History of Social Science (Lecture 2): Women in the History of Social Science (Focus: Chicago School)

During the institutionalization of the discipline of sociology in the early 20th century, we see the segregation and exclusion of women in the form of a division of sociological labor. Men were expected and encouraged to become professors and deal with abstract ideas and theories, while women’s roles lay in testing and putting these ideas into practice in social settlements for the poor. Later, as sociology was becoming “science-ified,” the social work and activism done by women, which had been crucial in establishing the discipline and developing and testing theories, was excised from the discipline. The University of Chicago, which was one of the most important institutions in establishing sociology as a professional academic discipline, operated with this kind of division. As a result, the role of Jane Addams and other women (including graduate students) in establishing the Chicago School of Sociology in its early days has been largely forgotten.

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Chronologically, this class actually begins at the start of the 19th century, with the scientific social philosophy of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. We will get to that in a couple of weeks. But this week and next week, we are skipping ahead so that you can get a sense of your main project for this class and what it entails.

As we talked about last week, your main project for this class will be to research and write about a figure in the history of the social sciences who is also a woman. This can be from any discipline in the social sciences, or even the humanities, because the further back you go, the less distinguishable those two become.

Next week, we’ll be having a class with an archivist, Catherine Uecker, at the Special Collections at the University of Chicago, to look at some of the work that was done by women in the early years of the establishment of the discipline of sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. Of course, it would be preferable to have this class in person so you could see some of the physical archives. But given our current circumstances we decided it would be best to have a remote session, and perhaps discuss some of the digital archives that will be available for you to use online. You can always go over to the Regenstein individually or in small groups to have a look at any of the physical archives we discuss in the class next week.

This week, we are going to be looking at the early years of sociology in Chicago (not just the university of Chicago, but other institutions in Chicago as we’ll see. Specifically, we are going to be looking at one mechanism of exclusion of women in the history of social science that has been carried over into official histories. This story involves a sociologist, philosopher, and activist called Jane Addams, and the settlement house she founded and directed called Hull House. What we’ll be learning is that Addams and other residents at Hull House had major roles to play in the early years of sociology as it was becoming established in Chicago. We’ll also learn how the role of these women residents was intentionally diminished several decades later when sociology underwent transformation and professionalization. And we’ll see that this process of burying the role of Hull House residents in the early years of Chicago sociology has had a lasting impact on what people learn about the origins of sociology today.

So that’s three things we’re covering today—we’ll learn a bit about the early days of sociology, a bit about the work of Jane Addams, a bit about the settlement of Hull House, and the connections between them at the turn of the twentieth century.

So first of all, what was sociology like at the turn of the twentieth century? Well, it was very new. The first Sociology department had been established here at the University of Chicago in 1892 as part of a university that was then only two years old. And, just as the new university was not yet well-established and legitimized in the eyes of American academia, neither was the discipline of sociology.

At this time, as Deegan tells us, sociology in the united states was an “amorphous area of study”—without a clear definition of exact methods and goals. It often existed as an attaché to other disciplines that were well established, like history and political economy.

It was also a rather radical area of study, which was associated with movements like feminism, socialism, and secularism. And it was undertaken often with an eye to make progressive changes and improvements to society, rather than simply analyzing and studying it for the sake of knowledge.

For this reason, the academic department of sociology at the university of Chicago and its faculty had close associations with settlement houses, which engaged in activism, lobbying, and provided resources to poor immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago, like education, childcare, art workshops, and meeting spaces. The first settlement house in the United States was founded by two women called Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in the neighborhood of Near West Side in Chicago in 1889. In 1894, the University of Chicago’s sociology department was engaging significantly enough with Hull House settlement that it was eager to have its own settlement house as an extension of its academic department, and so they offered support to another working member of Hull House, Mary McDowell, to found another settlement in Back of the Yards.

What you’ll notice is that the names associated with these settlements are all women, while the men who staffed the department of sociology at that time were all men. This is not a coincidence. Although the university of Chicago and department of sociology at that time were rather radical, it was still difficult for women to gain employment in the university, and so many of the early women sociologists (or who we might now call “settlement workers” or “social workers”) were based in these settlement houses. Of course, certain gendered ideas about appropriate work for men and women, and naturally masculine and feminine skill sets, were still very dominant. Women were people-pleasers, carers, and hostesses, making them appropriate for the practical, people-oriented, charity work going on at settlement houses. And men, of course, were sharp, abstract, intellectuals capable of developing brilliant theories in their roles as professors.

