Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes
1910
Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes
1910
In 1889, a young woman from a privileged background arrived in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods and stayed for nearly fifty years. This is the account of what she found there, and what it made of her. Jane Addams founded Hull House as an experiment in living democracy, a place where the boundaries between helper and helped would dissolve into genuine community. She writes intimately about the immigrant families, Italian, Greek, Jewish, German, Irish, who became her neighbors and teachers, and about the reforms she championed: labor protections, public health, peace, and civic participation. But this is also a deeply personal book. Addams traces her own formation, her father's moral rigor, her early encounters with poverty, her wrestling with doubt and purpose, to understand how a life becomes dedicated to social justice. Written with warmth, honesty, and intellectual force, Twenty Years at Hull House remains a foundational document of American reform and a testament to what committed citizenship can achieve. It speaks to anyone curious about the roots of social work, the history of immigration in America, or the question of how one person might meaningfully change the world.
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“In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.””
— Jane Addams
“Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.””
— Jane Addams
“In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.””
— Jane Addams
“It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy’s phrase “the snare of preparation,” which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.””
— Jane Addams
“It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.””
— Jane Addams
“I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting "preparation for life," however ill-prepared I might be. It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase "the snare of preparation," which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.””
— Jane Addams
“I recall that in planning my first European journey I had soberly hoped in two years to trace the entire pattern of human excellence as we passed from one country to another, in the shrines popular affection had consecrated to the saints, in the frequented statues erected to heroes, and in the "worn blasonry of funeral brasses" - an illustration that when we are young we all long for those mountaintops upon which we may soberly stand and dream of our own ephemeral and uncertain attempts at righteousness.””
— Jane Addams
“But stranger than any episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife, nor his godfather for a moment considered him a criminal. He had merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.””
— Jane Addams
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/twenty-years-at-hull-house-with-autobiographical-notes-c5f382d2-a275-40b6-9b77-99948dc1b666"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes by Jane Addams free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/twenty-years-at-hull-house-with-autobiographical-notes-c5f382d2-a275-40b6-9b77-99948dc1b666)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/twenty-years-at-hull-house-with-autobiographical-notes-c5f382d2-a275-40b6-9b77-99948dc1b666][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes by Jane Addams free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/twenty-years-at-hull-house-with-autobiographical-notes-c5f382d2-a275-40b6-9b77-99948dc1b666Cite this book
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Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes. Lex, lex-books.com/book/twenty-years-at-hull-house-with-autobiographical-notes-c5f382d2-a275-40b6-9b77-99948dc1b666.Addams, J. (1910). Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/twenty-years-at-hull-house-with-autobiographical-notes-c5f382d2-a275-40b6-9b77-99948dc1b666Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/twenty-years-at-hull-house-with-autobiographical-notes-c5f382d2-a275-40b6-9b77-99948dc1b666.
