hull house's hidden power: the donors behind and beside jane addams

HULL HOUSE’S HIDDEN POWERThe Donors Behind and Beside Jane Addams

Kyle Simpson McCaskill

Jane Addams did not employ a feminist rhetoric like that of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Yet she became one of the most powerful women in American history. Historians have examined Jane Addams and her Hull House associates as women who professionalized progressive reform. However the most significant fact about Jane Addams and her associates is that they were women living in the late nineteenth century—but they had careers, followed their own agendas, and exercised considerable influence. How was this possible?

When I set out to research Jane Addams, my assumption was that she was largely funded by big businessmen like Armour, Field, and McCormick; the most obvious sources of big money in Chicago in that era. Virginia Woolf characterizes the power of money nicely in Three Guineas, wherein she discusses the ability that the wealthy have to exercise “the right of potential givers to impose terms” over the recipients of their gifts.1 In accordance with this principle, I presumed that Addams’ agenda was at least partially controlled by Chicago’s male power brokers. I discovered, however, that while Addams did receive very small, regular “subscription” donations from many of Chicago’s big business players as part of their obligatory charity docket, the bulk of her funding came from other women, particularly from Louise de Koven Bowen and Mary Rozet Smith.

Did these women, who made Hull House possible for Addams, practice “the right of potential givers to impose terms?” What were their terms?

The nature of connections among women in the 1890s allowed something unusual to develop: terms that permitted and even fostered agency. In return for their money, Mary Smith and Louise Bowen wanted connection to Addams and to the network she was building, connection to a person and vehicle in sympathy with their own goals, with whom they could operate in concert. The result was not a beholden relationship, but a relationship that strengthened everyone and allowed all of the players to exercise more influence.

While it is true that women often grouped together to acquire public influence throughout U.S. history—particularly during the nineteenth century—there was a difference in the female network Addams built. Hull House’s conduit of female-controlled money empowered Addams, rather than constraining her with obligation. Addams was not beholden to her female financial backers, because the empowering was reciprocal: support of Addams was an avenue toward personal power for Louise Bowen and Mary Smith.

The Addams associates that historians have focused on—Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and Alice Hamilton—were Hull House’s most visible reformers, yet their power ultimately derived from behind the scenes. Smith and Bowen were the hidden powers behind Addams, and thus, behind Hull House’s front-line reformers.

1 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1938), 41.

© 2002, 2010 Kyle Simpson McCaskill 1

Smith and Bowen have long been misunderstood. Mary Rozet Smith has been recognized as Jane Addams’ companion, but has been portrayed as a caricature of a meek Victorian wife, a powerless accompaniment to Addams’ vigorous effectiveness. What has been overlooked is that Smith was one of Addams’ two largest and most continuous sources of financial backing, and embedded in that backing was influence. Addams also derived a great deal of the personal power she developed at Hull House from the emotional support of Mary Smith.

Louise de Koven Bowen has been recognized as Addams’ close friend and champion, but the fact is that her extraordinary support of Hull House had a defining influence on the shape of the institution. Two of the largest facilities in the Hull House complex only existed because Bowen decided that they should. Addams could not have developed Hull House into an institution that marked her as “the greatest woman in the world” without Bowen’s funding. By the same token, Bowen could not have implemented her civic improvement agenda for Chicago, nor achieved the same degree of personal power, without Addams and her network of reformers.

Late nineteenth century men accessed political and corporate power and increased their influence through the separation of the professional from the personal. Women—like Addams, Smith, and Bowen—lacking access to political and corporate channels, conversely found strength by combining the personal and the political—combining affective ties with financial ties—and this proved their ultimate strength.

Jane AddamsAddams was part of the first generation of college-educated women: women who

sallied forth to college with a sense of breaking barriers, discovering new frontiers, acutely aware of making history. Bound together by their new-found sense of mission, these women graduated and went out into the world . . . only to find that the world didn’t have a place for them. Professional careers for educated women were largely absent. They found their new sense of mission invalidated. After her graduation from Rockford Female Seminary, Addams wrote despairingly: “I have been idle for 2 years . . . and the consequence is that . . . I have constantly lost confidence in myself.” 2

The women coming out of Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Bryn Mawr reacted to this fact of late nineteenth century life in significant ways. A large number of them, including Jane Addams, experienced difficulty with depression and health problems. Addams at last cured her malaise by finding something to do—and finding ways to fund it.

Anne Firor Scott contends that associations of women were a driving factor in the way American social and political systems developed. Prohibited any public political voice as individuals, women found that in groups they carried weight and could carve out a public place for their voices.3 Kathleen McCarthy argues further that it was not only female support networks that provided these women with a power base in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the progressive reform movement itself. She identifies philanthropy and voluntarism as avenues used by women to access and

2 Davis, Heroine, 37.3 Ann Firor Scott, Natural Allies; Women's Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 2.


influence public policy.4 Educated women built the progressive reform movement in the process of creating professions for themselves.

The culture that incubated Addams, Bowen, and Smith is one in which men and women were relegated to separate social spaces. Women were bound in a domestic orbit of pregnancy, child care, household chores, and care of the sick. And this Victorian culture, which was excessively repressive regarding male-female relations, was entirely lacking our twentieth century taboos regarding close female relationships.5

Consider the effect that a college education might have on a woman in this cultural milieu. Women with common aspirations were brought together in classrooms and dormitories with an absence of male authority figures. There they schemed and dreamed about how they would use their educations to better the world around them—a world that industry was changing so fast it often seemed to be going mad. It is no surprise that these women would gravitate to other women for intellectual, emotional, and material support.6

Jane Addams and her fellow settlement workers were what Carol Smith-Rosenberg has termed “a revolutionary demographic and political phenomenon”: “the single, highly educated, economically autonomous New Woman.”7 Moreover, women found that they could increase their influence by combining personal/emotional, political, and financial support. For men, “business was business,” an approach that permitted business transactions and political maneuvers to be self-serving, competitive, and even unethical. Addams and other women in the progressive reform movement discarded the male model and developed their own political method of consensus and conciliation, combined with emotional and financial support. Jane Addams required funding to achieve her goals, but she also required emotional support, sharing, and empathy with her agenda and her challenges. Historian Lillian Faderman explained Addams and her associates when she wrote the following:

