What Services Were Offered At Hull House Which Amendment Gave Women's Right To Vote

Exterior of Hull House complex along Halsted showing many buildings — The exterior of the Hull-Firm complex, looking northward forth Halsted Street. From the Hull-House Yearbook 1906-1907, page seven.
https://archive.org/details/hullhouseyearboo1906hull/style/2up

The content for this article was researched and written by Jade Ryerson, an intern with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education.

During the early 1900s, working-class immigrants in Chicago endured housing problems and unsanitary living weather. To address these issues, social reformers established institutions chosen settlement houses, which offered social services for the community. Hull-House was the commencement settlement house established in the United States. It was designated a National Celebrated Landmark in 1965.

Many Hull-House staff members were white women who came from upper- and middle-form families. They focused on decent housing as a basic need and led the accuse to reform the city'south waste product disposal, sanitation, and housing services. At least one reformer became known as the "Garbage Lady" for her efforts.

black and white photo of seven people living in a two room tenement — A family of seven occupying a ii-room tenement in Chicago. These crowded conditions -- mutual across Chicago -- were inherently unhealthy. From "Tenement Conditions in Chicago" by Robert Hunter, 1901, folio 63 (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Tape/000955441)

"Foul Across Clarification"

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-Firm in the Nineteenth Ward on the Almost West Side of Chicago. Hull-House offered social services for working-form immigrants who primarily came from Eastern Europe and lived in the ward. Many of them worked in local sweatshops and garment factories and earned low wages.

Customs residents faced unsanitary weather condition at home and at work. The Nineteenth Ward was densely populated and there were not plenty places to live. The Chicago River separated the ward from the city's central business commune known equally the Loop. The river and back alleys became dumping grounds for manufacturers who cared more near profits than public welfare. When the river flooded and the sewers overflowed, man waste material and garbage spilled into the streets. Diseases spread quickly and contributed to the highest infant mortality rate in the city.

Addams offered a vivid description in her volume Twenty Years at Hull-Firm. She wrote:

"The streets are inexpressibly muddy, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul across description."

View of a Chicago Tenement Alley, unpaved, muddy, and full of trash — A Chicago aisle. Tenements filled lots from street to aisle, making these unpaved and filthy places some of the merely places for children to play. With no trash collection, residents dumped their waste into the alleys. From "Tenement Weather in Chicago" past Robert Hunter, 1901, page 131.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000955441

The 'Garbage Ladies'

Some Hull-House residents took their concerns across providing services at the House and advocated for improved community infrastructure and other social improvements. Hull House Women'southward Club members spearheaded sanitation and housing reforms. In 1898, the mayor appointed Jane Addams as Chicago'due south first adult female garbage inspector. 2 years later, Addams and children'southward rights activist Florence Kelley conducted a mapping projection and door-to-door surveys in the Nineteenth Ward. They documented how the ward's physical conditions affected the health of the people living at that place.

Addams and Kelley too studied if bad plumbing and contaminated water helped to spread typhoid fever and other diseases. Addams tasked Hull-Firm worker and epidemiologist Dr. Alice Hamilton to investigate. Hamilton discovered that house flies transmitted the affliction. Her data underpinned several sanitation regulations enacted for residences and workplaces.

Mary McDowell, a former Hull-House kindergarten teacher and Hull-Business firm Women's Club member, became known as the "Garbage Lady" and "Angel of the Stockyards." McDowell had researched European garbage collection systems and led a settlement business firm in the Dorsum of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. At her urging, the city created a Commission on Waste in 1913. McDowell served every bit the chairperson. In this part, she directed efforts to clean upward the Bubbly Creek branch of the Chicago River. It was called Bubbly Creek because Due south Side meatpackers routinely dumped then much waste into the river that it "bubbled up."

Ultimately, Addams and Kelley's survey exposed the corruption, negligence, and indifference at the root of the ward's housing problems. Their data illustrated a relationship between a neighborhood'south cleanliness and its land rents. Manufacturers, landlords, urban center officials, and politicians profited from Chicago's ethnic and class divisions. Addams and Kelley revealed how these groups unfairly enforced sanitation and building codes to maintain slums and accelerate their ain interests.

black and white photos of babies sitting in bathtubs — Bathing babies at Hull-House. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, almost all of the tenements were without bathtubs, making cleanliness and disease prevention almost impossible. Hull-House provided bathing facilities for children and adults.
Photo from the Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago (https://explore.chicagocollections.org/ead/uic/25/nk66/)

Across the Bins and to the Election Box

Addams too encouraged not-activist women to become involved. In her 1910 essay, "Why Women Should Vote," she urged women to extend their traditional domestic duties to the election box. Addams stressed that women's "individual conscience and devotion are no longer constructive" to safeguard their families. Modern lodge had grown as well big and complicated. Health and safety were at present "utterly dependent upon the city administration" to enact laws to "protect the home from the dangers incident to mod life." Addams argued that voting for these regulations enabled women to proceed to fulfill their traditional duties.

Hull-Business firm workers also advocated for protective labor laws for women and children and other social and political reforms. They demonstrated the powerful affect that women could take on the environment and the political landscape.

Selected Sources:

Addams, Jane. 20 Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. New York: Macmillan, 1912. A Celebration of Women Writers. University of Pennsylvania Digital Library. Accessed December xv, 2020.

Addams, Jane. "Why Women Should Vote." Ladies' Home Journal 27 (Jan 1910): 21-22. Jane Addams Digital Edition. Accessed December 15, 2020.

Hunter, Robert. Tenement Weather in Chicago. City Homes Association, 1901.

Mann, Susan A. "Pioneers of Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice." Feminist Formations 23, no. 2 (Summer 2011): one-25. Accessed December fifteen, 2020.

Platt, Harold Fifty. "Jane Addams and the Ward Dominate Revisited: Class, Politics, and Public Health in Chicago, 1890-1930." Ecology History v, no. 2 (April 2000): 194-222. Accessed December 15, 2020.