Visiting Jane Addams Hull House Museum in Chicago in April 2025
By Sally Greenberg, NCL CEO
How fortunate we were to be in Chicago for the 31st teen consumer education competition this April 2025. Fortunate for several reasons – Chicago is truly one of the world’s great cities: wonderful architecture, grand old buildings, and charming neighborhoods, each with its own restaurants and customs.
However, we were fortunate as well because the roots of our organization, the National Consumers League, are found at Chicago’s Hull House. Today, it’s called Jane Addam Hull House Museum and is a National Historic Landmark.
This site was America’s most famous original settlement house, today on the campus of the University of Chicago. The House was founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and her partner, Ellen Gates Starr, to serve poor Greek, German, Irish, Italian, Bohemian, Russian, and Polish Jewish immigrants flooding to Chicago to work in the city’s burgeoning industries. Addams was a prolific author and social reform visionary (she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931), opening the doors of Hull House for residents and their children in surrounding tenements, offering cultural experiences like dance, theater, and music, classes in English, weaving, American customs, and public baths. Little children were welcomed to the nursery and older children attended kindergarten.
Hull House Museum, with its many bedrooms and function rooms, became home to social reformers like NCL’s Florence Kelley. Other residents of the Hull House included Dr. Alice Hamiliton, Julia Lathrop, Grace and Edith Abbott, and Sophonisba Breckenridge. Kelley had fled New York City and an abusive husband, taking her three children with her Hull House in Chicago and successfully filing for divorce in the Illinois courts. She lived and worked alongside Addams. NCL co-founder Francis Perkins accepted a teaching position in Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1904 and immediately began to spend her free time at Hull House.
Kelley served in the 1890s as chief factory inspector for the State of Illinois and undertook a project to map tenements. Kelley documented the overcrowded, dilapidated rooms, tracking wages, working conditions, and ages of residents. She discovered children as young as 4 and 5 not attending school but working many hours a day inside dark, airless dwellings with their families for pennies a day. Infectious diseases spread rapidly in these conditions, and many children and adults died. Kelley’s mapping effort provided critical data to enable her to make the case for comprehensive reforms. Addams enlisted Kelley to serve as General Secretary when they decided to form the National Consumers League.
So, my colleague Karen Silberstein, also a history buff, ventured to the Near West Side to see Hull House Museum. We beamed with pride at the exhibit of Florence Kelley, showing the “White Label” that she created to give to factories that respected worker rights. The exhibit describes her as a “labor activist, consumer advocate, and attorney.” Kelley later received her degree after taking night classes at Northwestern Law School.
We walked through the first and second floors, seeing exhibits of the many reformers and residents of Hull House and marveling at the looms, yielding handiwork and extensive crafts of Hull House. We read romantic poems and letters – once kept from the public but now proudly displayed – from Addams to her life partner, Mary Rozet Smith.
Hull House actually had 13 buildings, and while most of them aren’t open to the public, this national treasure is a must-see for Americans who are fascinated by our nation’s history during the turn of the 20th Century and the Progressive Era. NCL is proud to be an essential part of this American heritage.
