Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells and the Women Written Out

Between 1889 and 1920, a group of women in Chicago produced some of the most rigorous empirical social research in America. They mapped a city block by block, ran systematic surveys, published in the American Journal of Sociology, taught at the University of Chicago, and built an institution that hosted Dewey, Mead, Veblen and Du Bois.

The discipline classified them as social workers.

This lesson is about what they did, why the classification happened, and what it cost.

Two publications, four years apart.

1895. Hull-House Maps and Papers appears — a collection produced by the residents of a settlement house on Chicago's Halsted Street. Its centrepiece is a set of colour-coded maps of a square mile of the Nineteenth Ward, showing every building, and coding each dwelling by the nationality of its occupants and by weekly household wage.

The data came from schedules collected by Florence Kelley as a special agent of the US Department of Labor, supplemented by house-to-house investigation. The essays that accompany the maps cover sweatshop labour, child labour, the Bohemian and Italian and Jewish communities of the ward, the Cook County charities, and the art and music work of the settlement.

It precedes The Philadelphia Negro by four years and it precedes anything comparable from the University of Chicago's sociology department, then three years old and located a few miles away.

1899. Du Bois publishes The Philadelphia Negro, having spent fifteen months in the Seventh Ward (4.5.1).

1920s. The Chicago School produces its celebrated urban monographs — Park and Burgess's concentric zone model, Thrasher on gangs, Wirth on the ghetto, Zorbaugh on the Gold Coast and the slum — and American urban sociology is born, dated from Chicago, in the 1920s.

Both of the earlier bodies of work sit a short walk from the department that gets the credit, and neither is much cited by it.

The difference in the two cases is instructive. Du Bois was excluded by race, from outside the institution. The Hull-House women were excluded from inside it — they held appointments, published in the journal, and were then moved into a different department.

The question is the one 4.5.5 posed and this lesson answers with a different mechanism.

These women were not obscure. Jane Addams was, at her peak, among the most admired people in the United States and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Florence Kelley drafted labour legislation that reshaped American employment law. Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge held doctorates and university appointments. Ida B. Wells's anti-lynching investigations were internationally known.

They were not unpublished. Addams published five articles in the American Journal of Sociology — the discipline's flagship — between 1896 and 1912, and the Hull-House residents produced a substantial body of empirical work.

And they are not in the canon.

The mechanism here is not non-publication or non-citation. It is reclassification — the movement of a body of work from one disciplinary category to another, after which it is no longer read as belonging to the first.

How does that happen, and what does it cost?

What Hull-House actually was

The people, because the names matter:

Jane Addams (1860–1935) — co-founder; author of Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) and Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910); Nobel Peace Prize 1931.

Florence Kelley (1859–1932) — translator of Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England (she corresponded with Engels directly); chief factory inspector of Illinois; head of the National Consumers League; the principal architect of American child labour and minimum wage legislation. She collected the wage and nationality data behind the Hull-House maps.

Julia Lathrop (1858–1932) — investigator of Illinois's charitable institutions; first head of the federal Children's Bureau (1912), the first woman to head a federal agency in the United States.

Edith Abbott (1876–1957) — PhD in economics, University of Chicago; author of Women in Industry (1910) and The Tenements of Chicago (1936), a thirty-year study of housing.

Sophonisba Breckinridge (1866–1948) — first woman to receive a PhD in political science and economics at Chicago, and the first to earn its law degree; co-author with Abbott of studies on truancy and juvenile delinquency.

Alice Hamilton (1869–1970) — physician; founder of American industrial toxicology, tracing lead, mercury and phosphorus poisoning through workplaces; the first woman appointed to the Harvard faculty.

And Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) — not a Hull-House resident, but a Chicago figure and Addams's sometime ally and critic, whose work belongs here for reasons the next section makes clear.

The research, assessed as research

The Hull-House maps (1895) are the founding work. Colour-coded by wage band and by nationality, block by block, building by building.

Their model is Charles Booth's London poverty maps (3.2.2), which Addams and Kelley knew. Their innovation is the nationality mapping — a systematic spatial record of immigrant settlement patterns, which is precisely what the Chicago School's ecological studies of the 1920s would later make their central object.

The wage data distinguishes actual household earnings across the year, capturing seasonal and irregular employment — a genuine methodological advance over the flat annual income figures then usual.

