Jane Addams influenced the lives of many immigrant Chicagoans through offering a variety of community oriented services including art education programs at the Hull-House. This study examines the origins and philosophy of both the Butler Art Gallery and Labor Museum, and discusses each program’s role for residents, visitors, and guests of Hull-House. In addition to providing a historical basis for Jane Addams as an art educator, this study discusses the techniques for community organization that were utilized by Hull-House residents, including Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. / text

Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House, Chicago’s first settlement house, in 1889 as a means of confronting poverty, poor housing conditions, disease, discouragement, and other ills that flourished in the predominately immigrant Halstead neighborhood. Because Hull House volunteers lived at the House, in the center of the community, they were well-equipped to respond knowledgeably to the neighborhood conditions. Hull House residents worked for reform in areas such as education, labor, juvenile protection, immigration, welfare, housing, and suffrage and they provided the community with a plethora of activities and services during the Progressive Era. As the community expressed their needs, Hull House volunteers responded to them. This dissertation provides evidence that social activism did not just take the form of political engagement and occupational health efforts but that it also included disease and illness prevention efforts. An examination of activist work of the Hull House Woman’s Club helps create an understanding of the intersection of activism and disease and illness prevention, and how activists used strategies to improve the health and wellbeing of people at the turn of the century. Specifically, three groups of women—the neighborhood women, the club women, and public health knowledge-holders—came together to address public health issues in the Nineteenth Ward. Each of these three groups played an integral role in the success of Hull House public health activism; it was their coming together that enabled them to create such powerful change. This dissertation specifically examines the women’s efforts in 1894 to improve garbage collection and sanitation and their 1902 efforts to eliminate typhoid in their neighborhood. This dissertation argues that, despite a lack of formal public health education or training, Woman’s Club members utilized local knowledge to improve health conditions in the Nineteenth Ward in Chicago. Woman’s Club activists acquired public health knowledge and developed activist strategies and techniques inductively, through trial and error, as they were carrying out their activist work. This dissertation helps fill in the historical gaps by exploring the strategies Hull House volunteers used to prevent disease and illness prevention.

ABSTRACT Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), the leading American figure in industrial medicine during the early to mid-1900s, left behind a body of rhetoric that is important in the history of American feminist discourse and American public address. Her discourse is the exemplary of feminist-pragmatist rhetoric, a genre of cross-gender communication developed by New Women associated with Hull House and the University of Chicago between 1892 and 1918. Hamilton’s rhetoric illuminates a key event in the history of the American rhetorical tradition—the emergence of the modern woman from her late-Victorian beginnings through her Progressive self-transformation. This study is approached as a rhetorical biography. It tracks Hamilton’s evolution from “reticent scientist” to outspoken feminist-pragmatist by examining family, educational, peer and social influences on her development; and through critical analysis of her speeches, technical writing, books, and popular and specialty magazine articles over a 36-year period, from 1907 to 1943.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1965. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-200).

This is a historical documentary research study across Neva Leona Boyd (1876-1963). The theoretical perspective is based on the historical perspective of knowledge from ancient Greece to the approach of modern symbolic interactionism. The study shows that Boyd, who was Viola Spolins teacher, was a proponent of the modern view of group play theory. 1909 she founded Chicago School for Playground Workers, later transformed to the Recreation Training School. Until 1927, the school entered in Hull-House initiated by Jane Addams. The school was incorporated with Northwestern University. Boyd also worked at other schools and the Illinois Department of Public Welfare, where she designed a recreational program for the mentally ill. Contemporary with Boyd was George H. Mead and John Dewey. Boyd's previous work turns out to have some connection to Sweden when Boyd collected and systematized games from different geographical regions of the world. Boyd’s group play theory are identified and described. Boyd’s group play theory highlights the importance of leadership and the intimacy leaders manage to create in group work.