We can look back at this division of labor and see it as an appalling injustice, but the women in settlements like Hull House were quite confident in the value, relevance, and centrality of the work they were doing. Although the university men and the settlement women did have different ideas about the division of labor that was developing between them. The general narrative coming from the university was that the professors were intellectually superior and that sociology ought to be conducted at the university, with women in the settlements simply collecting data and testing their theories. But from the perspective of the women at Hull House, the university men were too afraid to get involved in the messy and dangerous work of the real world, preferring to stay in the safe realm of abstract ideas. And far from collecting data and testing theories, they were engaged in the most important work of all: changing the world.

This division of labor also didn’t matter all that much at the time, since the settlement houses engaged very closely with academic sociologists, and both university and settlement sociologists viewed themselves as engaged in very much the same, innovative enterprise. As we’ll see, Jane Addams had close associations—both personal and professional—with University Chicago sociologists like George Herbert Mead and W. I. Thomas. In the practical realm of working with problems of integration, legislation, and interacting with the immigrant working-class, many professors viewed Addams as a leader.

Anyway, this is all to say that the division of labor in place in sociology in the years surrounding 1900 was not a particular problem for those engaging in it. The problems came later, when sociologists began attempting to professionalize sociology and establish it as a respectable, academic discipline. This involved disassociating the practice of sociology from any of the radical ideas, efforts at social reform, or non-university experimental institutions it had been associated with in the past. In the process, academic sociology also disassociated itself from pretty much all the early women sociologists who practiced sociology as a movement for radical social amelioration and reform, and by both desire and necessity, conducted their sociological work in these settlement houses.

Such efforts at professionalizing sociology’s image were undertaken by sociologists like Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, who are now considered major influential figures in the early years of Chicago sociology. For example, take a look at this excerpt from Burgess’ book from 1925, The Urban Community:

“The city has been the “happy hunting ground” of movements: the “better government” movement, the social-work movement, the public-health movement, the playground movement, the social center movements, the settlement movement, the Americanization movement. All these movements, lacking a basic understanding or conception of the city, have relied upon administrative devices, for the most part, to correct the evils of city life. Even the community organization movement, theoretically grounded upon a conception of the city as a unit, had the misfortune to stake its programs upon an assumption of the supreme value of the revival of the neighborhood in the city instead of upon a pragmatic, experimental program guided by the actual conditions and trends in urban life.”

What’s interesting about Burgess’ claim in this excerpt is that it overlooks (or perhaps intentionally ignores) the innovative empirical work conducted by the women residents at Hull House (which he refers to here as “the settlement movement” but also “the social work movement”). These empirical methods included statistical and survey methods, neighborhood mapping, and extensive participant-observation—all of which were groundbreaking in 1895 when they published their major work, Hull House Maps and Papers. As we’ll see in a few weeks, another major contributor to the early use of innovative empirical sociological methods who is often left out of the history of sociology is W. E. B. Du Bois. It’s interesting to note at this moment that Du Bois was a correspondent of and collaborator with multiple women sociologists at Hull House, including Jane Addams, Isabel Eaton, Katherine Bement Davis, and Florence Kelley.

You can read more in Chapter 6 of Deegan’s book, if you’re interested, about how the rhetoric of men like Park and Burgess succeeded in transforming the image and the practice of sociology from a discipline conducted between the university and settlement houses into one conducted only in the academy. And denigrated the contributions made by those who preceded them in the process.

An interesting bit of UChicago history, if you want some extra reading, is the role of the University in transforming the practice of sociology, as a result of the administration placing restrictions on their employees, preventing them from participating in any political activities. But we won’t cover that here—that’s in Chapter 7 of Deegan’s book.