And the analysis rejects the moral framing. The accompanying essays consistently locate poverty in wage levels, seasonal unemployment, sweatshop subcontracting and housing conditions rather than in the character of the poor — the same argument Du Bois would make in 1899 and the same one Booth's data had forced on him in London.

Other work of the same programme:

Kelley's factory inspections produced systematic data on child labour and sweatshop conditions, which supported the Illinois Factory Act of 1893 — legislation she drafted and then enforced as chief inspector.

Hamilton's industrial disease investigations traced specific poisons to specific workplaces and processes by walking factories and following case histories back to their sources. Her Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943) describes a method that is essentially occupational epidemiology, developed by someone with no epidemiological training because none existed.

Abbott and Breckinridge's truancy, delinquency and housing studies produced the longitudinal data on Chicago tenements that ran from 1908 to the 1930s.

And Addams's own theoretical work — Democracy and Social Ethics in particular — is a genuine contribution to social theory, arguing that democracy is not a form of government but a mode of association requiring that people cross social distance to understand each other's situations, and that charity organised across a class boundary without such understanding is degrading to both parties.

Ida B. Wells deserves separate treatment, because her work is a methodological achievement that has been almost entirely uncredited.

In 1892 three Black grocers in Memphis — one of them, Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells's — were lynched after their store drew custom from a white competitor. Wells, editing a Memphis newspaper, investigated. Her office was destroyed and her life threatened; she left the South permanently.

Her response was to count.

She compiled lynching statistics from the Chicago Tribune's annual tallies and from local white newspapers — choosing white sources deliberately, because they could not be dismissed as partisan. She then examined the alleged cause in each case.

The result, published in Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), demolished the standard justification. The claim was that lynching punished the rape of white women. Wells's data showed that in roughly two-thirds of cases no such accusation was even made; that many "assault" allegations concerned consensual relationships; and that the actual precipitating causes were frequently economic — successful Black businesses, disputes over wages, refusal to defer.

Assess the method. A defined population of cases. Sources chosen for their hostility to her conclusion. Systematic coding of alleged versus actual cause. Comparison against the public justification. Publication with the data.

That is quantitative content analysis of an official record, used to test a causal claim, in 1892 — and it predates the formal development of content analysis as a method by decades.

She was also an organiser: co-founder of the NAACP, campaigner for suffrage, and — in a detail worth keeping — a public critic of Jane Addams, whom she pressed on the failure of white progressives to confront segregation in Chicago's schools. When Addams wrote against lynching in 1901, Wells published a reply pointing out that Addams had accepted the rape justification as a premise while arguing against the practice. Addams's argument conceded the factual claim Wells's data had already refuted.

That exchange is a small case study in why exclusion produces error: the more prominent scholar argued from an assumption the excluded one had already disproved with evidence.

The reclassification

Now the mechanism.

The mechanisms, specifically:

One — the professionalisation of sociology. As the discipline sought scientific standing, it defined itself against reform. Applied and interventionist work became evidence of insufficient rigour. The very feature that made settlement research valuable — that the researchers lived among the people they studied and acted on what they found — became the mark of not being a scientist.

Two — the institutional split at Chicago. Abbott and Breckinridge moved to the School of Civics and Philanthropy, which became the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration in 1920, with Abbott as dean. The work continued; it was now in a different building with a different name, and sociology's history was written from the sociology department.

Three — Park's ascendancy. Robert Park's arrival at Chicago in 1914 and his subsequent dominance shaped what counted as urban sociology. Park was explicit and hostile about reform: he told students, in a much-quoted remark, that more damage had been done by "the sentimentalist" and the "do-gooder" than by any other force, and that the sociologist's business was to observe, not to improve.

Four — the value-neutrality norm (4.3.9). Weber's ethic, imported into American sociology, supplied a principled-sounding justification for the exclusion. Research openly aimed at improvement could be classified as advocacy rather than science.

And five — the ordinary operation of gender in academic careers. Women were largely barred from tenured sociology appointments; the settlement route was one of very few open to educated women who wanted to do social research, and its association with women then reinforced its classification as not-quite-sociology.

The honest complication, because the reclassification was not purely arbitrary.

There is a real distinction between research designed to explain and research designed to support a specific intervention, and it is not unreasonable for a discipline to care about it (4.3.9).

And some settlement work was closer to advocacy than to analysis. Not all of it meets the standard of the maps or of Wells's lynching data. Addams's writing is essayistic and its arguments are frequently moral rather than evidential; some of the reform literature of the period was thin.