In selecting other women they chose not only a relationship of equals but one of shared frustration, experiences, interests, and goals with which only the most saintly of nineteenth and early twentieth-century men could have sympathized. Such private sharing was essential to these women, who found themselves quite alone in uncharted territory. 8

Jane Addams established Hull House in the fall of 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr, her intimate friend since their Rockford days. Addams and Starr started off with a kindergarten for the children of the tenement neighborhood, but soon added the Butler Art Gallery and a public kitchen. Eventually Hull House would grow into a massive institution that provided university extension classes, lectures, plays, dances, a Coffee House, Boy’s and Men’s Club buildings, a Woman’s Club hall, libraries, a gymnasium, a billiard room, a bowling alley, a labor museum, an employment bureau, postal services,

4 Kathleen D. McCarthy, Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power (New Brunswick:Rutgers University Press, 1990), 1.

5 Carol Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985), 74.

6 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers; A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 13.

7 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis: 1870-1936”, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985), 245, 253

8 Faderman, Odd Girls, 22.


and a variety of outreach efforts for 5-6,000 neighbors.9

While still in its early stages Hull House altered the nature of the Addams/Starr relationship, driving a wedge between them and underlining the ways in which they did not fulfill each other’s needs. The support Addams needed came to her eventually in the person of Mary Rozet Smith.

Jane Addams and Mary Rozet SmithJane Addams was the love of Mary Smith’s life. The emotional and financial

support Smith provided helped Addams develop into a woman of far-reaching influence. Historiography has not given this intersection of love and money the primacy it deserves.

Mary Rozet Smith was of the old Chicago aristocracy: naive, shy, sheltered, and rich, yearning to make a difference and to experience life, yet not comfortable in the public eye. Her father was a leading Chicago paper manufacturer. Her mother came from a prestigious Philadelphia family, and Mary’s privileged childhood included a considerable amount of European travel. Unmarried and at loose ends, Smith made her way to Hull House during its first year.

From the very first, Addams’ letters refer to donations Smith was making to Hull House activities. By July of 1892, two years after Smith first found her way to Hull House, Addams began closing her letters with phrases such as “I am always your loving friend.” One letter Addams penned during this period reveals that part of the dynamic between Smith and Addams manifested itself early in their friendship: “My dear friend. I am very grateful to my sweet nurse for all her good letters, and am ashamed to have appeared so unresponsive. I hope she knows that I really am not. . . .” 10 Addams’ characterization of Smith as her “sweet nurse” is telling, revealing that Smith’s propensity to nurture drew Addams from the start.

By the summer of ’92 Addams’ personal financial resources were dwindling, and increasingly she turned to Smith as a financial resource and strategic confidante. Though Smith’s commitment to care for ailing members of her family precluded her from considering residency at Hull House, Addams drew Smith into Hull House life by putting her in charge of the Boy’s Club and frequently consulting her about plans and operations.

During 1893 and 1894 Addams’ letters to Smith reflect an evolution in the character of their relationship from a fond friendship into something more intimate. Although Smith only lived on the other side of Chicago, Addams sent Smith a steady stream of letters detailing progress at Hull House, framed by sentiments expressing a growing devotion, such as “I bless you, dear, every time I think of you, which is all the time at present.” 11 In spite of the fact that by all accounts Addams was reserved and impersonal, there are expressions that suggest a new feeling of vulnerability. “I did not say that I wanted to air the confessional the other night because I did not feel sure enough of myself—if you ever doubt my desire to be with you—I wish you could see at the bottom of my mind—you would certainly be reassured.” 12

We do not have a complete record of Mary Smith’s financial contributions to Hull House. Some of Addams’ letters thank Smith for checks that do not appear in the donor records. This fact underscores the nature of the Addams-Smith relation and how its very

9 Chicago Historical Society, “Just the Arti-FACTS; Jane Addams,” <http://chicagohs.ia.thirdcoastnet/AOTM/Mar98/mar98fact1.html>, March 1998.

10 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, July 21, 1892, The Jane Addams Papers (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International for the University of Illinois at Chicago, 1984), 2/1323.

11 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, December 23, 1894, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/1612.12 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, February 21, 1897, The Jane Addams Papers, 3/580.


intimacy muddied the financial waters. For Smith, the money she gave Addams was diffused, personal, an extension of her passions, partly directed at Addams, partly directed at Hull House.

The nature of Mary Smith’s giving changed over time. In the early years of Hull House—also the early years of the Smith-Addams relationship—Smith’s donations generally represented very specific amounts targeted to very specific projects, often making up budget shortfalls. Jane Addams was a consummate executive, but a poor bookkeeper, and always seemed to be confronting one financial difficulty after another. Smith was willing to feed her resources into Hull House on an as-needed basis. 13

Addams frequently expressed reluctance to accept Smith’s assistance and some anxiety regarding the effect of “all these money transactions” on their relationship. In a 1894 letter Addams wrote, “The check came this afternoon. It gives me a lump in my throat, to think of the round thousand dollars you have put into the prosaic bakery and the more prosaic debt when there are so many more interesting things you might have done and wanted to do.” 14

Addams found it difficult to raise sufficient funds for poor relief, yet relatively painless to obtain thousands of dollars in donations for new buildings. Donors contributed easily and generously to capital investments in Hull House that would live on in the public memory in the form of a gymnasium or a museum, but made excuses when asked to contribute funds that would be quickly used up in poor relief and then forgotten. However, while other benefactors were supporting the children’s creche, Smith sent Addams $100 to relieve some of the neighborhood suffering brought about by unemployment. So Addams, in the face of such resistance from her other supporters and in spite of her own regrets, included in her newsy letters to Smith appeals for help such as this one:

We have had a fearful time with the ‘unemployed’ all summer. The ‘Relief & Aid,’ the ‘United Hebrew Charities,’ and all the ‘offices’ of the Central Relief has [sic] been closed up.... [H]ave collected about one hundred dollars since I came from Rockford but we are still almost two hundred dollars behind. I don’t know what to do. 15

Smith had a soft spot for the kind of outright charity that many other donors shunned, and regularly tried to ameliorate the harsh conditions in the neighborhood surrounding Hull House. Addams was always careful to give Smith an account of the positive benefits her funds had provided:

The check for one hundred dollars came duly to hand and is being cautiously given out in food and coal. We are feeding a good many of the lodging house ladies, they are rather short of sewing there and have just about managed to pay for the lodging. It is a real pleasure to be able to be human once more. 16

13 Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Who Funded Hull House?" in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick:Rutgers University Press, 1990), 101-104.

