Champions For Reform

Imagine that instead of going to school 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, you went to work 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, 12 months a year.

- Barbara Bair

In the late 1800s, some reformers grew concerned about the negative impact that working under such conditions had on working-class and poor children. Those children did not go to school, and they did not have much time to play. Reformers brought the issue of how children were exploited to the government’s attention. They also rolled up their sleeves and made change happen.

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened one of the first settlement houses in the United States. They found and fixed up a house in a poor, immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. Addams and Starr called their settlement house Hull-House. College-educated individuals like them made a commitment to live and work in the house and in the community to improve the daily lives of those who lived around them. They took a particular interest in children. They believed children should have fresh air, time to play, and safe places to play—not dark alleys or busy city streets. Toward that goal, they helped create city parks and playgrounds.

Addams, Starr, and others who lived at Hull-House believed children should have the opportunity to grow up healthy and to go to school. They offered courses on how to prepare healthful meals and provided childcare. They also ran after-school and summer-school programs for children of immigrant families and working mothers. They helped the mothers who came to Hull–House to find jobs that paid a fair wage, so that the young children in their families would not have to work.