Jane Addams (1860-1935) was one of the leading White liberal reformers in the US. She founded Hull House in 1889 in the Near West Side of Chicago, then an immigrant slum. It was a settlement house that became the model throughout the US. She also helped to found the NAACP. She opposed the US entering the First World War. That got her kicked out of the Daughters of the American Revolution – but led her to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
A settlement house was where the well-to-do, mostly university students, lived among the poor while helping them. The houses became community centres that provided things like day care, food, money, education, training, after-school activities, playgrounds, community events like plays, help with finding work and help with the city’s opaque institutions, like prisons and poorhouses.
The effect was profound: It gave all those young university students a much better understanding of poverty than all those experts armed with mile-high statistics and ideological commitments. By the 1930s these impressionable souls had risen to the top levels of government, people like Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labour. Or Eleanor Roosevelt, his wife.
It helped to change ideas about the causes of poverty, from a Protestant church one of personal shortcomings (which many still believe) to a sociological university one of structural poverty: tons of people were poor because of low wages, high unemployment, poor education, bad health care, old age or the loss of a breadwinner.
Reform: If poverty is structural not personal (or racial), then there is plenty the government can do about it – especially in a gilded age of naked capitalism.
Addams pushed:
- an eight-hour work day for women,
- voting rights for women,
- workmen’s compensation,
- factory inspections,
- tenement-house regulation,
- juvenile courts,
- racial desegregation of Chicago’s schools.
The last one was with Ida B. Wells, a Black activist.
Addams did not come up with the idea of settlement houses. She got that from her travels in Europe in her 20s. When she saw the poverty in the East End of London in the 1880s it shook her. But later she saw something else in the East End: Toynbee Hall, a settlement house.
Her religious and class background: Her father, a practising Quaker, was a mill owner. His workers, as she saw with her own girlhood eyes, lived in shocking poverty.
Cultural racism: She did not believe in scientific racism, then at its height, which blamed biology for sociological differences between races. Instead she blamed bad circumstances (as with poor Whites) and racism – and, in the case of Blacks, Black culture:
Black American culture she saw as less civilized than, say, Italian culture. That meant it was less suited for life in big cities. That led to things like high rates of Black prostitution. Yet when it came to, say, White youth crime, she said little about their culture.
Immigration: She saw immigrants as bringing cultural treasure to the US, much of it, though, destroyed by xenophobic Americanization.
Sources: Mainly “The Child’s Book of American Biography” (1915) by Mary Stoyell Stimpson; “The Condemnation of Blackness” (2010) by Khalil Gibran Muhammad; “Encyclopaedia Britannica” (1989).
See also:
- White History Month 2015
- Ida B. Wells
- White thought on racism in her day:
- The Birth of a Nation – she thought it was racist
- The Third Enlargement of Whiteness
- Black pathology
So would her philosophy still fit well with modern day white liberals?
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@ Jefe
LOL! They share some of her ideas, like cultural racism and structural poverty, but most seem all too comfortable with war, poverty and racial inequality.
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[…] Jane Addams (1860-1935) was one of the leading White liberal reformers in the US. She founded Hull House in 1889 in the Near West Side of Chicago, then an immigrant slum. It was a settlement house that became the model throughout the US. She also helped to found the NAACP. She opposed the US entering the First World War. That got her kicked out of the Daughters of the American Revolution – but led her to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.- Click through for more – […]
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Is it possible there was a “white savior” mindset?–that solutions have to come from the top down….essentially keeping the power structure (imbalance) intact. Instead, if there had been a focus on empowering the communities to come up with their own solutions, and to empower them with the authority to implement those solutions—the power imbalance might have been challenged?
I think there is a Christian saying about teaching a person to fish instead of giving them fish–or something like that…?….
Isn’t there a difference between superficial reforms and structural reforms?
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Jane Addams was a moronic dolt who should have stayed in the kitchen.
PS: I’m ecstatic that all of the recent comments to the right of the blog belong to me.
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