But the classification was applied by category rather than by case. The maps, Kelley's factory data, Hamilton's disease investigations, Abbott's thirty-year housing study and Wells's lynching statistics are empirical work of high quality, and they were reclassified along with everything else — while male sociologists conducting explicitly reformist work were not.

And the strongest evidence that the criterion was not really rigour: Park's own students produced monographs with substantial normative content and were not reclassified. The line fell where the women were, not where the advocacy was.

Go deeper

What the discipline lost

Not a rhetorical question — a list.

Long-duration embedded fieldwork. Settlement researchers lived in their districts for years. The Chicago School's ethnographies are typically much shorter engagements. A method of that duration would not become common again until much later.

The insider-outsider position made explicit. Settlement workers were permanently near-and-far in Simmel's sense (4.4.3) and wrote about it. Reflexivity about the researcher's position — which sociology would spend the 1970s and 80s rediscovering — was routine in this work.

A theory of democracy as association. Addams's argument in Democracy and Social Ethics — that democracy requires people to cross social distance and understand situations not their own, and that this is a practice rather than an institutional arrangement — is a genuine contribution that the discipline let go to political philosophy.

Occupational health as a sociological object. Hamilton's work connected specific workplace arrangements to specific bodily damage. Sociology substantially ceded this to public health.

And the analysis of gender itself. The women of this generation were writing about women's work, women's wages, domestic labour and the position of women in industry — Abbott's Women in Industry (1910) is a serious economic history — decades before sociology treated gender as a category. The discipline reclassified out the people most likely to have made gender central, and then took until the 1970s to discover it.

The parallel cases

The mechanism is not confined to Chicago.

Marianne Weber (1870–1954) — a substantial scholar in her own right. Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (Wife and Mother in the Development of Law, 1907) is a major historical study of marriage law and women's legal status. She was president of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, the German women's federation, and the first woman elected to a German state parliament. She is remembered as Max Weber's biographer, and she was — her 1926 biography is indispensable, and it edited and preserved his unpublished work. The two facts are usually not held together.

Harriet Martineau (3.3.3) — How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), a systematic research methodology preceding Durkheim's Rules by fifty-seven years; classified as a popularising translator of Comte.

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) — A Voice from the South (1892) contains the earliest sustained analysis of the intersecting position of Black women in America: "Only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter... then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." She took a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1924, at sixty-six, and taught school. Her 1892 argument precedes Du Bois's 1903 book and is more analytically precise about intersection than anything in it (4.5.2, 8.7).

Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) — with Sidney Webb, produced the methodological treatise Methods of Social Study (1932) and an enormous body of empirical research on trade unions, local government and the Poor Law; her 1909 Minority Report on the Poor Laws set out the framework later realised in the British welfare state. Classified as a Fabian and a policy figure.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) — Women and Economics (1898) analyses the economic dependence of women in marriage as a structural arrangement rather than a natural one, and argues for the socialisation of domestic labour. Classified as a feminist writer.

The recovery

Mary Jo Deegan's Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School (1988) is the pivotal study, arguing that Addams was a sociologist whose work was systematically appropriated and marginalised by the male department, and documenting her AJS publications, her teaching, and her intellectual relationships with Mead, Dewey and Veblen.

Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge's The Women Founders (1998) reconstructs the whole tradition — Martineau, Gilman, the Webbs, Addams, Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Marianne Weber and others — as a coherent body of classical sociology.

And the assessment is contested. Some historians of the discipline argue Deegan overstates Addams's theoretical contribution and understates the genuine methodological differences between settlement research and what Park was building. The debate is worth knowing, and it does not touch the central finding: that a substantial body of empirical research was produced, was reclassified by category rather than by quality, and was consequently absent from the discipline's account of its own origins for most of a century.

"The Hull-House women were social workers who also did some research." They produced systematic social surveys, spatial mapping, factory inspection data, occupational disease investigation and thirty-year longitudinal housing studies. The classification came after the work.

"Their work wasn't scientific because it aimed at reform." Booth's London surveys, Rowntree's poverty studies and Du Bois's Philadelphia study were all reform-oriented and are canonical. The criterion was applied selectively.

"Jane Addams wasn't a sociologist." She published five articles in the American Journal of Sociology, taught in university extension, and was a member of the American Sociological Society. Whether her theoretical work is first-rate is arguable; her disciplinary membership at the time is not.

"Ida B. Wells was an activist, not a researcher." A Red Record is a systematic analysis of a defined case population, using sources selected for their hostility to her conclusion, testing a public justification against evidence.

