Jane Addams wrote Twenty Years at Hull-House for two main reasons: to present a record of the founding and first years of the Hull-House settlement in Chicago, and to stop the publication of two biographies of herself. The first four chapters trace Addams’ life from her childhood through college and tours of Europe to her decision to begin Hull-House. The primary influence in these years was Addams’ wealthy abolitionist father, who stressed morality and sensitivity to the poor. The second important influence was Abraham Lincoln. John H. Addams was both a supporter and a personal friend of Lincoln, and although Jane Addams was only a small child when Lincoln was assassinated, she had heard many stories of him from her father. Addams saw Lincoln as the best role model for the new immigrants, since Lincoln too had emerged from humble surroundings without ever forgetting his past and the lessons that he had learned from his experiences. These two men helped to form Jane Addams’ character and influenced the direction that her life took.

It is in these early chapters that Addams makes clear the problem that the first generation of college-educated women faced: what to do with their lives. As happened to other women of this generation, Addams suffered psychological conflict that resulted in physical distress. One result of her ailment was a physician’s recommendation to visit Europe for two years. Had she been male, a tour of Europe would have been part of her maturing experiences. Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, her college friend, visited not only museums and art galleries but also the wretched poor in the East End of London. Although Addams had spent a year in medical school before illness resulted in her tour, she now realized that there might be other ways to help the poor besides practicing medicine.

Addams’ experiences in Europe brought into focus the problem that she and other women faced. As she described it herself, they were smothered with advantages and had lost the ability to react to human suffering. The assumption of society was that an educated “girl” could have nothing to do with the poverty that was particularly acute in the large cities. Addams’ trip did not cure her physical ailments, but a second trip with Starr, when she attended a meeting of the striking London match girls, began the crystallization of her plans for renting a house in Chicago where she might live and work among those mired in poverty.

The other fourteen chapters deal with Addams’ life work at Hull-House, which involved a wide variety of activities and an amazing array of exceptionally talented women who were nurtured, trained, and readied there to do social battle on larger fronts than that of the neighborhood of Halsted Street. The activities at Hull-House involved almost every important person of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from John Dewey and Henry George to Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Although these later chapters begin with a chronological chapter telling of the first days at Hull-House, Addams soon switches to a topical approach, discussing poverty, economics, labor problems, immigrants, ideas from European settlements and experiments, local political campaigns, social clubs, and the arts at Hull-House and ending with the story of revolutionaries from Russia. These chapters are filled with engaging stories that illustrate what Hull-House was attempting on these various fronts.

Addams’ effect on women’s issues was a result of her activities rather than of any specific writings. Addams supported the suffrage movement and worked to secure the vote in municipal elections, but her feminism saw women as morally superior. To such...