The efforts of Park and Burgess to denigrate and exclude the contributions of settlement sociologists and social reformers were solidified later, when other academic sociologists like William F. Ogburn, also at the University of Chicago, tried to science-ify sociology. This was part of a related effort to make sociology more “scientific”—a label which as we all know is usually associated with legitimacy and respect. This meant extracting sociology from any direct role in social reform, and practicing sociology as a purely observational science, free of values. In his address to the American Sociological Association in 1929, Ogburn said that it was not sociology’s job to improve society. “Science (in which he included sociology, of course) is interested directly in one thing only, to wit, discovering new knowledge” Bannister 47. Obgurn and his allies in the American Sociological Association sought to “purge the discipline of social workers” (48) and usher in a more professional, respectable style of sociology.

This was part of a wave of positivism that was sweeping the social sciences and humanities in the early twentieth century. We’ll learn about positivism’s origins in the work of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte in two weeks’ time—it started in the early nineteenth century, but people got really into it again in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, lots of people are still really into it nowadays.

Anyway, by the 1930s, after a decade or so of attempts to transform sociology’s image, its practical associations with social reform efforts were long gone. And, more importantly for our purposes, the now well-established discipline of sociology had eradicated the women who received training in sociology, conducted sociological research in settlements like Hull House, and innovated sociological methods, from the official narrative of its disciplinary origins.

So we’re going to learn a little bit about that history today, by learning about Jane Addams and Hull House. And next week we’ll look into the archives here at the university of Chicago, to see what we can find related to this largely ignored part of sociology’s history at the University and in the city of Chicago.

So who was Jane Addams? She was a really remarkable person, I think really a role model for anyone who aspires to be a public intellectual. She spent her life embroiled in the battles of the labor movement, serving on national and international committees for labor rights, lobbying for legislative protection of laborers, mediating trades unions strikes, and providing educational and childcare services to immigrant working populations through Hull-House, the settlement she founded and directed in the Near West Side neighborhood of Chicago. Remarkably, among all her commitments, Addams found time to write a great deal on an impressive range of topics, including democracy, education, charity work, trades unions, and pacifism.

To begin her story, she was born in 1860 in the small town of Cedarville, Illinois to a relatively well-to-do family. She was the daughter of a man who was a Quaker, state senator, and mill owner. She was educated in a seminary in Rockford, Illinois, after which she attempted to complete a medical degree, but dropped out due to poor health.

In the early years of her life, Addams was frustrated by the expectations and limitations placed on women of her era. She was, of course, expected to marry and devote herself to the roles of wife and mother. But she, like many brilliant women, exerted a great deal of willpower in resisting these predetermined routes for her life. She experienced an extended period of frustration and depression after leaving medical school, which coincided with the death of her father. She travelled a lot during this period, including an extended trip to Europe with her friend Ellen Gates Starr.

In June 1888, she visited Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. This settlement was associated with Oxford University, and was a residence where privileged educated people could go to live among, learn about, and provide education and other resources to members of the impoverished working class populations who lived there. Addams was very impressed by this initiative which she felt was doing a lot of good for the East End population. When she returned to the United States in 1889, she and Starr set up the very first settlement house in the country in a derelict mansion in the Near West Side neighborhood of Chicago. This was Hull House, and parts of the original building still survive today in the form of a museum. It would be lovely to visit this as part of the class, but alas—the contagion.

So what was Hull House? Well, in the early years, it was basically just Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr renting out one floor of a derelict building in a poor neighborhood and offering art classes to the locals who comprised mostly recent low-income immigrants from Europe. But it very quickly transformed into something much greater. Over the coming decade, Hull House expanded to include several other buildings, in which were set up a coffee house, gymnasium, library, art gallery, meeting house, kindergarten and nursery, a men’s residence, a co-operative apartment, and a theater.

Hull House attracted many highly educated women, who became residents there, and participated in both social research and social reform activities. Many of these women collaborated on the 1895 publication, Hull House Maps and Papers. As you’ve seen in your reading, as part of this publication, Hull House published detailed maps of the neighborhood they lived in and were serving, with information on the residents’ nationalities, occupations, and wages, along with chapters on their experiences of different kinds of social problems they were encountering.

