Money. Food. Education. Jobs. Homes. Hygiene. All of which are of utmost importance for Americans, yet are being wrongfully denied to immigrants of our country. Immigrants are constantly forced into low-paying unskilled labor, demanding and tiresome work shifts, and cramped tenements swamped with disease. These conditions not only affect their lives but future generations as well, plunging thousands of immigrants and their families into poverty. The “land of opportunity” that people once sought when coming to America is no longer a promise. Instead, the conditions of life for immigrants can be worse than what they’d arrived with.
Jane Addams, a renowned social and political reformer, decided to take this crisis into her own hands. In 1889, Addams founded Hull House on Chicago’s West Side (a largely Italian immigrant neighborhood) with her companion Ellen Gates Starr. Hull House is one of the first of social settlements, which are essentially non-profit “community welfare centers” that address the problems of the urban poor, fundraise money for emergencies, and help advocate for citizens’ labor rights. Since the past decade that Hull House has been established, it has brought sweeping changes to the standards of life for immigrants, women, and children as well.
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When asked where she got the idea for Hull House in a conversation with Jane Addams, she said it came partly from Toynbee Hall: a London settlement that Addams and Starr had visited while touring Europe. According to Addams, Florence Kelley, who has made important reforms regarding women and child labor, also greatly influenced the mission of Hull House. However, as Addams became acquainted with her new neighbors she realized that working-class Americans already knew what they needed. What they lacked were resources and a political voice to fulfill those needs, and settlement workers try to provide exactly that. For example, Hull House offered a bathhouse, playground, kindergarten, and day care center, where working mothers can leave their children while they earn extra money for their families.
Addams taught immigrants the skills and knowledge they need to survive, and implemented various legislations to make factory work safer, set child labor laws, and enforce anti-drug laws. She transformed Hull House into a meeting place for clubs and labor unions as well as a center for women’s activism and social reform, as she actively encouraged local women to inspect the neighborhood and bring back a list of dangers to health and safety. By offering jobs to well-educated, middle-class women, the settlement also gived women opportunities to use their education to earn money and support themselves better. As Dr. Alice Hamilton, at the pediatric clinic at Hull House, wrote: “Addams came to see her settlement as a bridge between the classes … this bridge was as much of a help to the well-to-do as to the poor”. Settlements offered immigrants “a place where they could live as neighbors and give as much as they could of what they had.”
Serving as the initial spark for community improvement and political reform, Hull House fostered the operation of dozens of social settlements across the United States. Most of our families, if not all, were immigrants to America at some point in time. It is our responsibility to ensure their safety and health in a foreign land where they know no one but their own families. Social settlements are doing exactly that and much more.
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