720 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Progressive Era
the lives of the immigrant poor. Hull House was modeled on Toynbee Hall,
which Addams had visited after its establishment in a working- class neighbor-
hood of London in 1884. Unlike previous reformers, who had aided the poor
from afar, settlement- house workers moved into poor neighborhoods. They
built kindergartens and playgrounds for children, established employment
bureaus and health clinics, and showed female victims of domestic abuse how
to gain legal protection. By 1910, more than 400 settlement houses had been
established in cities throughout the country.
“Spearheads for Reform”
Addams was typical of the Progressive era’s “new woman.” By 1900, there were
more than 80,000 college- educated women in the United States. Many found
a calling in providing social services, nursing, and education to poor families
in the growing cities. The efforts of middle- class women to uplift the poor, and
of laboring women to uplift themselves, helped to shift the center of gravity
of politics toward activist government. Women like Addams discovered that
even well- organized social work was not enough to alleviate the problems of
inadequate housing, income, and health. Government action was essential.
Hull House instigated an array of reforms in Chicago, soon adopted elsewhere,
including stronger building and sanitation codes, shorter working hours and
safer labor conditions, and the right of labor to organize.
Female activism spread throughout the country. Ironically, the exclusion
of blacks from jobs in southern textile mills strengthened the region’s move-
ment against child labor. Reformers portrayed child labor as a menace to white
supremacy, depriving white children of educations they would need as adult
members of the dominant race. These reformers devoted little attention to the
condition of black children. Women’s groups in Alabama were instrumental
in the passage of a 1903 state law restricting child labor. By 1915, every south-
ern state had followed suit. But with textile mill owners determined to employ
children and many poor families dependent on their earnings, these laws were
enforced only sporadically.
The settlement houses have been called “spearheads for reform.” They
produced prominent Progressive figures like Julia Lathrop, the first woman
to head a federal agency (the Children’s Bureau, established in 1912 to investi-
gate the conditions of mothers and children and advocate their interests). Flor-
ence Kelley, the daughter of Civil War– era Radical Republican congressman
William D. Kelley and a veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women’s
power as consumers as a force for social change. In the Gilded Age, the writer
Helen Campbell had brilliantly exposed the contradiction of a market econ-
omy in which fashionable women wore clothing produced by poor women in