Coffeeshop is part of legacy of Jane Addams
Customers of Wild Bill's and other community coffeeshops are often surprised to
learn that Jane Addams imagined places like these as social work settings.
Actually, it was one of her earliest innovations at Hull House.
The settlement house opened its doors on Halsted Street in Chicago in 1889. The coffeehouse opened a few years later. It was to be a community gathering place, Addams said, where all would be welcome. The coffeehouse was both an informal drop-in place as well as the sponsor of a host of programs, including theater, music, lectures and debates.
By 1895, the coffeehouse experience was in print. It was included in one of the chapters which make up Hull House Maps and Papers. In 1910, Addams included the coffeehouse in her best-known book, Hull House Maps and Papers.
The coffeehouse idea was just one of a host of remarkable ideasfrom Addams and the women of Hull House. They also started a day care center for working mothers, a health clinic, a branch library and a public playground. All of these were innovations when they began a century ago -- new institutions which responded to specific community needs.
Addams and the women of Hull House were also involved in forming a host of community organizations. Among the best-known: NAACP, NASW, PTA, AAUW, American Civil Liberties Union and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. They also helped organize labor unions and cooperatives.
RESEARCH IS PART OF THE LEGACY OF ADDAMS, TOO
Little-known today is that all this activity was supported by an extraordinary amount of research. From the earliest days of Hull House, Addams and her colleagues were conducting research. Their first book, Hull House Maps and Papers, is a detailed study of their neighborhood including both quantitative and qualitative research. There were many other published studies by Addams and her sister social researchers, from Safeguards for City Youths (1914) to Tenements of Chicago (1936). All of this "left a legacy that formed a basis for sociology as a way of thinking, an area of study and a methodological approach to data collecting," writes Lawrence Neuman in a new edition of a textbook called Social Research methods published last year.
But Neuman's acknowledgement of the legacy of research by Addams and the other women of Hull House is one of the few one will find in academic circles. Whether one looks in social work, sociology or urban studies, one will find little about these feminist scholars.
David Sibley confirms this in an academic essay: "Virtually all texts in urban geography and urban sociology...present the same history of the subject. In this conventional account, urban studies began in Chicago in the school of sociology about 1910...In fact, there were other authors...analyzing urban problems at the same time and in the same place...These largely forgotten authors were nearly all women."
SEXISM HAS KEPT THIS LEGACY OUT OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Why haven't Addams and other women scholars of Hull House received credit for their research? Blatant sexism is the most important factor, according to a number of writers.
Mary Jo Deegan reaches this conclusion in her book called Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School. "Despite her [Addams] vision and contributions...her authorship ...has been obliterated from the annals of the discipline and many of her ideas were only selectively used and distorted."
David Sibley agrees, offering two quotes from male social scientists to illustrate their sexists attitudes. One referred to the women of Hull House as "the old maids downtown who were wet-nursing social reformers." A second claimed that "the greatest damage done to the city of Chicago was not the product of corrupt politicians or criminals but the women reformers."
Neuman, writing in the research text, says Addams was the target of gender bias on the part of higher education and as a result was "unable to secure regular work in universities."
posted by Tom Gilsenan @ 1:49 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Its not fair that Jane Addams has not been given the credit she deserves for all of her research. She is the founder of Social Work and hardly gets any credit for it, the reason is simply sexisim. She did wounderful work with Coffee Shops and had the right idea, that has been proven today, that they are a great place for all sorts of people to get together.
Linsey a
I was initially shocked to learn that the idea behind coffeehouses began with the women of Hull House and Jane Addams. I think that it is interesting to think about coffee shops as one of the perfect social work setting. However, when a person thinks about coffee shops in this way it seems to make perfect sense. Coffeehouses are a place where individuals of every type seem to gather and discuss life and all of its imperfections. A person can see a high school student and his/her friends discussing their plans for the weekend, a business man/woman working diligently on a project that their boss has requested by noon that same day, and even a group of men and women who have merely come to the coffeehouse to meet and enjoy each others company. Often a person will even see communication between these different groups of people.
One thing that I feel people strongly underestimate is the power of a group and a support system. A group may not be a structured setting that involves certain meeting times and rituals but may just be that congregation of people sitting at your local coffee shop.
~Amber Corey
I don’t think that it is fair that Jane Addams has been kept out of the history books because of sexism. She did a lot for social work and the community she lived in. I did not know that Hull House had a coffee shop. I thought that it was just a place that people came and stayed, but they had a lot of different things in Hull House. I have learned a lot about Jane Addams and the work that she has done since starting college that I probably would not have know otherwise. She has done so much for social work and the field would probably not be the same if she and her friends had not started Hull House and decided to clean up the streets of thier neighborhood.
Rachael H.
Jane Addams did some amazing work with the immigrants of Chicago, and it is horrible that people dont give her enough credit. Jane and her fellow reformers made life easier for women who needed someone.
Callie P.
I think it is amazing how ahead of the times Jane Addams was. The thought of having a daycare for woman with a job doesnt seem like something that was needed in the 1900's. The fact that she is not a major part of history because she is a woman is terrible! I think the times have changed and they need to give credit where credit is due.
Becky Smith
It was not really a terrible shock that Jane Addams was not recognized for all of her hard work and research because of the fact that men back in that era did not think women were capable of doing such things. Or the fact, that Jane Addams and the women of Hull House initially came up with the coffeehouse idea. However, it is sad that Jane Addams was recognized for all her hard work and research because from what I read she did do a tremendously good job for others. She wanted to people to be treated fairly and have to improve their living conditions.
Margaret W.
I've been thinking lately that history is a lot more complicated than we realize. I'm not sure about the notion that: Women were not recognized a century ago and they are now. The reason we don't know about the work of Hull House women may not result from gender bias a century ago. Rather, it may result from bias in the men who wrote the histories. That was later.
Post a Comment
<< Home