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HULL-HOUSE MAPS AND PAPERS
A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions
By Jane Addams University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-252-03134-2
Introduction
Rima Lunin Schultz
The year 2005 marked the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago Together with Comments and Essays on the Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions (HHM&P). Hull-House residents worked on the project between 1892 and 1894, and, after a contract with Thomas Y. Crowell was negotiated with the help of Richard T. Ely in 1894, the volume was published in 1895. Hull-House residents made a dramatic statement about their shared values and understanding of the nature of social science knowledge and its usages in a democratic society when they made the decision to put together a collaborative work of sociology based on their experiences as residents of Chicago's Near West Side. They were certain that publishing maps with explicit information about the wages and conditions of the working poor in the Nineteenth Ward would educate the public and lead to much-needed reforms. The belief that an enlightened citizenry could be mobilized for reform causes was part of the Progressive Era's faith in the efficacy ofsocial science investigation to produce solutions for society's problems. HHM&P, the first study of its kind in the United States, directly influenced subsequent social surveys that also emanated from settlement houses rather than from universities.
The volume of maps and papers is a major work of the progressive movement. Kathryn Kish Sklar calls HHM&P "the single most important work by American women social scientists before 1900." For Leon Fink, HHM&P is "one of the classics of social science and muckraking journalism in this period along with Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, John R. Commons's Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Ida Tarbell's History of Standard Oil Company, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, Lincoln Steffens's Shame of the Cities, and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro."
The contents of the volume reflect the deeply political nature of settlement work in its early days and force us to rethink the ways in which Jane Addams, the head resident of Hull-House, and her colleagues have been relegated to the margins of progressive movement history and have instead been linked to developments in the field of social work or even, lately, been confined to gender studies. Reading HHM&P reminds us that settlement houses were key organizations in the major social and political movements of the day. Hull-House was at the cutting edge of major initiatives that collectively defined progressivism by the 1900s. It had literally and figuratively mapped those initiatives by 1893, the year the settlement celebrated its fourth birthday.
At the time Addams and the Hull-House residents began the maps and papers project the gulf between the rising, propertied classes and the working poor who lived in the slums of East London, the West Side of Chicago, or on the Lower East Side of New York threatened social order. Hull-House residents developed their settlement in the hope that by living with working-class and poor immigrants and sharing daily experiences they could find solutions to societal problems growing out of social conditions in slums. The new relationship between rich and poor avoided the humiliation and paternalism of traditional Christian charity. Addams was uncertain of the right method, but she knew that the burgeoning industrial society that offered future progress was a complex, increasingly interdependent web of social and economic relations that required the addition of what she defined as the "social function to democracy."
Traditional views about the role of government and the nature of economic laws still dominated all branches of government, the political party system, and the religious and academic establishments. Social Darwinists such as the political economist and ordained Episcopal minister William Graham Sumner of Yale University rhetorically asked what the social classes owed each other. For them, the answer was "nothing." The iron law of supply and demand ruled and established wages and hours that Social Darwinists argued derived from laws as natural and unchangeable as the physical laws guiding the planets. In contrast, Addams led the settlement movement's attack on classical liberal economic thinking when she stressed "that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal."
HHM&P should be placed in the context of the protest literature emerging from the 1870s, including Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879), an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and the increase of poverty alongside increases in wealth. The paradox of wealth and poverty informed the Hull-House maps as it had Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (1889), which was accompanied by startling maps of the prevalence of poverty in London. Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) was a graphic account of children who lived in poverty in New York City. The discovery that the United States was no different than Europe and that the slums in U.S. cities were comparable to the vilest quarters of the Old World so disturbed Congress that money was appropriated to study the issue.
The study of urban sociology (or sociology of any topic) was in its infancy. No maps had ever been created that showed nationalities and wages household by household, and next to nothing had been written about sweatshops and child labor. Analysis of state care of the indigent sick and insane and of the poorhouse from the point of view of whether these services were being delivered appropriately-and in the best interests of inmates-was a radical departure. The maps and papers constituted an incredible effort to quantify data about the most intimate conditions of workers' lives; the amount of air, light, and space available for individuals and families in tenements; the hourly rate for making a buttonhole, or stitching hems, or pulling the basting threads; the intricate scheme of work and sleep that families and boarders were required to maintain in order to reap survival wages; the process of premature aging among breadwinners; the extent of deformities and occupational diseases in children; and the lasting effects of industrial injuries.
This book is important because it is one of the first publications that refuted conservative laissez-faire economics with statistical data on wage labor. It is one of the first publications that graphically details the plight of immigrants and documents their work ethic, blaming the economic system rather than the individual for social conditions in the slums. Its publication, however, was not an isolated occurrence. HHM&P was a significant and innovative work that resonated with other social theorists and social science practitioners in the new departments of sociology and economics of universities and in newly established organizations such as the American Economic Association, which was founded in 1885. Their contemporaries identified Addams and other Hull-House residents as sociologists, and the Hull-House social investigations that followed on the heels of HHM&P were published in the American Journal of Sociology.
The location of the maps and papers project in a social settlement rather than a university department contributed to its innovative and groundbreaking results. When it was suggested that Addams could be more useful as a chair of sociology rather than as head of Hull-House, Ely, a progressive economist and founder of the American Economic Association, replied, "If she were a professor of sociology she would be simply one professor among many others." What she was doing was "work for the nation" he contended, and "a model work for the whole country." Noting that there were many critics of Hull-House, he contended, "Miss Addams should by no means be tempted away from Hull-House; but Hull-House itself should be developed into the greatest 'People's University' on the continent." It was Ely, general editor of the Library of Economics and Politics, who selected HHM&P as the fifth volume in the series and promoted it as an important work of sociology. For him and for many pioneers who promoted the study of social science and dissemination of social science research there was no problem or inherent contradiction in having social investigation emanate from a settlement house.