14 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, sometime during 1894, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/1482.15 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, February 6, 1895, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/1662.16 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, February 16, 1895, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/1666.


In addition to rescuing Addams from cash shortfalls, Smith gave Addams personal gifts, like items of clothing. Addams may have shied away from accepting money for her personal use, so Smith found another way to help with Addams’ personal finances: she funded the accounts that she knew Addams would otherwise fund with her personal resources. Consider this 1895 letter that Addams wrote to Smith:

I was very much touched by your note last evening. I ought not to accept the back pay for Miss Barnum’s fellowship. I went to bed quite determined not to do it, but after a three o’clock vigil found myself weakly accepting it. Miss Barnum has changed it on the fellowship account from my name to yours.17

All of the manifestations of their early financial relationship are in this letter. By funding an account (Miss Barnum’s fellowship) that Addams had been funding, Smith was making up that shortfall, but more importantly was relieving Addams of the need to invest personal funds. Addams went through her usual process of resistance; moving to regretful, almost shamefaced, acceptance of Smith’s assistance. This letter also refers to a Hull House program that was near and dear to Mary’s heart in the early years: fellowships.

Fellowships were the conduit Addams devised to get donor money directly to settlement workers in the form of salaried employment. Addams explained the fellowship concept this way to Anita McCormick Blaine during an appeal for funding: “Several people — Mrs. Coonley, Mrs. Wilmarth, Miss Mary Rozet Smith, and Miss Colvin, — pay sums of $50 a month, which are known as fellowships. The person receiving these sums devotes herself to a special sort of work and reports to me, of course, but directly to the persons giving the money.” 18 Addams cleverly gave the donor a sense of ownership and control, while pointing out the contributions of the donors’ peers.

Addams’ nephew, James Weber Linn, provided an insightful description of Smith’s pattern of giving.19 “In the early years of the House, which were of course the most difficult years financially, Mary Smith was the most unfailing helper-out. She enlisted the interest of her father in gifts for buildings; later, when she was made a trustee of the Hull House Association, she herself gave largely. But it was her constant overcoming of deficits here and there, small but apparently insurmountable, that literally kept the work going.” 20

That Smith engaged her father’s interest is an understatement. Smith supported the Hull House children’s programs and established the Music School. As patron of Mary’s interests, her father paid $12,255 for the construction of a new Children’s House complete with Music School in 1896. The impressive facility also included a day nursery, infant care, kindergarten, connecting class, music school, and studio, with rooms available for classes and club meetings at night.21 As Linn’s comment infers, over the years Smith’s role would change from that of stop-gap, to that of a trustee and benefactor

17 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, August 15, 1895, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/1741.18 Jane Addams to Anita McCormick Blaine, December 11, 1895, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/1821.19 James Weber Linn was the child of Jane’s elder sister Mary, who died in 1894. After Mary’s death Jane assumed

guardianship of Linn’s younger brother Stanley, and Hull House became home base for James Weber while he attended the University of Chicago. Davis, Heroine, 83-84.

20 Linn, Addams, 147-14821 The Hull House Bulletin (January 1896), p.6., in The Jane Addams Papers, 53/510.


with responsibility and stature, until her name became synonymous with the Hull House Music School.

Mary Smith’s influence upon Hull House is less obvious and visible to the eyes of history than that of Louise Bowen, notable for her towering financial support and her own Chicago reform agenda, or of women like Florence Kelly, Julia Lathrop, and Alice Hamilton who branched out from Hull House into national and even international renown. However I would argue that Smith’s influence was more pervasive, in that it operated through Addams, as it were, the way the influence of the First Lady operates through the President. Smith never resided in Hull House, and her visits were brief and infrequent enough to make Addams entreat her for more. Smith never renounced the “family claim” that unmarried women were assumed to have, the way Addams did. She cared for her ailing mother, assisted her father as he gradually lost his eyesight, and provided a familial nucleus for her brothers’ families.22 Yet Hull House provided her with a vocation and a respite from the demands of her family. As she became more and more of a partner to Addams, she took an increasingly more important role in financial issues, so that when Addams incorporated Hull House Association in 1895 and appointed a board of trustees, she immediately offered Smith a trusteeship: “Will you consent to be one of our ‘trustees’ the fatal moment has arrived when we must incorporate. I want very much to have you. When are you coming home, we are postponing some very important decisions for your arrival.”23

Addams found an unanticipated complement and anchor in the person of Mary Rozet Smith. She counted on Smith not only as a companion but an advisor, often discussing financial information about projects for which Smith was not a donor. Mary Smith, in turn, found in Addams someone who valued her and who opened her eyes to a captivating intellectual excitement and sense of mission.

Louise Bowen left us with this picture of Smith’s apparent role as a sort of helpmeet to Addams: “Mary was in the habit of following her [Addams] around with a shawl, pocket handkerchiefs, crackers if she thought Miss Addams might be hungry, or anything else she might want, and was thus always ready to supply Miss Addams’ needs, whatever they were.”24 Based on such accounts, historian Robin Muncy has compared Smith to a “Victorian wife,” saying that “Smith took her identity strictly from her relationship with Addams.”25 Muncy suggests that Smith submerged her own identity in that of Addams. On the contrary, I would argue that Smith and Addams drew upon and supported each other in complementary but equal ways. Smith became a curious combination of helpmeet and provider.

