Excerpts from Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes

Published in 1910

"Civilization is a method of living and an attitude of equal respect for all people."

Jane Addams (1860–1935) is regarded as the first social worker (someone who helps people with a variety of social problems, such as poverty) in the United States. As a young woman she graduated from Rockford College and afterwards decided to pursue a career. Going to college and having a career were both unusual events for women in her era. In the late 1800s, young women were expected to get married and stay at home, but this did not appeal to Addams.

In 1889 she and a college friend, Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940), founded what came to be called Hull-House. Addams rented an old mansion at the corner of Polk and Halsted Streets in Chicago, a neighborhood filled with recent immigrants from Italy, Russia,...