Hull-House Highlights

"Hull House Maps and Papers"
Nationalities Map No. 1, Polk Street to Twelfth, Halsted Street to Jefferson, Chicago.

With the arrival of Julia C. Lathrop in 1890 and Florence Kelley in 1892, Hull-House embarked on the road of social science. Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop were already exploring this direction and Kelley's knowledge of European Marxism and her university training in economics fostered investigation and advocacy. Kelley and trade union leader Alzina Parsons Stevens began to collect statistics for the Illinois Bureau of Labor on the sweatshops that proliferated in the Hull-House neighborhoods. Hull-House Maps and Papers, published in 1895, exemplified the approach taken by this group of residents.

Sharon Haar counts twenty-three investigations conducted by Hull-House residents between the years 1892 and 1933 including Hull-House Maps and Papers. Haar contends that Hull-House women investigators "worked through relationships of affinity via both the activities of the settlement house and municipal reform" whereas "the burgeoning urban sociology movement [the men of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago] rested on the belief in detached scientific objectivity..." (Harr, "Location, Location, Location: Gender and the Archeology of Urban Settlement," The Journal of Architectural Education, 55, no. 3, p. 154.)

The Abbotts, Breckinridge, and Hamilton increasingly did their research and advocacy in several "work cultures." They were the first generation of university-trained specialists; they chose to do both investigative research and advocacy, the latter a result of their connection with Hull-House. Their careers included government service, university teaching, clinical practice, and social science investigation. Although words like "ambition" and "personal achievement" were not the vocabulary of settlement residents, women had a dialogue with themselves and each other about how to balance family, work, and their civic or social responsibility. Residency at Hull-House created space where women's professional careers were encouraged but their commitment to activism, the concrete expression of the social claim, was supported through the collective work of the house.

By Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz, Director and Editor, Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963.

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