with his Hull-House colleagues and took their advice to negotiate honestly with his workers. [47]According to business historian Ellis W. Hawley, between 1913 and 1922 Swope accomplished three tasks that “enhanced his reputation as an organizational genius”: a systematic reorganization of Western Electric’s foreign interests; as a dollar-a year man during World War I, the overhaul of the Army Supply Service; and third, a rebuilding of General Electric’s operations abroad. “As the first president of International General Electric, a GE subsidiary, Swope became the prime mover behind an intricate series of corporate reorganizations and multinational business agreements, and in association with such foreign statesmen as Walther Rathenau of Germany and Louis Loucheur of France he took a keen interest in European reconstruction.”[48]

 Internally, Swope remained true to the standards for industrial relations that he had gleaned from his relationships with Hull-House reformers. He employed Dr. Alice Hamilton, whose expertise in industrial toxicology was well-known to him since his Hull-House days, to oversee the industrial environment of the GE factories to ensure the health of the workers, and by 1923 he was experimenting with stock options for his employees. [49]  Meanwhile both Mary and Gerard were on the boards of Greenwich House and the Henry Street settlements in New York and Mary continued her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Meanwhile Addams had become increasingly an advocate for the “American effort to combine industrial and commercial activities that shall operate by consent” as an alternative to “the strong-arm control by employers” of industry, or the “constant struggle between organized capital and organized labor with the result in some trades of trade-union tyranny, and in others of employers’ tyranny, in either case accompanied by conflict and instability.”[50] She favored a mixed economy: municipalization of electric systems; Federal projects like Boulder Dam; and privately run economic activities “if the latter can be controlled when specifically dangerous or anti-social.” [51] She had been impressed with men like Gerard Swope and Julius Rosenwald, the latter attempting similar experiments with stock ownership for his employees at Sears, Roebuck& Company in Chicago.  Even with the financial crisis of 1929, Addams could write in 1930 that “a mixed type of state with competitive and cooperative elements may have the greatest survival value and prove to be the most serviceable.”[52] She could even look with hopeful anticipation of the globalization of American business.  In the General Electric plants she had visited in China and Japan she had witnessed the improvement of the workers of these countries “so long regarded as mere labor power, lifted into regions where a standard of living became a matter of world-wide concern.”[53] She was happy to acknowledge the Hull-House link with Gerard Swope, who “was preparing to announce an unemployment plan designed to make funds available for such of the company’s 75,000 employees as may be forced into idleness in time of business depression.”[54] Swope had acknowledged the influence of Hull-House and Addams in a letter in which he detailed the new plan.[55] “In September 1931, with the economy mired in depression, Swope’s vision of an organized capitalism became the basis for the much publicized Swope Plan.  All major firms, he proposed, should be organized into mandatory  trade associations, and under federal supervision these should regulate economic activity and provide social insurance programs.” [56]

Initially met with strong criticism from the business community, Swope’s approach was adopted in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, and Swope served on such implementing agencies as the Industrial Advisory Board, the National Labor Board, and the Business and Advisory and Planning Council. Swope supported the New Deal after 1934, unlike the majority of businessmen, although he continued to maintain that industrial self-government should be an important part of any American plan.  He also advocated the creation of a federal social insurance system and from the start advocated that both employers and employees contribute to such a program.[57] When 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 the major industrialists formed a subcommittee that voiced a minority opinion and offered their support to President Roosevelt.  Swope became one of thirty business and professional leaders who served as voluntary economic advisers to the administration.  Swope’s advocacy of the social security system came out of his belief in the cooperation of private and public sectors to create a humane society. When the Supreme Court declared the National Recovery Act unconstitutional in 1935, Swope went public: “Maximum hours and minimum wages, and the abolition of child labor have come to stay, despite the verdict on the NRA.”[58]

Addams would have been gratified with the news of Swope’s advocacy of the Social Security Act whose passage she did not live to see. It was, perhaps, the highest example of the kind of enlightened industrial relations she had envisioned when she began her advocacy of a social citizenship for both capital and labor. How much she would have credited Swope’s Hull-House experiences in shaping his social policies we can only conjecture.

