Rima Lunin Schultz, ed.. Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together With Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007. x + 178 pp. $50.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-252-03134-2. Reviewed by Ruth Crocker Published on H-SHGAPE (January, 2008) The appearance of a new edition of Hull- tion and from professions open to their male House Maps and Papers, frst published in 1895, peers such as medicine or the ministry, women suggests the continuing fascination of scholars resident in the settlement houses engaged both in with the famous Chicago settlement house and its social research and social work (the term was founder, Jane Addams. It joins a number of im‐ new). The settlements served as an arena for pro‐ portant new studies of Hull-House and its reform ducing social knowledge and as centers for the re‐ circle by biographers, historians, and moral form campaigns fueled by that new knowledge.[2] philosophers.[1] This edition, the frst since the New interest by scholars in the early years of Arno Press reprint of 1970, is welcome for its American social science makes the reissue of Hull- thoughtful extended introduction by Rima Lunin House Maps and Papers particularly timely. Hull- Schultz, assistant director of the Jane Addams House Maps and Papers is clearly part of the liter‐ Hull-House Museum, and for the eight full-color ature of reform--Rima Schultz calls it "a major maps showing wage and ethnicity data accompa‐ work of sociological investigation and analysis" nying what has been described as the frst social (p. 15). It reflects the Progressive belief that by survey in the United States. publishing statistics of harsh working conditions Settlement houses like Hull-House were a or bad housing social scientists would activate an new kind of institution, neither government agen‐ informed public that would demand reform. It cy, nor graduate school, nor charity, that became a was produced at a time when social scientists center of reform activism for an extraordinary could be sociologists, humanitarians, Social group of reformers, many of them college-educat‐ Gospelers, and activists, all at once. Later the ed women. They gravitated to settlement houses practitioners of this engaged social science would in this period because these institutions offered be marginalized, as social science retreated to an opportunity for collective life and work in the university departments of sociology and political city. Barred from most positions in higher educa‐ economy, and drew the covers of objectivity and H-Net Reviews professionalism over its head.[3] Hull-House to illustrate their fndings. "But nothing else had Maps and Papers exemplifies the Progressive-era been decided. At a Residents' Meeting in August, confidence that reform begins with fact-finding the minutes plaintively recorded the question, and publicity, a tradition that runs from Charles 'What is to go with the maps?'"[4] They decided to Booth in England to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadel‐ add research papers by Florence Kelley, Jane Ad‐ phia Negro (1899), to the Pittsburgh Survey dams, Julia Lathrop, and Ellen Gates Starr that (1909-11) and beyond. Interestingly, Jane Addams were versions of papers given at the Chicago Con‐ made no such claim. She wrote, "The residents of gress on Social Settlements the year before. Jane Hull-House offer these maps and papers to the Addams then titled the resulting volume Hull- public, not as exhaustive treatises, but as record‐ House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Na‐ ed observations, which may possibly be of value, tionalities and Wages in a Congested District of because they are immediate, and the result of Chicago, Together With Comments and Essays on long acquaintance" (quoted, p. 5). Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions. At Hull-House Maps and Papers was in fact an the invitation of Richard Ely, it became part of the improvised volume, the result of intersecting re‐ series, Library of Economics and Politics, pub‐ form initiatives--a U.S. Department of Labor inves‐ lished by Thomas Y. Crowell. tigation of slums, and an Illinois Bureau of Labor The resulting volume is a collection of papers, Statistics inquiry into sweated labor. Both em‐ uneven in length and perspective. Several of the ployed Hull-House resident expert Florence Kel‐ essays (including those on the Bohemians and the ley. In the wake of the public outcry prompted by Italians) make no mention of the maps. Hull- Jacob Riis's sensational How the Other Half Lives House Maps and Papers begins with Agnes Hol‐ (1890), U.S. Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. brook's discussion of the research design and Wright had been charged by Congress to under‐ methods of the social survey and the mapping take the investigation that produced A Special In‐ project. Holbrook, a Wellesley graduate and a res‐ vestigation of the Slums of Great Cities (1893). ident since 1892 of Hull-House, had worked with Wright appointed Kelley, whose investigation of Kelley to prepare the maps. Then follows Florence labor conditions under the auspices of the Illinois Kelley's essay, "The Sweating System," a brilliant Bureau of Labor resulted in the frst legislation demonstration of fact-based advocacy. Florence regulating sweatshops in Illinois to head the Kelley and Alzina Stevens's "Wage-Earning Chil‐ Chicago phase of this investigation. Kelley select‐ dren" is next, based on frst-hand investigation ed as the area of study ("the slum"), a neighbor‐ and observation. Isabel Eaton's powerful indict‐ hood of barely one-third of a square mile east of ment of work conditions among the cloak makers Hull-House in Chicago's Nineteenth Ward. For sev‐ was also included, as were two essays by Hull- eral months, investigators collected house-by- House residents who were both immigrants and house data on wages and nationalities, which they journalists, Josepha Humpal-Zeman on the Bo‐ plotted onto colored maps. They then faced the hemians, and Alessandro Mastro Valerio on Chica‐ dilemma of how to publicize them. go's Italians. Charles Zueblin's curious essay, "The Louise Knight in her new biography of Jane Chicago Ghetto," rounded out the essays on immi‐ Addams gives a sense of the improvisation that grant "colonies," a portrait of a Jewish community produced the volume. Residents had been collect‐ that was already so dispersed that the word "ghet‐ ing data on nationalities and wages in the settle‐ to" seems more about "othering" than social scien‐ ment neighborhood all spring for the Department tific observation. (Zueblin used the term "ghetto" of Labor study, and had agreed to prepare maps despite the evidence that the Jewish community was fast dispersing; in fact, with the delay in pub‐ 2 H-Net Reviews lication, the maps were rapidly becoming out of tors' academic credentials (some were frankly date).[5]. Also included is Julia Lathrop's jaun‐ amateurs), but because of their residency in the diced assessment of Cook County Charities by an neighborhood--their data was experience-based. advocate of social work professionalization; Ellen In this way the volume anticipates the pragmatist Gates Starr's "Art and Labor," and fnally Ad‐ project that Hull-House was becoming. Not only dams's "The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor did the essays present various views of the "social Movement." The volume ends with a brief and de‐ problem," they even had no common body of ceptively naïve overview by Addams of Hull- data. Nor was there an editorial voice, for the vol‐ House, an "Outline Sketch" of the settlement's pur‐ ume's authorship was a collective, "Residents of pose and its activities, illustrated with internal Hull-House, a Social Settlement." This puts it in and external photographs of the settlement build‐ contrast to Riis's How the Other Half Lives, with ings. its strong authorial voice and journalistic tone, Rima Schultz's introduction helps the reader and its undeniable voyeurism. Riis, too, used facts make sense of this rather idiosyncratic collection. to gather support for reform of conditions, pre‐ Building on the work of others, she discusses how senting them in the form of maps, tables, and of women were able to become social science ex‐ course photographs. perts and even to develop a "female dominion" in Schultz acknowledges her debt to recent work reform, simply because when they engaged with on gender and social science by Helene Silver‐ topics deemed natural for women, such as child berg, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Dorothy Ross. But health, juvenile courts, and women workers, they she also has interesting things to say of her own. spoke with authority. Hull-House Maps and Pa‐ She points out lapses in objectivity and examples pers offers a close-up of women as practitioners of the moralism that still shaped the social sur‐ of social science.[6]. Their writings imagined an veys of this period, such as the tendency of these expanded state power that would protect women privileged observers to label immigrant commu‐ and children and end child labor. They were nities "clannish," when they should have val‐ strong advocates of organized labor, municipal orized the immigrants' ethic of cooperation and reform, regulation of sweatshops, and consumer survival (p. 113). Investigators assumed the exis‐ protection. They called for housing reform and tence of "foreign colonies" or "quarters" in the for a living wage for labor, and as experts on the city, and took them as a unit of study, even when city and labor conditions they offered to mediate their own maps showed evidence of ethnic inter‐ in disputes between employers and labor.