While Smith played a wifely role in seeing to Addams’ personal needs, Addams had a wifely financial dependency upon Smith, making it difficult to cast Smith in the role of Victorian wife. Addams frequently made reference to Smith as a provider of both Hull House funding and personal items, as in this 1896 letter from Addams to Smith: “I have been homesick for you and have meditated much on your unfailing goodness to me. I put on the blue dressing gown the other night on the cars thinking that I had accepted it too much as a matter of course. And when I put on my black dress and fine new jacket in the morning both of which you had given me, I concluded that I had reached the point of

22 Linn, Addams, P 15023 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, March 26, 1895, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/1688.24 Louise de Koven Bowen, Open Windows: Stories of People and Places (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1946), 227.25 Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16.


taking whatever you gave me without even so much as telling you how much I cared for them because they came from you.” 26

Addams frequently chastised Smith for being too busy to come see her. If Smith had been the vacuous shell that Muncy has implied, she would have drowned in the wake of the dynamic and imperious Addams, but that was not the case. Smith never relinquished her own goals and obligations, and moreover remained the rock that Addams turned to again and again. Addams was visible, charismatic and energetic, but it was not until her partnership with Smith cemented that she became focused, grounded, and financially secure enough to begin to develop real power. Addams' developing power was ultimately rooted in the balance of her relationship with Smith. In their unique way, these two women worked out a partnership in which each got what she needed from the other without compromising herself.

During the autumn of 1896, Addams wrote to her sister that Mary "is so good to me that I would find life a different thing without her." 27 At this time she sent Smith a gift along with these sentiments: "it is a token of my 'fondest love' and a feeble expression of my gratitude for our affectionate friendship which has made life a very different thing for me during the last three years and has transformed the future." 28 This sense of transformation, of unhoped-for possibilities, convinces me that they regarded each other as life partners.29

The significance of the wedded nature of their relationship becomes clearer when we consider that professional women of Addams' generation perceived marriage and career as mutually exclusive choices.30 Upon choosing career, Addams thought she had sacrificed the possibility of marriage. The revelation was that Smith could be that kind of life partner—but a new kind of partner, who could help enable Addams’ career rather than thwart it—and that love and professional success could not only coexist, but actually reinforce each other.

It is obvious that Smith supplied Addams with both financial and emotional security, but what did Addams supply Smith? Smith clearly struggled with something Addams had mastered: how a late nineteenth century woman of privilege who chose not to marry justified her existence. Having faced this issue and then resolved it via Hull House, Addams offered Smith her experience and advice. She described to Smith all her attempts to find purpose before founding Hull House: how she enrolled in medical school, took drawing lessons, immersed herself in the study of art and language on a European tour; how she tried to run a sheep farm; even how one summer she succumbed to the “family claim” and ran her family household in Cedarville—and how all of this constituted misdirection until she found meaningful work through Hull House.

But there was something else. Late in 1896 Smith wrote to Addams: "I have been having another bad time with my conscience (about [indecipherable word] my ‘wealth’) and I've been in the depths of gloom until yesterday when the sight and sound of you cheered me.... I wonder how it would feel to escape from the 'conviction of sin' for about ten minutes." Smith enclosed a donation with this letter, significantly blending conscience and contribution.31 Addams supplied Smith with a trustworthy, honorable

26 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, January 18, 1896, The Jane Addams Papers, 3/24.27 Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, December 4, 1896, The Jane Addams Papers, 3/520.28 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, sometime during 1897, The Jane Addams Papers, 3/531.29 I have chosen the word “married” to underline the combination of financial and emotional interdependence in the Smith-

Addams relationship.30 Sicherman, Hamilton, 8.31 Mary Rozet Smith to Jane Addams, December 1896, The Jane Addams Papers, 3/512-515.


vehicle through which she could put her wealth to good use, satisfying her ethical principles. Pointedly, Smith enclosed a check with her letter when she was experiencing a severe bout of guilt. Part of what Smith derived from Addams was seems to have been relief from the guilt of inherited wealth.

Addams, older than Smith by ten years, felt that part of what she could offer Smith in return for her emotional and financial support was the learned wisdom of her greater life experience. And while Smith sometimes chafed at this advice and went her own way, this aspect of Addams clearly filled an empty niche within Smith. She was attracted to Addams’ maturity, executive ability, and political and cultural insights. The occasional friction came from Addams’ tendency to carry her executive manner too far into her personal relationships, to the point where her Hull House associates joked about “Lady Jane’s” inability to draw the line. Addams, in turn—being prone to a surfeit of seriousness—was attracted to Smith’s mischievous charm.

Addams periodically lifted Smith out of the confinement of sheltered family dependency. Mary Smith had never met anyone quite like Jane Addams. Addams was a steam roller, extremely focused. Smith balanced her: she would point out the smaller details, the people and emotions that needed tending. She had a way of being a very gentle critic that Addams came to rely upon.32

The economic component of their relationship was complex, because while Mary Smith provided support for both Hull House the institution and Addams the individual at different times and in different ways, I do not believe she would have supported Hull House were it not for Addams. Though Addams was not in the same class of wealth as Smith, she was not without means of her own. As a matter of fact, in the startup years Addams was the primary support of Hull House, using over $10,000 of her own money from 1889 through 1891.33 However her resources were ultimately limited and for years she counted on earnings from speaking engagements to help support herself. Money was often a means of expressing devotion for Mary Smith. More often than not it was Addams who drew the line—not at the support of Hull House, but at the personal economic support. In an 1897 letter to Smith she wrote, “I can’t take the $25 a month because I don’t need it and there is no use in my pretending not to take a salary and then to accept so much. I shall have to take it sometime maybe but not yet. . . . I wonder if you know how much I care [about you].”34

In 1898, Addams was deeply involved with local politics, spearheading a campaign to elect an honest alderman to Hull House’s municipal ward. Hull House’s aldermanic campaign failed for the second time, to the disappointment and bafflement of Addams and her associates, who failed to understand how the local populace could re-elect the unscrupulous local boss. To Smith she admitted that “in the midst of this horrible election . . . I find myself depending on your moral fiber as never before,”35 revealing the emotional and moral anchor that Smith provided. “Happiness does not depend on money or power or society . . . but in our relation to those we love,” Addams wrote to Smith, and yet continued, “I have . . . a new scheme about the building that I want to talk to you about, before anything is decided.”36 referring to plans for a new

