By B. Allan Quigley

Jane Addams was an unlikely champion of literacy. She was born into a wealthy family in Cedarville, Illinois. She was raised in the wealthiest area of Rockford, near Chicago. Jane attended the Rockford Seminary where she studied the humanities. Most of her wealthy female friends would go on to marry wealthy men and be involved with charities. However, this was not the route Jane Addams chose. Instead, her lifetime of work for social justice was to win her a place in world history and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 (Haberman, 1972).

Jane Addams was a remarkable learner. She read at length. While others around her were aware of social problems, Addams studied them, reflected on them, and then took action. Her studies and reflections would then begin again. As Davis explained, “Jane Addams never became a radical in religion, in economics or in politics, but she did become a social reformer, a defender of organized labor, and she did come to believe that her main task was to eliminate poverty rather than to comfort the poor” (1973, p. 74).

Jane Addams became aware of social inequality when she travelled across Europe with other women. All these women were from wealthy families. During the trip she was stunned by the inequality where some lived in great wealth and others in abject poverty. She came home to Rockford “convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city [of Chicago] where many primitive and actual needs are found” (Ferris, p. 219).

With her lifelong friend, Brenda Starr Gates, Addams moved on September 18, 1889, into a house formerly belonging to the Hull family. They were now in the very heart of the worst slums of late 19th century Chicago. Area garbage pickup was unheard of; sewage systems were primitive; children played with rats as pets; and alcoholism, unemployment, disease, death and domestic filth surrounded them (Quigley, 2007).

These women looked out on a sea of immigrants who had come for the American Dream, but were living the nightmare of urban poverty. The women of Hull House started with what they knew best, providing a “liberal education” (Quigley, 2006).

Educated in literature and the arts, they began a discussion and reading group for young women. They created a lending library of books and framed photographs of master paintings, even delivering them to the tenement houses. They started an exhibit of works of art and encouraged the “Chicago matrons . . . to loan artwork from their private collections” (Bryan, Bair, De Angury, p. 550). They offered courses on Dante and Browning to the immigrant working women in the area, then “other residents led Shakespeare and Plato clubs” (Bryan, Bair, De Angury, 2003, p. 549). A Working People’s Social Science Club was created. With connections to America’s most influential, they invited speakers such as John Dewey and Susan B. Anthony to visit and speak at Hull House.

There were

• kindergarten classes in the morning,
• club meetings for older children in the afternoon
• clubs or courses for adults, especially English as a Second Language (ESL) and basic reading and writing classes in the evenings (Haberman, 1972)

The response was amazing. “Some 50,000 people . . . came to the House” (Linn, 1935, p. 115) in the first year, and in “the second year the number increased to 2,000 per week” (Linn, p. 115). The Hull House facility grew to cover several city blocks.

The mission of Hull House was to

• make education possible for the marginalized
• educate the wealthy about the conditions of immigrants
• inform the wealthy about the work of Hull House and other Settlement Houses in other cities (Quigley, 2006)

However, they soon saw that their liberal arts approach had its distinct limits. Health problems, unemployment, disease and death faced them every day.

Addams and her colleagues turned to projects that might help lessen poverty. They began

• craft-making courses
• a book bindery workshop
• dressmaking courses and millinery courses
• a Boy’s Club to teach “work in wood, iron, and brass . . . copper and tin; . . . commercial photography, printing, telegraphy, and electrical construction” (Lagemann,1985, p. p. 179)
• an unemployment bureau
• a public kitchen to teach cooking and provide nutritious American meals (this project largely failed since many of the immigrants would not cook or eat such “foreign food”)
• birthing, washing and preparing the dead for funerals

The movement went from literary discussions to hands-on involvement in people’s struggles (Lagemann). But even this change was not enough.

At this time, those men, women and children who could find work were working long hours in terrible conditions. The suggestion of an eight hour work day “was connected in the minds of many employers not only with laziness but directly with anarchy” (Linn, p. 101). As the Hull House team saw it, the marginalized would forever remain marginalized if they did not have an equal chance. The activism of the Hull House women in the 1920s and ‘30s is credited with today’s U.S. fair labour laws. These laws restricted work hours to eight hours per day and enforced bans on child labour (Quigley, 1996). Addams became the first woman president of the National Conference on Social Work--the beginning of social work in America as we know it.

Addams also saw the inequalities women faced. She fought for women’s rights in the suffragette movement. She was the founder and first president of the National Federation of Settlements; the National Chair of the Women’s Peace Party, and the president and co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Addams’ work for the poor and for peace as America headed into World War One, led to her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jane Addams and her colleagues shifted their ideological purposes. Addams began her work with trying to “uplift victims,” and ended it fighting from the belief that poverty and low literacy “flow from social causes” (Diliberto, 1999, p. 254).

The Hull House story shows the shift towards social justice in literacy (Demetrion, 2005; Quigley, 2006). Today ideological tensions pull literacy in so many directions. These tensions have grown out of the history of adult literacy. Today, some sponsors, academics and practitioners argue for vocational/workplace literacy; others argue for community-based/community developmental literacy; others argue that a liberal arts education is what is needed; yet others believe that learner voice must be heard and learner-centred humanism is the best approach. No sponsor, no program, no literacy educator is without a bias or working philosophy in at least one of these directions.

However, one lesson that can be taken from the Jane Addams story is that none of us can grow without experiencing, learning, reflecting, and acting - and then starting the cycle over again. So it is with our entire field. When we grow, so does our field and history plays a part in that growth.

Note: for an excellent pictorial tour of historic Hull House, go to the “Jane Addams Hull House Museum Website,” at http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/, and click on “Urban Experience.”)

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Note: Permission to use portions of "Building Professional Pride in Literacy" (2006) by A. Quigley has been granted by Krieger Publishing; an earlier version of these vignettes appeared in the Literacies journal in 2007.

Sources

Bryan, M., Bair, B., & DeAngury, M. (2003). The selected papers of Jane Addams, Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Davis, A. F. (1973). American heroine: The life and legend of Jane Addams. New York: Oxford University Press.

Demetrion, G. (2005). Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education: In Quest of a U.S. Democratic Politics of Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Diliberto, G. (1999). A useful woman: The early life of Jane Addams. New York: Scribner.

Ferris, H. (1943). When I was a girl: The stories of five famous women told by themselves. New York: The Macmillan Co.

Haberman, F. W. (Ed.), (1972). From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1926 -1950. Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam.

Linn, J. W. (1935). Jane Addams: A biography. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co.

Lagemann, E. C. (Ed.). (1985). Jane Addams on education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Quigley, A. (2006). Building professional pride in literacy. Malabar, FL: Krieger.

Quigley, A. (2007). Literacy’s Heroes and Heroines: Reclaiming our forgotten past. Literacies, 7, 4-11.