As far as I can tell, this is the first detailed work of urban sociology in the United States, and it used groundbreaking survey methods, neighborhood statistics, and neighborhood mapping. In any case, this publication was released significantly before the University of Chicago’s School of Sociology started adopting its now-famous methodological paradigm of undertaking detailed study of the environment and structures of the city.

Du Bois’ work of sociology, The Philadelphia Negro, which we’ll look at later in the quarter also preceded the rise of these methods in the University of Chicago, being published in 1899. He had a copy of Hull House Maps and Papers, and probably used it to structure his own innovative study of Black Americans in Philadelphia. Interestingly, Isabel Eaton, who collaborated with him on this project, was also a resident at Hull House. So as I mentioned earlier, Hull House settlement, though not officially associated with a university, was a major site of early sociological innovation, and far from the haphazard, unempirical form of study that Burgess characterized it as in 1925. Between 1895 and 1935, over 50 articles were published in American Journal of Sociology by Hull House residents about the research and reform work they were conducting there. P. 47

In spite of this, Addams and the women at Hull House are usually not considered sociologists, at least not significantly enough to make it into histories of the discipline. In response to this, Deegan created a list of criteria for what counts as a sociologist. They are: Someone who teaches sociology, is a member of the American Sociological Association, writes works of sociology, self-defines as a sociologist, or is defined by contemporaries as a sociologist. Deegan goes on to show that Addams meets every single one of these criteria pp 9-13. Most importantly:

  • Addams gave lectures in sociology, including at the University of Chicago. Albion Small, the chair of the sociology department, even offered her a half-time faculty position, which she refused.
  • Addams was the most active female member of the American Sociological Society during that era, addressing the society by invitation from the presidents in 1912, 1915, and 1919.
  • As well as publishing in the American Journal of Sociology, Addams’ books were regularly reviewed in the journal.
  • Many of Addams’ major works, including Democracy and Social Ethics and Newer Ideals of Peace were published under the editorship of the institutional economist at the University of Wisconsin Madison as part of his Citizen’s Library of Economics, Politics, and Sociology.

 

Major sociologists from the University of Chicago and elsewhere also engaged closely with Addams and Hull House settlement. Members of the university of Chicago sociology department who frequented Hull House and corresponded with Addams include George Herbert Mead and W. I. Thomas, early originators of Chicago’s tradition of symbolic interactionism. The University of Chicago also hoped to create official ties with Hull House by absorbing it into the university, but Addams resisted this, fearing it would interfere with the institution’s independence p38. And as I’ve mentioned, the University of Chicago founded its own settlement under the leadership of Mary McDowell. If you have time, I recommend you look at the Jane Addams Papers Project and look at the wide array of social scientists of her time she corresponded with.

But while both the university and the settlement clearly had significant roles in the early formulations of sociology as an area of study, they had very different ideas of what their work entailed and how it ought to be done. One obvious place where they clashed was over the idea of the settlement as a social laboratory.

While many sociologists in the university viewed Hull House and the University of Chicago Settlement as serving the function of a “window” allowing them to acquire information for the construction of their social theories, the settlement house residents rejected any characterization of their surrounding neighborhoods as specimens. Jane Addams said very early on in the preface to Hull House Maps and Papers that the settlement was chiefly oriented towards “constructive work” (viii). And later, in 1911, in Twenty Years at Hull House, she said: “I have always objected to the phrase ”sociological laboratory” applied to us, because Settlements should be something much more human and spontaneous than such a phrase connotes” (308). Mary McDowell of the university of Chicago settlement resisted this label as well.

The women residents at settlement houses did, of course, engage in sociological investigation, as we can clearly see from Hull House Maps and Papers. The important point, though, was that knowledge was not just to be acquired through observation for the sake of developing theories, but was to be constructed in the service of reform work for the sake of better approaching encountered social problems. Rather than being motivated by the question: “what social problems arose as a result of the increase in urbanism during the time of the Industrial Revolution?” they asked, “what social problems arose, and what institutional reforms, or collective actions can remedy these problems?” Their goal was to use the knowledge they gained from their experiences at settlements like Hull House in the application of practical changes and improvements to society and the lives of the people they served, not to derive knowledge for its own sake.