Addams’s The Second Twenty Years was published in November, 1930, before the financial crash had become a deep and catastrophic economic depression.  During the final five years of her life, Addams endured health crises and weakened physical well-being; she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, which helped to repair the long rejection by many Americans of her international policies that had begun in 1915. She withstood the death of her life partner, Mary Rozet Smith in 1934.  And until her death, she remained engaged in peace movement activities and advocated for New Deal programs. Hull-House had significant connections to the New Deal because many of the New Dealers were former Hull-House residents or allies of the reform network in which the settlement was a leading force.[59] Historians have linked the powerful women of Hull-House with the New Deal and the construction of the welfare state but have overlooked the powerful men of Hull-House who were also significant players in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administrations.  Gerard Swope’s advocacy of New Deal reforms is an example of the male dominion that emanated from Hull-House and stretched to the national level of leadership at a crucial time in America’s struggle with industrialization.

This paper is a beginning effort to use the gender lens in a more complicated interpretation of the construction of social roles for men and women. As the editor of a decade-long research project that culminated in a reference book on Chicago women, I share with the historians of the 1980s and 1990s the goal of uncovering the role of women in society in all of the depth and complexity that such work requires. It was critically important to bring women out of the shadows and when historians did so, they were shocked by the amount of work that women had accomplished before the vote was achieved and during a long period in which cultural constructions of femininity and womanhood, along with legal disabilities, made it difficult for women to change institutions and empower themselves.  Determining how women were able to achieve political and policy influence, then, was a question of enormous importance. Without this foundational work it would not be possible to ask the questions this paper raised.  This paper has focused entirely on Hull-House, but it argues that the more complicated gender story that it is attempting to tell has value for the interpretation of progressivism and post-progressive reform of capitalism that has suddenly become even more timely.  The progressives remain a difficult group to interpret.  The identity and meaning of progressivism continues to challenge historians.  The revised gender model of Hull-House as a space for a new kind of interaction between men and women may help to get at the dynamics of social policy formation and political activism that formed the modern American welfare state.

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[1] Helen L. Horowitz,  Hull House as Women’s Space.” Chicago History, Vol. 12 (1983):40-55; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (Summer 1985): 658-77; Robyn Muncy, Creating A Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 

[2] Minna Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930. University of Chicago Press, 1990; Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn,  Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945. The University of North Carolina Press, 1993; Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.  Ironically, the first modern book on the settlement movement in the United States, Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement 1890-1914.  Oxford University Press, 1967, remains an amazingly comprehensive study. Davis was quite aware of the women in the movement and how the settlements offered an important alternative for the growing numbers of college-educated women who had a sense of uselessness; but he also noted that male college students also wanted to put theory into action. (Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 37.)

[3] Charlene Haddock Seigfried,. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Mary Jo. Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918 (New York: Transaction Books, 1988); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge University Press, 1991; Dorothy Ross, “Gendered Social Knowledge: Domestic Discourse, Jane Addams, and the Possibilities of Social Science,” in Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years edited by Helene Silverberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[4] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Introduction,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions by the residents of Hull-House (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007; originally published 1895.)

[5] Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 20-22; Fink discusses “a distinctive women’s intellectual culture,” 23, following Dorothy Ross’s lead. See also Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), especially his chapter on Chicago.

[6] Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades; The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D. (Beverly, Mass.: OEM Press, 1995; originally published 1943),108.

[7] Jane Addams [Address at the Wedding of Mary Hill and Gerard Swope. August 1901], in JAMC (Reel 46-1069), Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.                            

[8] Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott. University of Illinois Press, 1983; Ellen Fitzpatrick,  Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform. Oxford University Press, 1990; Robyn Muncy, Creating A Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 

[9] Robert M. Lovett, excerpt from his autobiography All Our Years, printed in Mary Lynn Bryan & Allen Davis, One Hundred Years At Hull-House, pp. 166-167;

[10] Information taken from a list that was prepared in 1929 of all Hull-House Residents who had lived in the House for at least six consecutive months and had entered into its activities. The names were organized into groups that divided the former (and current) residents according to professional/occupational categories and gave their current business and home addresses. There was a note indicating that the Hull-House Association files were incomplete regarding former residents. See: Hull-House Residents 1889-1929, Hull-House Association Records, folder 294, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, UIC.

[11] HH Yearbook , 1934, 69.