HHM&P is a work of social science whose contributors believed that sociological knowledge was the result of the integration of social investigation and advocacy, an opposite approach from the canonical model that was just beginning to emerge in the late 1890s and became by the 1920s the only acceptable way to be a professional social scientist. By the 1920s the kind of sociological investigations undertaken at Hull-House no longer fit the criteria of academic research. HHM&P and other studies published by Hull-House were either ignored or placed in the category of applied social science. Addams became identified as one of the founders of social work rather than as a sociologist. She argued that her position outside the academy gave her the insights and independence critical for the sociological investigations in which she engaged. Ironically, that outsider status became the major reason she was denied a place in the history of the social sciences in the United States.
Since the 1980s historians have revised the history of the social sciences in the United States and recovered the nineteenth-century American social science tradition that "joined claims of science and disinterested expertise with the democratic and humanitarian impulses associated with moral reform. Its practitioners included independent scholars, civil servants, and both male and female social reformers," including Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and others associated with Hull-House. This emerging revisionist narrative defines HHM&P as an important work in the field and places the Hull-House contribution in the center rather than at the margins.
The recent interest in HHM&P is almost entirely attributable to the rich interpretive work of scholars Mary Jo Deegan, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Dorothy Ross, who have recognized the significance of this volume in the larger project of revising the narrative of modern American history. Specifically, the work of Sklar, Deegan, and Ross has overturned the standard histories of the progressive movement and American political history from 1890 to 1920; the history of the development of the social sciences; and, particularly, the history of the development of sociological knowledge and the role of gender in the construction of the modern welfare state. The example of HHM&P as the "single most important work of women sociologists" has opened an entire field of inquiry. The writing of the American women sociologists and social policy theorists have begun to be reconsidered. Reclaiming the texts of women social thinkers in the Progressive Era has been enlightening and productive of new interpretations of the origins of the modern welfare state. Understanding the role women constructed for themselves as public intellectuals and as political beings forces reconsideration of civic engagement, the nature of political participation in a democratic society, and the role of professionalism and the empowerment of the academy as the site of the production of knowledge in society.
The Contributors to HHM&P and the Goal of the Collaboration
There were ten contributors to the volume: Florence Kelley, Alzina Parsons Stevens, Agnes Sinclair Holbrook, Isabel Eaton, Charles Zueblin, Josefa Humpal-Zeman, Alessandro Mastro-Valerio, Julia C. Lathrop, Ellen Gates Starr, and Jane Addams. Only Kelley and Zueblin had university training in economics and politics. This appeared not to disturb Addams whose prefatory remarks privileged experience over specialized education. She emphasized that all the contributors had been "in actual residence in Hull-House" (46) when they wrote their articles. "'In the study of society which we call sociology,' the settlement method of living among the people and 'staying with them a long time'" Addams had explained, "was the new method 'coming into vogue.'" She described how residents studied their neighbors "'to learn their needs and their manner of thought.'"
For Addams, there was no contradiction in lived experience and claiming the scientific nature of the work when seeking the nature of their neighbors' reality. "The residents of Hull-House offer these maps and papers to the public," she wrote, "not as exhaustive treatises, but as recorded observations which may possibly be of value, because they are immediate, and the result of long acquaintance" (45). Addams made clear that authority for the maps and papers comes from the investigators having lived in the neighborhood, not as theoreticians or scholars but as activists engaged in constructive work. She valorized that manner of knowing the neighborhood as the hallmark of the sociological investigation undertaken by settlement houses independently of universities or government agencies.
Along the same lines, Holbrook, who worked closely with Kelley on color coding and transferring the coded data onto the maps, notes that the maps are "an attempt ... to put into graphic form a few facts concerning the section of Chicago immediately east of the House" (53). Throughout her brief discussion of methodology Holbrook emphasizes the efforts employed to obtain facts: "The manner of investigation has been painstaking, and the facts set forth are as trustworthy as personal inquiry and intelligent effort could make them." She also bases the accuracy of the data on the experience and long residence in the neighborhood of Florence Kelley, "the expert in charge" (57). Holbrook also reiterates Addams's caution that the "aim of both maps and notes is to present conditions rather than to advance theories-to bring within reach of the public exact information ... rather than to advise methods by which it may be improved" (58). Echoing Addams's suggestion that public awareness will result in social betterment, Holbrook writes that "merely to state symptoms and go no farther would be idle; but to state symptoms in order to ascertain the nature of disease, and apply, it may be, its cure, is not only scientific, but in the highest sense humanitarian" (58, emphasis added).
Judging from the centrality of the wages and nationalities maps and of the articles that focus on sweatshops and garment workers in the Hull-House neighborhood, the selection of the maps and many of the topics of the essays appear to have been largely a function of the investigative work being carried out by Florence Kelley from 1892 in the context of the anti-sweatshop campaign. It is hard to imagine the maps and papers project being conceived without Kelley's initiative. She brought the statistical techniques of social investigation to Hull-House and used them as a powerful tool of social reform.
An extraordinary woman, Kelley knew American politics from her father, William Darrah Kelley, a member of Congress from Pennsylvania from 1860 to 1890, and women's rights activism from her grandmother, Sarah Pugh. Kelley studied history and social science at Cornell University and government and law at the University of Zurich. There she met and married a Russian Jew, Lazare Wischnewetsky, who was also a medical student and a socialist. While in Europe, Kelley had her first child; translated into English a work by Frederick Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England; and joined the German Social Democratic Party. The Wischnewetskys returned to the United States and settled in New York, where the couple had two more children. It was a difficult marriage, and in 1891, after divorcing Wischnewetsky, Kelley resettled in Chicago with the three children.
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