Jane Addams: “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Like many other young, middle-class Progressives, Addams felt an urge to be useful and to find a vocation to occupy her adult life. For eight years following her father's death, Addams was unable to act and find such a purpose in her life: “During most of that time,” she recalls in her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, “I was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned.” This period of personal and professional insecurity ended when she found a way to couple her idealism with concrete action through the establishment of Hull House in Chicago's slum neighborhood around Halsted Street. The settlement house was one of the most ambitious aspects of urban reform movements. Settlement houses were located in slum neighborhoods densely populated by immigrants and were mainly directed by women. Young middle-class people worked in settlements to improve the living conditions of slum dwellers, encouraging them to improve their education, jobs, and housing as well as their understanding of American society and culture. Settlement workers soon became the leading personalities of the movement for social reform, progressively broadening their focus to campaign for school nurses, public playgrounds, and better working conditions.

As with other Progressive causes, the political relevance of the settlement movement should not obscure its middle-class basis. Such a basis clearly emerges in Addams's 1892 speech “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” delivered at the summer school of the Ethical Culture Societies at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and later reprinted as the sixth chapter of Twenty Years at Hull-House. Addams makes clear that the settlement serves as a political solution to the personal malaise of young middle-class professionals who needed to find “an outlet for that sentiment of universal brotherhood” and must “give tangible expression to the democratic ideal.” Settlements like Hull House, Addams indicates, thus benefit both the slum dwellers they aim to serve and the middle-class people, particularly women, who work in them, allowing them to find an outlet for their talents and compassions. Without the settlement houses, such talents would largely remain untapped by society, and those unable to work in such houses would feel a sense of aimlessness.

Building directly on her own experience, Addams indicts the domestic values of American Victorian culture for their negative impact on the lives of many women. Society restrains the desire to act to alleviate suffering that is part of the social obligation that human beings feel. While the aim of this culture may be to give women a life full of pleasure and free of worries, the corresponding social attitudes only make them unhappy. Addams claims that in America “a fast-growing number of cultivated young people … have no recognized outlet for their active faculties.” To Addams, the fate of these young people who lack purpose is as pitiful as that of the destitute masses who occupy America's urban slums. Settlement houses can provide a medium of communication between the two groups and benefit both. Settlements are based on solidarity and the Christian impulse to better the lives of the poor.

The last part of the speech defines Hull House also as an experiment in urban sociology, designed to “relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.” According to Addams, this stark imbalance in the distribution of wealth is typical of the modern conditions of life in a great city. The activities of the settlement should be shaped by the conviction that solutions to urban problems can be achieved through cooperative efforts and reform. Settlement workers should have “a scientific patience in the accumulation of facts” about human life and should be tolerant, flexible, and keen to experiment with approaches. The goal of Hull House is not to highlight differences; on the contrary, the settlement should be built upon what workers and slum dwellers share. In Addams's conception, Hull House offers common ground where the working class and the middle class can meet and learn from one another.