[12] My sources began with the list cited above and these additional materials: Alice Miller, “Hull House,” The Charities (February 1892): 167-173, clipping in Hull House Scrapbook I, HHA Records, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library (RJDL), UIC; “Noble Work at Hull House,” Chronicle, June 9, 1895; Jane Addams to [Enos M.] Barton, 1896 Nov 6,  Rockford College Archives, in JAMC (Reel 3-0492-0495), Spec. Coll. RJD Lib., UIC; Florence Kelley, “Hull-House,” New England Magazine 18, no. 5 (July 1898): 550-66; HH Bulletin, 1903-04, vol. 6, no. 1;  HH Bulletin, 1906-07, 5-6; 1910, 2; Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, December 10, 1910, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 5-1393-1395), Spec. Coll. RJD Lib., UIC; Hull-House Yearbook, 1921, 4; Adena Miller Rich, “Report to Hull-House Trustees,” November 27, 1935, Adena Miller Rich Papers, Folder 17, Spec. Coll.,  RJD Lib., UIC; List of Residents, Autumn, 1935, Adena Miller Rich Papers, folder 40, Spec. Coll.; “New Residents—Fall 1936,” (October 5, 1936, pp. 1-3) Adena Miller Rich Papers, folder 40; “Occupations of the Residents of Hull-House,” (1935-36, pp. 1-2), Adena Miller Rich Papers, folder 40; Hull-House Magazine, vol.I, no.1 (November 1939); Donna Hodgman, “People Live At Hull-House,” 1943, typescript, Jane Addams Memorial Collection , Spec. Coll., UIC; Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers, Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum; Mary Lynn Bryan, editor. “Residents and Workers at H.H.” The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (1996).

[13] Robyn Muncy, Creating A Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9-10. In 1911 there were 400 settlements in the U.S. so these statistics only reflect half of the houses. So we have to settle for a very incomplete overview of male participation in settlement houses that were sexually integrated.

[14] Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, Dec. 21, 1931, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1 in JAMC (reel 23-139), Spec. Coll. Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[15] Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, Dec. 10, 1910, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 5-1393-1395).

[16] Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, March 14, 1935, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 26-1188).

[17] There is a complicated gender story involved with the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and its transformation into the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Here I am indicating only that Graham Taylor who definitely had the male advantage of career opportunities in the traditional ministry, and in other fields such as academe or medicine, felt an urgent need to create something new for men and women. See: Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 66-92.

[18] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years At Hull-House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 16-17.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964 ), 221-222. First published in 1902.

[21] Maureen Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City 1871-1933. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002) argues that women and men’s experiences were sufficiently different and that the women’s political culture which emerged in part out of settlement houses and women’s clubs led to a different vision of the city from that of male reformers. This book expands an earlier article where Flanagan compares the Women’s City Club and the [Men’s] City Club in Chicago.

[22] Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, 61.

[23] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Smith, Mary Rozet,” in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[24] Addams, the daughter of an Illinois State Senator and businessman who died in 1881, inherited a portion of his estate and was able to restore the old Hull home’s interior and contribute to the settlement budget, albeit with contributions from others, until about 1895. Addams was clearly a privileged woman who did not need to work; she was not, however, rich, as attested to the small amount of property and outright cash she had at the time of her death.                                                 

[25] The one exception to this is the relationship she had with Helen Culver; the incorporation of Hull-House in 1895 was a condition imposed by Culver before she would make a permanent relationship with Addams who, from 1889, had leased the house and had negotiated for each new lot for the expansion of the complex. Allen B. Pond to Helen Culver, April 18, 1906. JAMC Reel 4-1331, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.  See also: Jane Addams Memorial Collection correspondence, 1889, reel 2.  Letters to landlord Helen Culver from Jane Addams in March 1890.  Through the early years Addams struggled to get Culver to donate rent and eventually more buildings, finally convincing her after several years to offer some of the lots on the block for sale.  See especially the letter from Jane Addams to “Dearest” (Mary Rozet Smith) March 23, 1898, JAMC reel 2.

[26] The Hull homestead was the building where Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr opened the settlement house in 1889. For a good biography of Helen Culver see: Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, editors, Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 20010.

[27] See the biographical entry of Wilmarth in Women Building Chicago. Wilmarth, among other distinctions, was the mother-in-law of Harold Ickes, a young Chicago lawyer who later went to Washington D.C.

