We are delighted to share with our readers unpublished papers and presentations by advisory board member Rima Lunin Schultz. She recently donated her research files on Hull-House to the Project.
Rima Lunin Schultz, historian with a Ph.D. from Boston University, has written articles and books on Jane Addams, Chicago women in Catholic and Protestant faith traditions and the culture of urban elites. Her research challenges earlier interpretations of Jane Addams and Progressive Era reform. She edited and wrote the website: Urban Experience in Chicago, Hull House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2003-2018.
Schultz is the co-editor with Adele Hast of Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Indiana University, 2001), which was named Best Reference Book in 2001 by the American Library Association. She wrote the Introduction to the University of Illinois Press reprint of the path-breaking sociological study, Hull-House Maps and Papers (2007, paperback 2024). She is co-author of Eleanor Smith’s Hull-House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams’s Chicago, Haymarket 2020. With Kathryn Kish Sklar, Schultz authored “Jane Addams’ Wife” for the Women and Social Movement in the U.S. website, Alexander Press, October 2021. She is co-author with Ann Keating on the forthcoming book, In The Shadow of Jane Addams: Hull House and Planning in a Working Class Neighborhood, University of Illinois Press, April 2027.
She served as historian and assistant director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the University of Illinois at Chicago. Schultz is an advisor to the Jane Addams Papers Project at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and is the past president of the Chicago Area Women’s History Council, now the Chicago Women’s History Center.
Posts by Rima Lunin Schultz
-
Women’s Activism Before the Second Wave: The Case of Florence Scala’s Leadership in the Working Class Neighborhood of Hull-House
By Rima Lunin Schultz In 1963, as Ann Keating recounted in her prior blog, Florence Scala had already been engaged as a social activist for several decades in the neighborhood made famous by Jane Addams. She had participated as a leader in the grassroots organization of…
-
Democratizing the Arts and Crafts Movement: Jane Addams and Hull-House as A Lever for Social reform
This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz on September 11, 2020. Jane Addams was one of the most well-known and influential women reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She founded the Hull-House, a social settlement that became a leader in the new…
-
Leading by Example: Hull-House, Jane Addams, and Social Change: Addams as a Political Woman
This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz on July 17, 2020. One of the major pieces of legislation that would forever change the landscape of workers’ lives in the United States was the Social Security Act of 1935, passed just months after Jane Addams’s death. …
-
Reconsidering Jane Addams’s Neighborhood Plan
This post was a paper delivered by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Urban History Seminar, held at the Chicago History Museum on February 16, 2017. “I went to S. Clark St. this morning to show tenement houses there to [George Ward Springer] a youth of wealth…
-
Jane Addams’s “Cultural Fables”: Neighbors’ Narratives as Political Rhetoric in Progressive-Era America.
This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz, and delivered at the Oral History Association meeting in Tampa, FL on October 15, 2015. This paper looks at how Jane Addams’s stories about her neighbors, what I am calling her “Cultural Fables,” are linked to the radical…
-
Jane Addams’s Dilemma: American Catholic Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1925
This post was presented by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Crossings and Dwellings Conference, Loyola University Chicago, on October 18, 2024. Historian Carol Coburn’s keynote address Thursday evening has deepened our understanding of the crucial role Catholic sisters have played in building and shaping Catholic culture…
-
Jane Addams’s Dilemma: American Catholic Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1925
This post was given by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Crossings and Dwellings Conference, held at Loyola University Chicago, on October 18, 2014. Historian Carol Coburn’s keynote address Thursday evening has deepened our understanding of the crucial role Catholic sisters have played in building and shaping…
-
Democratic Cosmopolitanism and the Hull-House Women’s Club; Race, Class and Ethnicity
The post is drawn from a presentation by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Urban History Association Sixth Biennial Conference, October 25-28, 2012. “Very early in its history the [Hull-House Women’s ] club,” Jane Addams tells us, “formed what was called ‘A Social Extension Committee.’ Once a…
-
Reading History in Twenty Years at Hull-House: Jane Addams’s Narrative Choices
This post was written by Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz and given at the Centennial Symposium on Twenty Years at Hull-House, at the Chicago History Museum, November 13, 2010. Most people, if they have read anything by Jane Addams, have read Twenty Years. It has become the…
-
Charlotte Carr’s Hull-House: Labor Activism, Cultural Production, and Race Relations, 1937-42
This post was written by Rima Lunin Schulz as a chapter for an unpublished book about Hull-House after Jane Addams ca. 2007-2009. Introduction She was to remain at Hull-House for only five years, but Charlotte Carr led the famous settlement through an uncertain but innovative moment…
-
After Jane Addams: Life at Hull-House from New Deal to Great Society, 1930-1963
This post is by Rima Lunin Schultz and was first given at the Urban History Seminar, at the Chicago History Museum, on November 8, 2007 The three decades immediately following the death of its legendary co-founder Jane Addams in 1935 are generally viewed as a period of chaos…
-
Break The Box: Redefining Urban Space: Jane Addams and The Experiment at Hull-House, 1889-1915.
This post was written by Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz on March 3, 2007. After seven years of searching for a way to live her life constructively, democratically, and autonomously, at age twenty-nine Jane Addams broke out of the traditional domestic box that society had constructed for women…
-
Progressive Era Feminism at Hull-House
This post was given by Rima Lunin Schultz as a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2005. In my work with the biographies of Chicago women associated with the first wave of feminism, roughly from the 1870s thru the 1920s, it struck me that there…
-
Art For the People, Art By the People: The Visual Arts at Hull-House, 1893-1945
This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz and presented at the Teacher’s Workshop at the Terra Museum of Art, on August 3, 2004 Today I want to tell you something about the history of Hull-House and the role of the visual arts in its programs…
-
What Role Did Jane Addams Conceive for the Settlement as an Educational Institution?
This post was delivered by Rima Lunin Schultz at a plenary panel on What Citizen Jane Can Teach Us, at an Interdisciplinary Conference on Higher Learning and Democracy, held at Rockford College, April 25-26, 2004. Jane Addams gives us no indication that she planned to establish…
-
“Staging Halsted Street (1939): An Unusual Production in Hull-House’s Theatrical History.”
This post comes from a talk by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Performing the People, The People Performing: Theatre and Dance at Hull-House Conference, held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, September 19-20, 2003. Before I launch into my formal talk, I would like to…
-
Research in Jane Addams
This post is from a talk by Rima Lunin Schultz at Swarthmore College in 2002. I’m dividing my talk into two parts to describe the two resources for studying Jane Addams of which I have a role: The first is the reference book Women Building Chicago…
-
Re-Thinking Jane Addams’s Religious Beliefs
This post was delivered by Rima Lunin Schultz at a Rediscovering Jane Addams Conference, held at Swarthmore College, on February 2, 2002. Jane Addams, founder of Hull-House, social reformer, suffragist, and pacifist, is one of the most admired women in American history. She has been called…