32 Haldeman-Julius, Jane Addams, 1033 Kathryn Kish. Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work; The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 176.34 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, March 1, 1897, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 593-595.35 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, March 1898, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 3-977.36 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, March 1898, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 975-976.


building to house the Jane Club. Although on one level their reliance upon each other transcended financial arrangements, it was impossible to separate finances from other aspects of the Smith-Addams relationship; it was work that they did together. While Smith did direct some of the clubs at Hull House, her relationship to the institution was primarily one of financial sponsorship, which had been recognized formally in 1895 with her appointment to the board of trustees. Money was deeply and irrevocably embedded in her relationship with Addams from the very beginning.

The Jane Club was a cooperative living arrangement for working women set up largely through the initiative of labor organizer Mary Kenney in 1891, with start-up assistance from Addams. By 1898 the Jane Club had outgrown its quarters. Early in the year Addams wrote to Smith that she had secured some promises from donors for land on which to build a new Jane Club, but was still $1,000 short on building funds. “Perhaps deep down in the bottom of my heart I think if everyone else fails I will ask you for the last thousand, but I can’t bear that thought - of a Smith giving the lot, that we will stick to the original offer of your Aunt giving a Jane Club building and some one else the lot - is my dearest hope.” 37

In the end it appears that Mary bought the land, and her aunt financed the building. Addams lamented: “I have that old sinking of the heart, when I think of the Smith’s [sic] doing everything that there is done.”38 Later that summer Addams warned Smith that “it is quite enough for you to be responsible for my necessities but if you once assume all my follies we will get into trouble indeed . . . you mustn’t let me draw you in.”39 Addams’ litany of protest reveals the ambivalence she felt about this mixture of money and love. Yet time and time again Smith allowed herself to be drawn into Addams’ schemes, partly because of her devotion to Addams, and yet there was another reason. The fact is that sponsorship of Hull House, and the corresponding seat on the board of trustees, bestowed upon Mary Smith a degree of respect and influence in Chicago that she would not otherwise have had. Hull House provided Mary Smith with a conduit through which her money could acquire power.

Shortly after Smith purchased the land for the Jane Club, she left Chicago for an extended stay at another settlement. Addams frequently complained that Smith did not visit Hull House often enough or long enough, yet October of 1898 found Smith residing in an unnamed settlement of which Addams accused her of being overly fond. “Don’t you think you are treating your old love alittle [sic] badly to be so soon ‘off’ with H.H. and on with the new! My mind is filled with speculation as to what you are doing and never a word do I hear” was Addams’ jealous remonstrance. 40 Addams found it distressing to see Smith acquiring a degree of intimacy with another settlement that she refused to cultivate with Hull House. “You are really falling in love with the Settlement aren’t you? It is fine but I do wish you would give us an un-interrupted chance some month, instead of coming in for one night, and then going away.” Addams fretted, closing the letter, “My undying and unfaltering love to you.” 41

It is clear that Mary Smith occasionally went her own way. While she provided critical emotional and financial support to Addams, her ultimate autonomy reveals that a

37 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, March 20, 1898, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 997-999.38 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, April 1, 1898, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 102439 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, July 19, 1898, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 1132.40 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, October 6, 1898, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 1171.41 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, October 24, 1898, The Jane Addams Papers, reel 3, frame 1185-1187.


Victorian marriage provides a poor model for the Smith-Addams relationship: their partnership was a relation of equals.

Her lack of a college education, her obligation to care for invalid relatives, and her personality kept Smith from becoming a front-line reformer like Julia Lathrop or Florence Kelley. Yet her financial support of Hull House, combined with a virtual lifetime seat on the board of trustees, allowed her to use the one advantage she did have—wealth—to quietly advance her own causes and provide herself with a vocation. Through Hull House she could operate her Music School and pursue her philanthropic interests. Preferring to remain out of the limelight, she was still able to help shape Hull House into a formidable Chicago institution through Addams and her position on the board of trustees. By focusing her wealth largely through one vehicle, she was able to obtain a degree of power she would have lacked without Hull House. By the same token, Hull House could not have achieved the stature it did in Chicago without the financial support of Mary Smith and her family, along with Louise de Koven Bowen and other wealthy women.

Smith was not the simpering puppet that historians have painted. If she can be said to have been a kind of helpmeet to Addams, it is in the most empowered sense of the role. Through her partnership with Addams she increased both their power: Smith and Addams were together more powerful than either one could have been alone. Smith respected Addams’ executive ability, while Addams valued Smith’s sense of duty and capacity to nurture. “I have never known anyone who so instinctively and steadily did the noble and right thing in all her relationships. . . . She simply does what the rest of us yelp about . . . my heart aches for this dearest friend of mine with all her dependent invalids and yet—I love her for doing it.” 42

By the time Addams founded Hull House, she had clearly chosen public life over marriage. In her college years she had rebelled against Rockford’s insistence that women be pious and submissive. Her essays declared that women had the “right to independent thought and action” and a responsibility to use their special women’s intuition to help cure social ills. She argued that in order to do this, women first had to achieve “what the ancients called auethoritas, right of speaker to make themselves heard.”43 She had refused marriage proposals. The surprise of her relationship with Smith was her discovery that not only could she have both a partner and a career, but that this personal partner and this public career mutually supported each other. Addams called Smith “you whom I love best,” and was well aware that Smith’s emotional and financial support were integral to her success with Hull House. As Blanche Wiesen Cook pointed out, “the personal is the political . . . networks of love and support are crucial to our ability to work in a hostile world where we are not in fact expected to survive. . . . The networks of love and support that enable politically and professionally active women to function independently and intensively consist largely of other women.”44