[28] This data has been gathered primarily from the Minutes of the Hull-House Association, the Hull-House Year Books and Bulletins: April 25, 1895, March 14, 1903; April 14, 1903; October 15, 1907; January 27, 1908; April 14, 1908: October 30, 1928; November 1, 1928; April 9, 1929; June 18, 1929; October 29, 1929;  April 29, 1930;May 27, 1935, Board of Trustees’ Minutes, Hull-House  Collection, Dept. of Spec. Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Hull-House Bulletin 3, no. 12 (November and December 1899): 4. Biographical information on Sewell Avery: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; for Helen Bowen Blair: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; “Helen Culver Funeral To Be Held Saturday.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 20, 1925, pg. 10; “Helen Culver Leaves U. of C. $600,000.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 14, 1925, pg. 1; “C.L. Hutchinson, Banker, Is Dead. Long Active in Civics, Art, and Charities.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 8, 1924. pg. 1. See biographies of Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, Louise deKoven Bowen and Helen Culver in Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[29] Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, June 27, 1895, in JAMC (reel 2-1637-1645), Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

[30] Jane Addams to [Barnum, Gertrude], July 25, 1896, Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, in JAMC [  ] Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[31] Ibid.

[32] The major study of who funded Hull-House was published by Kathryn Kish Sklar:  “Who Funded Hull House.” Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power. Edited by Kathleen McCarthy. Rutgers University Press, 1990. This study focused on the early years of the social settlement.

[33]  Quarterly meeting of the Trustees of Hull House Association, October 30, 1928; Meeting of Trustees of Hull-House Association, November 1, 1928, Hull House Collection, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, UIC.

[34] Bowen’s version is in her autobiography Growing Up With A City (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 82. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Who Funded Hull House?” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women Philanthropy and Power. Edited by Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 141. Fn.39.

[35] I have written about Louise deKoven Bowen who was a prominent Episcopalian in an essay, “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Calling in the Episcopal Church: Chicago, 1880-1989,” in Episcopal Women: Gender, Spirituality, and Commitment in an American Mainline Denomination edited by Catherine M. Prelinger (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 21-22.

[36] Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, February 3, 1895, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 2-1647-1652), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[37] There were always critics, but Addams did not experience serious and sustained criticism until her pacifism during World War I. This was a difficult period for her personally but in an extraordinary demonstration of loyalty, Louise deKoven Bowen, a pro-war Progressive, stood by Addams and continued to fund the settlement as well as raise money from others, defending her friend and colleague at every turn. Louise deKoven Bowen, “Letter About Hull House,” in volume 2 of Speeches, Addresses, and Letters of Louise deKoven Bowen, ed. Mary Humphreys (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, 1937): 789-92.See Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. (Chicago: Ivan Dees, 2000), pp. 251-281, for a discussion of the attacks on Addams.

[38] Adena Miller Rich is the exception that proves the pattern. As the immediate successor to Addams, this Hull-House resident who headed the Immigrants’ Protective League, an affiliated agency at the settlement that had a national reputation in the field, Rich reluctantly agreed to takeover after Addams’s death, but insisted that she be a part-time, unpaid head resident The Welfare Council of Chicago urged the trustees to find a full-time paid professional as this was becoming the trend in settlements. Charlotte Carr and Russell Ballard called themselves directors and received executive salaries. HHA Minutes of Special Meeting of Trustees, August 2, 1935; HHA Minutes, Jan 8, 1937, HHA Box 1, Folder 5; 

[39] For example, no one dared suggest that Professor Robert Morss Lovett, of the University of Chicago, and his wife, Ida, leave Hull-House, where they had resided for many years, when the American Legion accused him of disloyalty. Trolander, Settlement Houses and the Great Depression, 104-105.

[40] See Victoria Brown’s article in Schneirov, Richard, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, editors. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics. (Chicago & Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

[41] Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers:  A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago together with comments and essays on problems growing out of social conditions.(1895). See Addams essay on the function of the settlement and labor.

[42] See: Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), especially her chapter “Industrial Amelioration.”

[43] Philip Davis, And Crown They Good (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), 89-90.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 394.

[46]

[47] David Loth, Swope of G.E. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 58-59.

[48] Ellis W. Hawley, “Swope, Gerard,” Dictionary of American Biography, John A. Garraty, editor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), Supplement Six, 614.

[49] “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.

[50] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years, 389.

[51] Ibid., 390.

[52] Ibid.. 391.

[53] Ibid., 396.

[54] Ibid., 395.

[55] 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.

[56] Hawley, “Swope, Gerard,” DAB, Supplement Six, 615.

[57] “Gerard Swope Backs Job Insurance Idea.” New York Times, July 2, 1934, pg. 42; “Opposes Insurance Bill. Gerard Swope Wants Employes [sic] to Aid in Job Compensation.” New York Times, March 22, 1935, pg. 3.

[58] “Hour-Wage Minimums To Stay, Swope Says.” New York Times, June 2, 1935, pg. 3.

[59] Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1963); Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 3; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 152-153.