Collaborative experiments: Jane Addams, Hull House and experimental social work

2009 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Gross
Keyword(s):  
Social Experiment ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Settlement Houses ◽  
Knowledge Application ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
Hull House ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The City

The social reformer, sociologist and feminist Jane Addams (1860—1935), who established Chicago's Hull House as one of the first settlement houses in America, described her work as experimental, but at the same time she and many of her co-workers rejected the idea of Hull House as a laboratory for social scientific investigation. The present article discusses Addams's unique understanding of social experiment beyond the laboratory. Through `experimental' improvement of social conditions for underserved people and communities in the city of Chicago, Addams and her co-workers perceived the laboratory experiment as an inferior variation of the experiment in society, and not vice versa. Based on the description of experiments at Hull House, this essay attempts to show how different dimensions of experimentation beyond the laboratory can be framed and how alternate phases that combine knowledge production and knowledge application can be conceptually comprised.

Jane Adams: an experience of multicultural education and social care. Chicago, 1889 – 1910

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 306
Author(s):  
Silvana Panza
Keyword(s):  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Social Care ◽  
Immigrant Families ◽  
Culture Learning ◽  
Educational Method ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
Hull House

The focus of this study concerns a deep analysis on the innovative educational method utilized by Jane Addams (1860-1935) at Hull House. She was a philosopher, but first of all we can consider this woman as a sociologist, because of her careful survey on society, Addams’s activities also implied a new educational project based on the social care of poor workers and their families. She chose for her extraordinary experience one of the most slummy suburbs in Chicago, where with her friend Ellen Gates Starr founded in 1889 this settlement. The main intention of the sociologist was to give immigrants lots of opportunities to understand Chicago’s social and political context. It was important to create a place where immigrant families could socialize, learning more about their rights and possibilities. For this reason Addams suggested that it needed to start from education, taking a particular care of children who lived in that area. It was necessary to promote a reform on the different culture learning to support immigrants in their integration, people who came there hoping to find a job into factories. In 1889 when the settlement was founded, there were about four hundred social houses around the States. Addams’ s important social and political idea was to develop a democratic society, where each person could recognize himself/herself as a part of it, avoiding marginalization and segregation. The sociologist was a central figure at Hull House for about twenty years.

Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil and Selected Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
JANET BEER ◽  
KATHERINE JOSLIN
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Social Pathology ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
North Side ◽  
Hull House ◽  
The City

Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896, spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out, finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture, fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”

Jane Addams

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Yans ◽  
Ji-Hye Shin
Keyword(s):  
Child Labor ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
School Teaching ◽  
Hull House

Jane Addams (b. 1860–d. 1935), along with Ellen Gates Starr, was cofounder of Chicago’s Hull-House, a model American settlement. Addams was a social reformer, author, and public intellectual. During her Hull-House residence from 1889 until her death, Addams led national and local childhood reform efforts for child labor, juvenile court, and public health legislation, the playground movement, public-school teaching innovations, and the abolition of childhood prostitution. When Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr arrived in Chicago, European immigrants and their children constituted three-quarters of its population. Hull-House, located in an immigrant slum, offered innovative well-babies clinics, a day nursery, a playground, and children’s art, drama, and music classes to neighborhood residents. Addams passionately insisted that the future of American democracy depended on the education, protection, health, and well-being of its youth, including immigrant and minority youth. Hull-House attracted many middle- and upper-class professionals: juvenile justice reformer Julia Lathrop, labor reformer Florence Kelley, and educator and philosopher John Dewey were drawn to Addams’s settlement as a hands-on reform experiment designed to “test the value of human knowledge by action” (see Lasch 1982: p. 187, cited under Papers, Autobiographies, and Collected Writings). They saw themselves involved in a mutually beneficial reciprocal relationship with immigrants and their children intended to make both sides of the Hull-House democratic experiment better citizens. Addams and Dewey maintained that democracy required continuing moral responsibility and receptivity to others—whatever their class, race, or gender. Far from a simple matter of individual freedom or a particular set of political institutions, they understood democracy as a way of life. In her Hull-House programs, her writings, her educational and juvenile delinquency reforms, and her suggestions for training immigrant children for industrial labor—indeed in all her efforts—Addams consistently argued the importance of the child’s potential and value as a participant in social democracy. Aware that children of poor families faced dull, unrewarding futures as unskilled factory laborers, Addams called on educators to assist students to appreciate their “social and industrial value.” At the same time, Addams cajoled industrial employers for their abuse of child laborers and, far ahead of her time, insisted on the propriety of federal powers protecting children (see Addams and Lagemann 1985: 124–135, cited under Writings on Children and Education). During her lifetime and even in the 21st century, Jane Addams is regarded as one of the United States’ most outstanding citizens and child advocates.

Harbingers of Progressivism: Responses to the Urban Crisis in New York, c. 1845–1860

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. Heale
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Welfare Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Jacob Riis ◽  
The Rich ◽  
To Come ◽  
Fact Finding ◽  
The City

Half a century before Jacob Riis and Jane Addams groped for the conscience of the nation with their exposures of urban misery, a few determined citizens were already fighting the long battle to liberate the huddled wretches of the cities. In Boston some of the techniques of the later social agencies were anticipated as early as the 1830s by Joseph Tuckerman's Association of Delegates from the Benevolent Societies, but it was New York City which really pointed the way to the future. In the twenty years before the Civil War a number of bodies were founded in the city which in time became permanent welfare institutions. They were in large part the products of conditions similar to those which produced the scientific philanthropy, Social Gospel, settlement house and other social movements of the late nineteenth century, and, like those movements, they anticipated many of the attitudes of the social workers of the Progressive era. It would be a mistake to press the parallel between ante-bellum reform and social Progressivism too far, but the two phenomena shared some common characteristics. Like many Progressives, the urban reformers of the ante-bellum years tended to come from pious middle-class backgrounds, and a number of them began life as missionaries before being drawn into social work. They were a fact-finding generation, investigating social problems with an unprecedented thoroughness, energetically uncovering evidence and compiling statistics with which to open the eyes of an indifferent public. They were very conscious of the social chasm between the rich and the poor and they did what they could to bridge it.

