Hull House was a center of feminism

Women's History Month is a good time to recall that Hull House was
much more than an experiment in social work. It was also a center of feminist
thought and action, something which is not widely known.

Hull House opened in 1889. It very quickly emerged as a leading center of the "first wave" of feminism which was sweeping across the United States in the late 19th century. Suffrage was at the center of this movement, but there were plenty of other issues as well, including temperance and pacifism. The women of Hull House were active in all of these. Three of the Hull House residents -- including Jane Addams -- emerged as major national figures in the women's movement.

Addams and the other women at Hull saw themselves as feminists. They were committed to gender equity in all areas of political and social life. Addams used the word feminist in her writing. One early example, in 1916, can be found in The Long Road of Women's Memory. In that book, she contrasts "feminist" with "militarist," concluding that one cannot be a
true feminist unless one committed to pacifism.

The women of Hull House worked with feminists in Chicago and across the United States. For example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an important feminist theorist, lived at Hull House for a time. Shortly after her visit, she wrote Women and Economics (1898).

Also, the women of Hull played a leading role in the organization of a host of social and political groups for women. Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) outlines some of the earliest ones: A Hull House Women's Club supported a wide range of civic improvement projects and was connected "with some of the most vigorous movements in the he city." A Monday evening girls club called Libuse studied heroic women in history. The Eight Hour Club was organized by young working women to lobby for an eight hour day.

At the national level, Hull House women were involved in organizing the National Congress of Mothers (PTA), AAUW, General Federation of Women's Clubs and a national association of African-American women. Addams and others were also founders of the Women's peace Party and the Women's International League for Peace and freedom as well as the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

At Hull House, Addams and her colleagues created not only an alternative workplace for women, but also an alternative way to live. From its start, Hull was a cooperative living community of women (and a few men). This idea was extended to working women in the neighborhood through housing co-ops such as the Jane Club.

People around the US saw Hull as a center for feminism. The institution legitimized the involvement of women in public life. It offered a place for intellectual discussion among women (and of women with men). It served as a testing ground for a variety of institutions to help parents, particularly mothers. Among these: a nursery, a day care center, a
kindergarten, a well-baby clinic and a playground.

Many women around the country wrote to (Addams and other at Hull House) for advice. For example, one young woman, soon to be married, wrote to Addams in 1916 asking if she was required to change her last name to that of her husband when she married. Addams responded: "It is not a legal matter to
take the husband's name. It is, I believe, only a matter of custom."

Another woman, writing from Louisville, Kentucky, asked for advice on a
career. "I would like to do something good in the world -- not merely
exist," she wrote, noting that she would not settle for the stereotypical
women's job of stenographer. Still another woman wrote to Addams to thank
her for her support of working women: "I have tramped the streets, bewildered
and weary, looking for work," she wrote. "I have known the bitter, bitter
loneliness of the hired girl."

It's an extraordinary history. But it's a history which is largely absent from our textbooks, including those in social work. Women's History Month gives us an opportunity to reclaim this and other aspects of our past which have been lost.