As the personal is the political, so is the personal the financial. Taken over a lifetime, Smith’s support of Hull House is remarkable, second only to the towering financial support of Louise de Koven Bowen. A 1928 letter from Alice Hamilton to Julius Rosenwald asserted that “our [Hull House’s] reliance always has been primarily on Mary Smith and Mrs. Bowen . . . they have done most generously by us and they have

42 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, May 31, 1899, The Jane Addams Papers, 3/1356-57.43 Davis, Heroine, 20-22.44 Cook, "Female Support Networks”, 44.


always been our first recourse in time of need.”45 Hull House donor records, although incomplete for Smith’s donations before 1906, indicate a total contribution of somewhere between $146,000 and $180,89546 over her lifetime.47 (These figures don’t include the myriad personal gifts and offerings Smith provided Addams directly.) This financial support does not lessen the integrity or importance of Smith’s emotional support. As Addams’ niece remembered: “Mary Smith more than anyone else left her impress upon Jane Addams’ life.... Miss Smith had a genius for sweetly reminding her of ...concerns and feelings that might easily have been overlooked.... [Addams] drew upon Mary Smith mentally as well as emotionally. The love and understanding between them was so limitless that Miss Smith could and did furnish Aunt Jane with a tender, tonic criticism that she found nowhere else.” 48

In partnering with a wealthy woman rather than a wealthy man, Addams escaped the constraints upon her independence that nineteenth century heterosexual marriage would have imposed. Addams and Smith—along with other late nineteenth century female couples— sidestepped the marital trap by choosing female partners. At the same time, in joining financial and professional forces they reciprocally increased one another’s public power.

“There is reason in the habit of married folk keeping together,” 49 Addams observed to Smith after a long absence. If the relationship between Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith can be described as a marriage, this was a kind of marriage new to late nineteenth century culture, a mutually empowering marriage of equals.

Jane Addams and Louise De Koven BowenLouise De Koven Bowen was far and away Hull House’s largest benefactor. From

1895 to 1928, her own records reveal a total contribution to Hull House Association of $542,282;50 an average of $15,049 per year. 51 In fact, Bowen’s relationship to Hull House was one of “feudality,” according to Jane Addams’ nephew, James Weber Linn.52 Kathryn Kish Sklar says of Bowen that “without a doubt she was the power behind Addams’s throne. . . . No other donor came close to her record; compared even to Mary Smith she looms very large indeed.”53

Bowen’s wealth was inherited. She was educated at Dearborn Seminary and in 1886 married Joseph Tilton Bowen, a businessman from Providence, Rhode Island. The first ten years of her marriage were devoted to her four children, but as they grew older she became progressively more active in civic improvement.54 She was raised with a keen awareness of the responsibility that goes with wealth. In her memoirs she recollected, “I had been brought up with the idea that some day I would inherit a fortune, and I was

45 Alice Hamilton to Julius Rosenwald, June 5, 1928, The Jane Addams Papers.46 $2,744,800 - $3,400,826 in 1997 dollars.47 Donor records, “Miss Mary Rozet Smith 1906-1934,” The Jane Addams Papers, 50/149-152.48 Haldeman-Julius, Jane Addams, 10.49 Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, May 26, 1902, The Jane Addams Papers, 4/391-392.50 the equivalent of over ten million in 1999 dollars.51 “Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen's Donations to Hull House Association from 1895 to Date,” June 4, 1928, in Alice Hamilton to Julius

Rosenwald, June 5, 1928, The Jane Addams Papers.52 Linn, Addams, 140-44.53 Sklar, "Who Funded Hull House?,” 107-109.54 Jane Addams, “Biographical sketch of Louise deKoven Bowen,” (1922), The Jane Addams Papers, 48/472


always taught that the responsibility of money was great, and that God would hold me accountable for the manner in which I used my talents.” 55

Bowen first visited Hull House around 1892. Addams did not hesitate to make use of her ability, aristocracy, and wealth. During these early years of their association Bowen’s duties as a mother of young children restricted her level of involvement. “You must think me a very useless member of society” she apologized to Addams when sending her a contribution and declining an invitation to direct the Hull House Woman’s Club, a responsibility she would eventually assume. 56

Of Addams, Bowen said simply, “I admired her greatly and loved her dearly.” She perceived that Addams had the charisma and ability, but not the funding, to accomplish an agenda very much in sympathy with Bowen’s sense of the responsibilities of privilege. Addams was free from the children that tied Bowen down, while Bowen possessed the financial resources that Addams lacked.

For her part, Addams made clever use of Bowen’s support. The following anecdote from Bowen reveals the way in which Addams positioned Bowen to give Hull House a legitimacy that it otherwise might have lacked.

On one occasion, she [Addams] was to speak at a large mansion on Fifth Avenue [New York]. I do not remember whether it was the Astor's or the Vanderbilt's. . . . I had been doing some shopping that afternoon, was attired in a very shabby hat, raincoat, and white kid gloves, all much soiled by the rain. I was to stop at this house for her and she was to return to the hotel with me.

As I entered the room and sat down just inside the door, I saw that her eagle eye had sought me out. To my horror I heard her say,

“'I am feeling rather tired, and I see my friend, Mrs. Bowen from Chicago, has just come in, and she will be able to finish my speech.”

My raincoat was trailing out behind me and I tried to get off my wet kids. It was not a very pleasant position because everyone was disappointed and showed it quite plainly. I did not know what Miss Addams had been talking about, and when I whispered to ask her, she replied, “Hull House,” so I started in on what I thought was important about the House.