scholarly journals Dimensions of social rehabilitation: A qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis

2020 ◽  
pp. 146801732097954
Author(s):  
Kati Kataja ◽  
Pilvikki Lantela ◽  
Marjo Romakkaniemi
Keyword(s):  
Social Aspect ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Rehabilitation Process ◽  
Social Rehabilitation ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relational Concept ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Individual

Summary Social rehabilitation is conceived to encompass services that concentrate specifically on the social aspect of the rehabilitation process. This interpretive qualitative meta-synthesis of 25 social scientific research papers published between 1980 and 2019 dealing with the concept of social rehabilitation aims to unpack the different dimensions of the social within social rehabilitation in different contexts. Findings In most of the articles, the causes for social rehabilitation are located in the rehabilitee’s social environment, community, or structure, and for the rehabilitation to be successful, a change is expected to take place also in these parties. Moreover, personally significant values and wishes are emphasized in many approaches viewing the rehabilitee as an agent in his/her own rehabilitation process. In a few articles, however, the individual is viewed as aberrant, and his/her conforming to societal norms is seen as forming the core of social rehabilitation. In this approach, the individual is viewed as the object of rehabilitation without much control over his/her own rehabilitation process. Applications The results of our study suggest that, to improve existing social rehabilitation practices, more effort should be put into acknowledging and considering the rehabilitee’s autonomy as a relational concept. Also, the needs for, foci, and aims of social rehabilitation should not be reduced to a certain kind of practice directed to certain kinds of client groups, but, rather, social rehabilitation should be understood as an entity consisting of interrelated and interdependent components forming a constantly shifting assemblage.

Starr, Ellen Gates

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Donner
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Hull House ◽  
Poor Population

Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940) was a social reformer who, with Jane Addams, co-founded Hull-House to provide women with a new avenue for living independently. The condition of the poor population led her to become active in the labor movement.

Fifty years ahead of its time? The provident dispensaries movement in Manchester, 1871–85

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
General Scheme ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Comprehensive System ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Hospital Reform ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Martin Hewitt’s chapter on the history of the provident dispensary movement, initiated in the 1870s by the social reformer, Dr John Watts asks why provident dispensaries, unlike the Hospital Funds movement, have been largely neglected in the scholarship of medical philanthropy although, as Hewitt argues, those in Manchester were central to national debates over hospital reform and served as a model for similar initiatives in other parts of the country. The establishment of provident dispensaries in the city encapsulated many of the challenges which impeded the development of medical provision for the working-classes, as in the tensions which Hewitt illustrates in relation to the professional status and expectations of medical men, concerned about the movement’s threats to their fees and status. Watt’s scheme of provident dispensaries, which aimed to promote ‘a general scheme of medical insurance’, was ahead of its time, symptomatic, Hewitt argues, of the pitfalls which faced those committed to the establishment of a comprehensive system of healthcare in the late-Victorian period.

The Effect of the Political Situation in the City of Jerusalem on the Rights of the Jerusalem Women

1970 ◽  
pp. 36-47
Author(s):  
Fadwa Al-Labadi
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Sexual Life ◽  
Family Status ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
Legislative Processes

The concept of citizenship was introduced to the Arab and Islamic region duringthe colonial period. The law of citizenship, like all other laws and regulations inthe Middle East, was influenced by the colonial legacy that impacted the tribal and paternalistic systems in all aspects of life. In addition to the colonial legacy, most constitutions in the Middle East draw on the Islamic shari’a (law) as a major source of legislation, which in turn enhances the paternalistic system in the social sector in all its dimensions, as manifested in many individual laws and the legislative processes with respect to family status issues. Family is considered the nucleus of society in most Middle Eastern countries, and this is specifically reflected in the personal status codes. In the name of this legal principle, women’s submission is being entrenched, along with censorship over her body, control of her reproductive role, sexual life, and fertility.

Analytical Study of Violence Theme in Victoria Schwab’s This Savage Song

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Study ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Vicious Cycle ◽  
Aggressive Approach ◽  
Research Article ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
The Right

This research article focuses on the theme of violence and its representation by the characters of the novel “This Savage Song” by Victoria Schwab. How violence is transmitted through genes to next generations and to what extent socio- psycho factors are involved in it, has also been discussed. Similarly, in what manner violent events and deeds by the parents affect the psychology of children and how it inculcates aggressive behaviour in their minds has been studied. What role is played by the parents in grooming the personality of children and ultimately their decisions to choose the right or wrong way has been argued. In the light of the theory of Judith Harris, this research paper highlights all the phenomena involved: How the social hierarchy controls the behaviour. In addition, the aggressive approach of the people in their lives has been analyzed in the light of the study of second theorist Thomas W Blume. As the novel is a unique representation of supernatural characters, the monsters, which are the products of some cruel deeds, this research paper brings out different dimensions of human sufferings with respect to these supernatural beings. Moreover, the researcher also discusses that, in what manner the curse of violence creates an inevitable vicious cycle of cruel monsters that makes the life of the characters turbulent and miserable.

Narrating Society: Enacting ‘Immigrant’ Characters through Negotiating, Naturalization, and Forgetting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Media And Communication

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

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