Twenty Years at Hull-House; with autobiographical notes, published in 1910, is the story of the most famous Settlement House in America by Jane Addams, a leading Progressive Era reformer and the founder of Hull-House. Addams’s autobiographical account of her efforts to improve conditions for working-class immigrants in Chicago’s West Side slums was her most successful book and helped stimulate the development of social work in the United States. Addams’s other books include Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930). In addition to working for the rights of children, women, and laborers, Addams served as the first president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1931, Addams became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her philanthropy.

This guide is based upon the 1999 Signet Classic version of her book, with a foreword by Henry Steele Commager.

Plot Summary

By the late 19th century, rapid industrialization and immigration were changing the landscape of American cities. Overcrowding, poverty, and competing cultural enclaves created volatile and unsanitary urban spaces. Fourteen-hour workdays, child labor, industrial accidents, and illiteracy were common among the working class. The United States did not yet have protective legislation, social security, or other welfare systems, leaving the immigrant and other urban communities defenseless against natural and human-created crises. Inspired by a trip to East London during which Addams witnessed the extreme poverty of the British urban poor, Jane Addams founded Hull-House in 1889 as an experimental effort to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial area on Chicago’s West Side. Addams believed that opening a large, welcoming home where educated, middle-class reformers could reside in an urban, immigrant neighborhood would help bridge the gulf between new arrivals from the Old World and native-born Euro-Americans. Based on the British reformers’ Settlement Movement, Addams’s project was to socialize democracy: identifying and helping to meet neighborhood needs by providing a community center for social, educational, and charitable activities. Through the Settlement House, Addams extended middle-class women’s traditional role in the domestic sphere into the public sphere of social action.

Twenty Years at Hull-House begins in 1889 and traces the development of Addams’s concern with social justice from her childhood through her late twenties, when she moved into Hull-House. Since her mother died when Addams was two years old, Addams describes the influence of her Hicksite Quaker father on the development of her moral conscience and desire to help the impoverished. Her father’s honorable service in the Illinois state legislature during the Civil War and his friendship with President Abraham Lincoln further stimulated her passion for democracy. She was impressed with the idea that the people themselves were America’s great resource. At age 17, Addams entered Rockford Seminary, known as the “Mount Holyoke of the West.” Addams and the other students were enthusiastic about the opportunity for Rockford Seminary to acquire accreditation as a college in the new movement for women to attain a full college education. Trying to place the woman’s school on an equal level with the state’s male-only colleges, Addams competed in the Illinois intercollegiate oratorical contest. She was one of the first Rockford students to receive a bachelor’s degree when the school secured a college charter. Her ambition was to study medicine and live among the poor. However, Addams’s health complications, caused by a spinal difficulty, and the depression she suffered following her father’s death, prevented her from completing her studies at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. On a subsequent trip to Europe in 1883-1885, Addams was shocked by the wretched poverty she witnessed in East London. During a second trip to Europe in 1887-1888, Addams formulated a plan to start a Settlement House in a poor neighborhood in Chicago and visited Toynbee Hall, a Settlement House in England, for ideas.

Addams believed that her first generation of college-educated young women had no proper outlet for their abilities and energy; consequently, they felt a sense of uselessness. The Settlement Movement not only aided the urban working-class, but it also offered an opportunity for these middle-class young women to contribute to society. With her Rockford classmate and close friend, Ellen Gates Starr, Addams acquired a large residence, built by Chicago real estate developer Charles Hull in 1856, located in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood in 1889. Hull-House became a center of reform activity as more pioneering social workers, such as Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop, moved into the residence. Succeeding chapters of Twenty Years at Hull-House cover the reformers’ early undertakings at Hull-House when they learn about the needs of the immigrants in their neighborhood. They provide daycare nurseries and kindergartens for the children of working-class mothers, afternoon clubs for older children, and social and educational activities for adults in the evenings.

Addams also describes some of the reformers’ mistakes. When their investigations lead them to conclude that nutritious food prepared in a public kitchen would solve some of the immigrants’ dietary difficulties, they do not anticipate the difficulties of preferred ethnic tastes. The reformers learn that they have to adapt to what the neighborhood will accept rather than impose their own tastes and preconceived ideas. As the Hull-House residents learn more about the working conditions of their neighbors, they discover child labor and the harmful practices of the sweatshop system.

The reformers realize that they need to compile careful data and urge the passage of protective legislation in order to stop these industrial abuses. Increasingly, the dire conditions identified by the reformers require them to expand the traditional woman’s role into the public sphere of government activity. Addams recalls that to deal with the factory abuses, the Hull-House women had to engage in their first government lobbying at the state capitol. Addams cites a number of other Hull-House residents whose reform efforts lead them into pathbreaking positions, such as Florence Kelley, who becomes the state’s chief factory inspector.

Further chapters discuss other Hull-House investigations and reforms, such as lobbying for the passage of an Illinois law that establishes the first juvenile court in the United States. Addams also describes the unmerited criticisms received by Hull-House during labor strikes and anti-immigrant hysteria because of the reformers’ defense of free speech and equal protection under the law.

Twenty Years at Hull-House concludes with descriptions of the arts and crafts, music, and drama offered at the Settlement House, as well as the various types of education, from literature lectures to English language classes to trade instruction. Most of the Hull-House residents had widely differing interests and tastes and supported themselves in Chicago with their professional occupations, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and artists, giving their leisure time to Settlement activities. Addams believed that without the improvement of the whole society, no individual could hope for an enduring improvement of her own condition and democracy could not endure.