This happened a great many times during my many years companionship with her, and I was so accustomed to it that whenever I went anywhere with her I made it a point to read some facts on the subject on which she was going to speak so I would not disgrace her and myself.57

Addams displayed audacious cleverness in maneuvering one of Chicago’s leading citizens into the position of spokesperson for Hull House; this was a masterful stroke of public relations. Addams thus parlayed her close friendship with Bowen into social acceptability at the same time that Hull House resident Florence Kelley was fighting to pass controversial sweatshop and child labor legislation. Kathryn Kish Sklar

55 Bowen, Growing Up, 53.56 Louise de Koven Bowen to Jane Addams, sometime during 1892, The Jane Addams Papers, 2/ 1336.57 Bowen, Open Windows, 210-11.


acknowledged that Bowen’s social rank provided Hull House with a legitimacy it would otherwise have lacked in the eyes of Chicago’s elite. 58

For her part, Bowen increasingly became part of the Hull House network during the 1890s, and learned to use it in order to advance her favorite programs. By 1899, her children were old enough to allow her to spearhead Chicago’s Juvenile Court—the first in the country—with the assistance of Hull House resident Julia Lathrop. It was around this time that Bowen began contributing more substantial amounts of money to Hull House. In 1895, Bowen’s gifts to Hull House totaled $400. In 1896 she more than doubled that with $974, and again in 1897 with $958. In 1898 her generosity jumped to $1,525. In 1899 she contributed $3,500 toward the construction of a new building to house the Hull House kitchen, Coffee House, and Auditorium, the total cost of which was $25,022.59 1901 marks the first year in which Bowen’s funding hit five figures, where her yearly contribution would stay for over thirty-five years. In 1901 she was the largest single donor for the construction of a Men’s Club House and Apartment House, contributing $15,000 of the $45,136 building cost.60 Income generated by the ventures was tagged as an endowment for Hull House. Bowen also gave $2,000 to add a gallery to the west end of the auditorium building that had been erected the prior year.

In 1903 Bowen accepted a seat on the Hull House Association board of trustees in recognition of her influence and support, filling the seat John Dewey had vacated. Then her level of giving really escalated, totaling $40,900 in 1904,61 $26,478 in 1905, 62 $46,790 in 1906 and $48,729 in 1907.63

What motivated Bowen to give Hull House so much money? $48,729 is the equivalent of more than one million dollars today: Bowen was giving Hull House a million dollars a year.

Bowen’s philanthropic career can be examined in light of the ideas about what constituted noblesse oblige in her era. Early on she was tightly constrained by the social conventions of her class. Although Louise de Koven was educated at Dearborn Seminary, but her father prohibited her from participating in the graduation ceremonies, believing that such public exhibition was unseemly for a woman. (As an adult Bowen would go on to flout this restriction, becoming a skilled public speaker in her own right.) Volunteering at her church was the only civic work that her family felt was appropriate for a young woman of her station. Typically, Bowen made the most of the opportunity, starting a Bible class for young men which grew to an enrollment of one hundred. Soon she organized a men’s club house for her students on Huron Street, providing a social alternative for the many who were new to the city.64

In 1886 she married Joseph Tilton Bowen, a social peer with wealth of his own, and initially her philanthropy revolved around her husband’s projects.65 While Bowen’s four children were young—in the decade before joining the Hull House board of trustees—she became involved with the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, serving as President of the board and funding the erection of a new wing.66 In the early years of her

58 Sklar, "Who Funded Hull House?", 107-09.59 Bowen’s personal records only show $1800 for 1899 but Hull House records for the building project clearly show that Bowen

contributed $3,500. The largest donors to the project were also women: Katherine Colvin and Helen Culver at $5,000 each.60 The next largest contributor was Helen Culver at $8,136.61 “Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen’s donations to Hull House Association from 1895 to date, June 4, 1928,” The Jane Addams Papers, 50/62 Louise deKoven Bowen to Jane Addams, June 18,1905, The Jane Addams Papers, 4/1077-78.63 “Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen’s donations to Hull House Association from 1895 to date, June 4, 1928,” The Jane Addams Papers, 50/64 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” 48/472.65 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” 48/311.66 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” 48/472-473.


marriage Bowen confined herself to philanthropy that all the spokesmen of her time would have commended.

During the 1890s Bowen began to branch out into areas that were very much a contemporary source of feminine power: promoting the welfare of children and families. The nation’s first court for children, the Juvenile Court of Chicago, was established largely through Bowen’s conviction that incarcerating children with adult criminals did more harm than good. She obtained city land and county financing for the erection of a Juvenile Court and Juvenile Detention Home. She chose the Juvenile Court officers and assigned them their responsibilities, garnered funding for their salaries, and even chose the court judges. Bowen then succeeded Julia Lathrop as President of the Juvenile Court Committee, which collected the funds to pay the salary of the probation officer—none other than Alzina Stevens of Hull House—and officiated over committee deliberations of cases brought before them. Later Juvenile Court officers would also come from the pool of Hull House residents. Bowen was instrumental in forcing Cook County to finally take responsibility for the salaries of the Probation Officers and the upkeep of the Juvenile Detention Home, after which she formed the Juvenile Protective Association. This body concerned itself with ameliorating conditions detrimental to children, with the goal of keeping children out of Juvenile Court in the first place. Bowen remained president of this organization for over twenty-two years.67

Bowen was becoming a formidable woman as she learned to wield her resources. Working with Julia Lathrop on the Juvenile Court Committee drew her deeper into Hull House’s progressive network. During the same year that Bowen was organizing the Juvenile Court, Addams was soliciting contributions for a new building to house an expanded Coffee House, Public Kitchen, and Auditorium. Bowen contributed $3,500 of the $25,022 total cost, more than tripling any of her previous donations to Addams’ enterprise. A year and a half later she paid for a gallery on the west end of the new auditorium with another $2,000. The Hull House Coffee House filled a niche in the neighborhood that had previously been filled only by saloons, by providing a gathering place in which people could hold their christenings, weddings, reunions, and parties.68 The auditorium provided a facility for the Hull House clubs and Dramatic Association.69 As with Bowen’s men’s club on Huron Street, she was providing a social alternative to Chicago’s proliferation of dance halls and saloons.

