Hull House

Hull House

The visit to Hull house was really informative to the life of Jane Adams. In being sociology major I have read a lot of articles about here and abstracts from her books like 20 years at Hull house but have never had the opportunity to visit it.  I was really surprised that when they started hull house they thought that the community would be interested in art slides. It really goes to show that sometimes you must go into the community and live among the people that you are trying to help to really know what services will be useful to them. This was shown again by the fact that the Hull house started to offer day care because there were so many women working in the garment factories near by. When the children came to the day care dirty they installed bath to wash the children before they went home. They even had a summer camp for the children so the children could get fed three meals a day and experience nature. To get the children to be able to have more of a childhood since many of them had to start working as such a young age they built a park and tried to get other communities to build parks as well. They also built stables to raise cattle when the families were being sold milk that was basically poison. I was also really surprised that the Hull house was also involved in doing research when it came to the milk and various other science and neighborhood research. Another aspect of Hull house that surprised me was that Jane Adams was not the soul founder and that Ellen Gates was actually a co- founder and huge part in making Hull house what it was. Hull house became a central part of the community that immigrants could seek out for help in assimilating to their new life in the city of Chicago. The hull house was not just a day care for working mothers but a social center for language classes and various other events and classes. When we visited the museum we were able to see a model of the complex, I could not believe how large the complex actually was and how many different types of buildings were actually incorporated into the complex. The people who live at hull house were not usually people in the community but were the volunteers that came to the complex to teach the classes and help those in the community.  They were mostly well-educated individuals that had money that spent long periods of their life donating their time to Hull House. I feel like Hull house was a stepping-stone to the modern day social work field that was non-existence at the time.