If you browse the digital archives at the Jane Addams Paper Project or read some of the later chapters of Democracy and Social Ethics, or any of Twenty Years at Hull House, you’ll find that Jane Addams was heavily involved with a wide range of social reform projects in her role as resident of Hull House. These included organizing trades unions, arbitrating strikes, forming national and international labor coalitions, lobbying for legislative protection of industrial workers, and plenty more.

She was asked to arbitrate the Pullman Strike of 1894 in Chicago, after a host of factory workers went on strike in response to a decrease in wages. Addams failed to successfully arbitrate the strike, because the factory owner George Pullman did not feel there was anything in need of arbitration. But in this process, Addams dealt extensively with the trades unions and, partly through her experiences in this event, wrote a lengthy chapter in Democracy and Social Ethics explaining how George Pullman had behaved extremely undemocratically in his dealings with factory workers.

What’s remarkable about Addams’ work in this regard is the way she combined action and theory. In the process of dealing with unions, capitalists, immigrants, industrial workers, professors, legislators, and others, she developed a theory of how to help these diverse people interact in such a way as to make society more democratic. And she applied this theory to the practical problems she was seeking to ameliorate. This is what I mean when I say she was a role model for anyone aspiring to be a public intellectual.

To briefly cover her theory of democracy as an example, Addams did not believe that democracy was a matter of ticking a ballot box once every few years. She argued that democracy was not just “a sentiment” or “a creed,” but “a rule of living,” which needed to be integrated practically with people’s everyday lives (p. 6). Many failures of contemporary democracy, she claimed, could be linked to the isolation of different sectors of society from each other, preventing familiarity with each other’s experiences. In order to resolve them and make our democracy more robust, we needed to ensure the connectedness of diverse types of people who shared the same society. For that reason, democracy could not be compartmentalized as a handful of remote political institutions, with the citizens’ democratic participation reduced to a single act of casting a vote. Democracy had to be an active practice for all citizens, embedded in their lived experience as a way of life. This would only be achieved by “mixing” the diverse members of society together and giving them “a wider acquaintance with and participation in the life about them” (p. 5). Addams argued that it was through exposure to the different ways of life, struggles, and needs of the many people with whom we share our society that we can develop attitudes of sympathy, respect, and a democratic sense of moral obligation towards each other. For example, she mentioned the importance of newspaper and literature in giving people the chance “to know all kinds of life” (p. 8). This kind of “diversified human experience and resultant sympathy” were, for Addams, “the foundation and guarantee of Democracy” (p. 7).

Addams based her theory of democracy on what she encountered in her practical experiences at Hull House, but she also applied her theory of democracy to suggest resolutions to the problems she encountered. For example, what Addams saw in the 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago was a failure of the democratic practice of connecting with the experiences of others. Pullman, the owner of the factory, had built a town for the use of his factory employees, with parks and recreational facilities, believing that he was acting generously. The factory workers, on the other hand, resented the extension of Pullman’s control into the private lives. When the workers went on strike, Pullman was confused by their anger, and he felt that the factory workers were being ungrateful for the resources he had given them. Addams argued that the “good deeds” Pullman thought he was conducting were in fact incomplete, because they were not conducted democratically. By not “calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or self-government,” he ended up lacking any familiarity with the experiences and desires of the workers (p. 143-4), and had operated undemocratically in making his decisions. “To attempt to attain a social morality,” Addams wrote, “without a basis of democratic experience results in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide” for actions—the daily experiences of other human beings (p. 176).

This is a perfect example of the inextricability of theory and practice in Jane Addams’ work. This made her work incredibly valuable both within and beyond academic thought. Her theories were important contributions to politics, philosophy, and social thought. But most importantly for our purposes, she was a major figure in the early years of Chicago sociology, in her role as a researcher and reformer at Hull House.

If you are interested in writing about any of the other women at Hull House, you might be able to find some information about them in Deegan’s book, and on the Jane Addams Papers Project. I should mention, too, that if you do end up working on one of these women, the Jane Addams Papers Project is always looking for undergraduate volunteers to write biographies and transcribe historical documents. Any work you do for our online project could be adapted if you want to make a contribution to another online resource like the Jane Addams Papers Project.

That’s all for this week’s lecture. See you in our archival session next week.

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