"Marianne Weber was Max Weber's biographer." She was that, and the author of a major legal-historical study of marriage and women's status, and a national political figure.

"This is about fairness to individuals." It is about what a discipline knows. Sociology reclassified out the researchers most likely to have made gender a central category, and then took fifty years to arrive at it.

Why it matters

It identifies a second mechanism of canon formation. Du Bois was excluded from outside the institution (4.5.5); these women were reclassified inside it. Reclassification is the subtler mechanism and probably the more common one, because it requires no hostility — only a boundary and a habit of applying it by category.

It shows a professional boundary being drawn and then naturalised. The sociology/social work split looks now like a distinction between kinds of activity. It was, at the time, substantially a distinction between kinds of people, and the activity-based justification was assembled afterwards.

It supplies methods the discipline had to reinvent. Long-duration embedded fieldwork, explicit reflexivity about the researcher's position, spatial mapping of social conditions, and occupational health as a social object — all present in this work, all lost, all recovered decades later.

And it explains a gap that shaped the discipline for fifty years. The people best positioned to make gender a central sociological category were moved out of the category. That is not a moral observation about fairness. It is an explanation of why a field that studies social structure took until the 1970s to notice one of the largest.

Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895) — colour-coded maps of a Chicago square mile by wage band and nationality, built on Florence Kelley's federal wage schedules and house-to-house investigation. It precedes The Philadelphia Negro by four years and the Chicago School's urban monographs by three decades.

The people: Addams (Nobel Peace Prize 1931, five AJS articles, Democracy and Social Ethics); Kelley (Engels's translator, Illinois chief factory inspector, architect of American child labour law); Lathrop (first woman to head a US federal agency); Abbott (Women in Industry, a thirty-year Chicago housing study); Breckinridge (first woman with a Chicago PhD in political science and its law degree); Hamilton (founder of American industrial toxicology, first woman on the Harvard faculty).

Ida B. Wells compiled lynching statistics from white newspaper sources chosen precisely because they were hostile to her conclusion, coded alleged against actual cause, and demolished the rape justification — quantitative content analysis testing a causal claim, in 1892. She publicly corrected Addams, who had argued against lynching while conceding the factual premise Wells's data had already refuted.

The mechanism is reclassification, not exclusion: sociology and social work separated between 1915 and 1930 along an almost perfectly gendered line, driven by professionalisation defining itself against reform, the institutional split at Chicago, Park's hostility to "do-gooders," the value-neutrality norm, and the closure of tenured appointments to women. It was applied by category, not by case — and Park's own students did normatively loaded work without being reclassified.

Parallel cases: Marianne Weber (a major study of marriage law, remembered as a biographer); Martineau; Anna Julia Cooper, whose 1892 analysis of Black women's intersecting position precedes and exceeds Souls; Beatrice Webb; Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

What was lost: long-duration embedded fieldwork, explicit reflexivity, spatial mapping, occupational health as a social object — and the people most likely to have made gender a central category.

Settlement house — a residence in a poor district where educated reformers lived, provided services and conducted research.

Social survey movement — the tradition of systematic urban investigation running from Booth through Hull-House and Du Bois.

Reclassification — the movement of a body of work from one disciplinary category to another, after which it ceases to be read as belonging to the first.

Professionalisation — the process by which an occupation defines its boundaries, credentials and legitimate methods, frequently by exclusion.

Content analysis — systematic coding of documentary sources to test claims; anticipated by Wells in 1892.

Industrial toxicology — the tracing of occupational disease to specific workplace processes; founded in the US by Alice Hamilton.

Reflexivity — explicit examination of the researcher's own position and its effect on the research.

One — look at the Hull-House maps. They are digitised and freely available. Compare them with Booth's London maps and with the Chicago School's later ecological maps. The lineage is unmistakable and the credit is not.

Two — read Wells's method. A Red Record is short and freely available. Read the opening chapters for the source selection and the coding, not only for the findings.

Three — trace a professional boundary. Take any two adjacent fields — sociology and social work, medicine and nursing, architecture and design — and find out when and how the boundary was drawn, and who ended up on each side.

Four — check a syllabus again. In any classical theory course, count how many of the assigned authors are women. Then ask whether the absence reflects who produced knowledge or who held chairs.

Five — read Cooper's sentence. "Only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter... then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." Written in 1892. Compare it with the standard account of when intersectional analysis began.