Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr rented a run-down mansion on Halsted Street in Chicago and began inviting their immigrant neighbors inside. Hull-House grew into one of the most influential settlement houses in America — a kindergarten, a labor museum, a night school, a meeting hall, a refuge for sweatshop workers and the children who worked beside them. Twenty years later, at fifty, Addams sat down to write the story. She begins in a Cedarville mill town with a Quaker father and a child's longing to do something useful, and works forward through Rockford College, a paralyzing stretch of European travel, and the slow conviction that there had to be a place where educated young people could live among the poor instead of merely studying them. The result is the founding document of American social work — and one of the great memoirs of an examined life. Addams went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.