Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes

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Jane Addams. Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS

CHAPTER II. INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN

CHAPTER III. BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS

CHAPTER IV. THE SNARE OF PREPARATION

CHAPTER V. FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER VI. SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS

CHAPTER VII. SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER VII. PROBLEMS OF POVERTY

CHAPTER IX. A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION

CHAPTER X. PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS

CHAPTER XI. IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN

CHAPTER XII. TOLSTOYISM

CHAPTER XIII. PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS

CHAPTER XIV. CIVIC COOPERATION

CHAPTER XV. THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS

CHAPTER XVI. ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER XVII. ECHOES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XVIII. SOCIALIZED EDUCATION

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On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that "No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this record with some impressions of my childhood.

All of these are directly connected with my father, although of course I recall many experiences apart from him. I was one of the younger members of a large family and an eager participant in the village life, but because my father was so distinctly the dominant influence and because it is quite impossible to set forth all of one's early impressions, it has seemed simpler to string these first memories on that single cord. Moreover, it was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but also first drew me into the moral concerns of life, and later afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the intricacy of its mazes.

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We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and flowers. It is hard to reproduce the companionship which children establish with nature, but certainly it is much too unconscious and intimate to come under the head of aesthetic appreciation or anything of the sort. When we said that the purple wind-flowers—the anemone patens—"looked as if the winds had made them," we thought much more of the fact that they were wind-born than that they were beautiful: we clapped our hands in sudden joy over the soft radiance of the rainbow, but its enchantment lay in our half belief that a pot of gold was to be found at its farther end; we yielded to a soft melancholy when we heard the whippoorwill in the early twilight, but while he aroused in us vague longings of which we spoke solemnly, we felt no beauty in his call.

We erected an altar beside the stream, to which for several years we brought all the snakes we killed during our excursions, no matter how long the toil—some journey which we had to make with a limp snake dangling between two sticks. I remember rather vaguely the ceremonial performed upon this altar one autumn day, when we brought as further tribute one out of every hundred of the black walnuts which we had gathered, and then poured over the whole a pitcher full of cider, fresh from the cider mill on the barn floor. I think we had also burned a favorite book or two upon this pyre of stones. The entire affair carried on with such solemnity was probably the result of one of those imperative impulses under whose compulsion children seek a ceremonial which shall express their sense of identification with man's primitive life and their familiar kinship with the remotest past.

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