Legacy of Jane Addams: Policy & research

COFFEESHOP customers are often surprised to learn that Jane Addams imagined places like this coffeeshop as social work settings. Actually, it was one of earliest innovations introduced by her -- and the other women of Hull House.

The settlement house opened its doors on Halsted Street in Chicago in 1889. The coffeehouse opened shortly after that. It was to be a community gathering place, Addams said, where all would be welcome. The coffeehouse was both an informal drop-in place as well as the sponsor of a host of programs, including theater, music, lectures and debates.

By 1895, the coffeehouse experience was in print. It was included in one of the chapters which make up Hull House Maps and Papers. In 1910, Addams included the coffeehouse in her best-known book, Hull House Maps and Papers.

The coffeehouse idea was just one of a host of remarkable ideas from Addams and the women of Hull House. They also started a day care center for working mothers, a health clinic, a branch library and a public playground. All of these were innovations when they began more than a century ago -- new institutions which responded to specific community needs.

Addams and the women of Hull House were also involved in forming a host of community organizations. Among the best-known: NAACP, NASW, PTA, AAUW, American Civil Liberties Union and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. They also helped organize labor unions and cooperatives.

Little-known today is that all this activity was supported by anextraordinary amount of research. From the earliest days of Hull House,Addams and her colleagues were conducting research. Their first book, Hull House Maps and Papers, is a detailed study of their neighborhood including both quantitative and qualitative research. There were many other published studies by Addams and her sister social researchers, from Safeguards for City Youths (1914) to Tenements of Chicago (1936). All of this "left a legacy that formed a basis for sociology as a way of thinking, an area of study and a methodological approach to data collecting," writes Lawrence Newman in a new edition of a textbook called Social Research Methods published i 2000.

But Newman's acknowledgement of the legacy of research by Addams and the other women of Hull House is one of the few one will find in academic circles. Whether one looks in social work, sociology or urban studies, one will find little about these feminist scholars.

Another scholar, David Sibley, confirms this in an essay about research: "Virtually all texts in urban geography and urban sociology... present the same history of the subject. In this conventional account, urban studies began in Chicago in the school of sociology about 1910...In fact, there were other authors...analyzing urban problems at the same time and in the same place...These largely forgotten authors were nearly all women."

Why haven't Addams and other women scholars of Hull House received credit for their research? Blatant sexism is the most important factor, according to a number of writers.

Mary Jo Deegan reaches this conclusion in her book called Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School. "Despite her [Addams] vision and contributions... her authorship..has been obliterated from the annals of the discipline and many of her ideas were only selectively used and distorted."

David Sibley, also a sociologist, agrees, offering two quotes from male social scientists to illustrate their sexists attitudes. One referred to the women of Hull House as "the old maids downtown who were wet-nursing social reformers." A second claimed that "the greatest damage done to the city of Chicago was not the product of corrupt politicians or criminals but the women reformers."

Newman, writing in the research text, says Addams was the target of gender bias on the part of higher education and as a result was "unable to secure regular work in universities.