twenty years at hull house

back edition, refers to it simply as an autobiography (though he does

note its odd impersonality: "Was there ever a more impersonal autobiography?" he asks). Others have seen it as not so much the autobiography of Jane Addams as the early history of Hull-House. In fact, it is

both; Jane Addams and Hull-House share center stage in Twenty Years

at Hull-House, and perhaps the most interesting theme of the hook is

the relationship between the two. There would have been no HullHouse without the personality and experiences of the person who

created it, hut equally, perhaps, there would have been no "Jane

Addams" if she had not created Hull-House in an extraordinary act of,

among other things, self-making.

Addams is very conscious of the double focus of her material in

Twenty Years at Hull-House (another, secondary act of self-making).

Jane Addams is present but subordinated to Hull-House even in the

title: Twenty Years at Hull-House; with Autobiographical Notes, a division of emphasis preserved in her curious preface, in which she opens

an autobiography with an apology for saying anything about herself.

"The earlier chapters," she writes, "present influences and personal

motives with a detail which will be quite unpardonable if they fail to

make clear the personality upon whom various social and industrial

movements in Chicago reacted during a period of twenty years." Personal experience, then, is not of interest in itself; it may be admittedonly if it explains certain public positions. Twenty Years at Hull-House

is thus to he read essentially like the earlier sociological books. "Each

of the earlier books," she writes, "was an attempt to set forth a thesis

supported by experience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace the

experiences through which various conclusions were forced upon me."

The relationship between Jane Addams and Hull-House, between

autobiography and history, is far more complicated than Addams was

able to explain in her preface, as she seemed to realize herself, since

she spends much of the book exploring, at least indirectly, the nature

of that relationship.

The first five chapters, the "autobiographical" ones which cover her

life up to the founding of Hull-House, tell a very different story from

that told by biographers like her nephew James Weber Linn and Allen

F. Davis. Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6,

1860. (It is characteristic of her impressionistic, elliptical method in

her initial autobiographical chapters that she omits both dates and