In 1901, still two years prior to her nomination to the Hull House board, Bowen contributed $15,000 toward a new Men’s Club building at Hull House, which consisted of a social room and a reading room on the first floor and apartments for male Hull House residents on the second.70 While in retrospect $15,000 seems small in comparison to some of her later projects, it was over four times larger than any of her previous Hull House donations. Bowen wished to provide for Chicago’s large number of “enterprising youths who had taken Horace Greeley’s advice, go West. They lived in rather uncomfortable boarding houses and although many of them evolved later into leading citizens, they were then lonely and forlorn.” Since this was not Bowen’s first effort for the benefit of Chicago’s young men, we can infer that she placed a high priority on providing them with opportunities for learning and better choices for recreation. Aside

67 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” 48/474.68 Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: The New American Library, Inc. 1981), 103.69 Hull House Bulletin (October 1898), The Jane Addams Papers,53/685.70 Hull House Bulletin (Winter 1901), The Jane Addams Papers, 53/789; also Hull House donor records, The Jane Addams

Papers.


from the fact that Bowen had two boys of her own, Jane Addams recalled that Bowen became concerned about recreational alternatives for young men when she discovered how much influence local political “bosses” were able to exercise over the young men of the nineteenth ward by controlling the local billiard halls and saloons.71 While the reading room helped ensure that the Men’s Club met all the contemporary criteria for an acceptable philanthropy, funding the Hull House Men’s Club fulfilled an agenda that was becoming distinctly Bowen’s own.

As early as 1893, Bowen had agreed to take on the presidency of the Hull House Woman’s Club, an unusual conglomeration of Chicago’s poor immigrants, reform women, and Hull House residents. She soon became the driving force of the club, serving as a crucial link between the Hull House community and the Chicago Woman’s Club. By 1904 Bowen was ready to hit full stride, both as a giant among Hull House donors and a vital strand in the web of Chicago’s female reform network. In the fall of 1904 the Hull House Bulletin announced with much fanfare Bowen's gift of a new Woman's Club building. Bowen appears to have funded the entire building with her contribution of $26,478, graciously covering a final cost that was way above Addams’ initial estimate. In May of 1904, when Addams sent her the latest building plans for review, Bowen responded with a letter light and cheerful in tone, assuring Addams that she wholly approved of the plans and would be sending along a check. She added, “Please go ahead with the building and make any changes . . . without consulting me. I feel that you know so much better than I do what is needed at Hull House that what ever you do is perfectly satisfactory as far as I am concerned.”72

The Hull House Bulletin stated that “this generous gift made it possible for the club to open wide its doors immediately, to welcome scores of women, who would otherwise have remained indefinitely on the waiting list." The building was to include a one-thousand-volume library—largely collected by Bowen—a sewing room, an audience hall seating seven hundred, dressing rooms, and wardrobe. The new audience hall was designed to be used not only for Woman's Club activities but for "the lectures and other popular entertainments at present given in the Hull House auditorium." By March 1905 the Woman's Club had ninety-nine new members and took possession of the new building with a dedication ceremony including eight hundred invited guests, highlighted by speeches from Bowen and Addams among others.73

Addams had elicited Bowen’s support for a new Woman’s Club building in the amount of ten thousand dollars. By the time the project was complete Bowen had paid over two and a half times that amount. As we will see, this pattern was repeated with other projects: Addams leveraged Bowen’s support for a given project by using extremely low estimates of cost, and then publicizing Bowen’s sponsorship pledge immediately, which attracted other donors. As project estimates climbed higher and higher, Bowen then gradually increased her commitment rather than withdraw her support.

Why—of all the possible philanthropic receptacles for Bowen’s wealth—why the Hull House Woman’s Club? Because the Woman’s Club was Bowen’s training ground as a public speaker and leader: it had become a power locus for her. In expanding the club via the magnificent new “Bowen Hall,” she not only

71 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” The Jane Addams Papers, 48/473.72 Louise deKoven Bowen to Jane Addams, May 17,1904, The Jane Addams Papers, 4/822-23.73 Hull House Bulletin (1905-1906; 8, 9) 53/873.


acknowledged that locus, but increased its efficacy for her. According to Addams, it was due to Bowen’s leadership that the club became a force for civic improvement, progressing from its original purpose of self-betterment for the members. It was Bowen who turned the club into a philanthropic force, linking it financially and representatively to other like-minded organizations, and Bowen who awakened a sense of civic consciousness in its members.74 Bowen remembered the beginning of her involvement with the Woman’s Club:

Most of the women in the neighborhood were immigrants, some spoke very little English, and their ideas of all housekeeping methods were very crude. Miss Addams wanted to instill in them, without their knowing it, a desire for a higher standard of living, more cleanliness, a better way to bring up their children, and an interest in and knowledge of civic affairs, so she gathered them together in a club.

My first work at Hull House, at Miss Addams' request, was to sit as a member of the club and make motions in order to show them how to conduct a meeting. At the end of about six months, they elected me President. . . .

Our meetings every Wednesday were crowded with women. There were 800 members. We had excellent speakers from all over the city, and in a very short time the women became much improved in appearance, in their home life, in their manners, and in their knowledge of public affairs.75

The Woman’s Club chorus had fifty members and in 1905 performed at the meeting of the Chicago State Federation of Woman’s Clubs. The Club maintained a Linen Chest for the poor, and held fund-raisers to support Bowen’s Juvenile Court and the Vacation School. Bowen’s Library soon grew to sixteen hundred volumes.76 The Woman's Club program topics during 1904-1906 included The Municipal Lodging House, Woman Suffrage, The Children of Various Countries, The Problems of Trade Unionism, The Problem of the Back Yard, Conditions Under Which Girls Work, The Waste of Housekeeping, The Theatre: Is it a Power for Good or Evil?, What Assistance Can the Home Give to the School?, The Care of the Sick, How a Great City Amuses Itself, and Recent Immigration. By the time Bowen Hall was constructed, the Woman’s Club was sending delegates to the Juvenile Court Committee, the Cook County League, the Illinois Congress of Mothers, the Vacation School General Committee, and the Illinois Federation of Woman’s Clubs.77 It is clear that through the Woman's Club Bowen was securely plugged into the female reform network of the entire state.

The Hull House Woman’s Club was the medium through which Hull House was networked with the Chicago Woman’s Club. In fact, the creation of the Juvenile Court was due to the combined efforts of these two affiliated but very different groups of women. While the Chicago Woman’s Club was composed largely of the elite wives of Chicago’s wealthy men, Hull House women were generally educated and unmarried. Chicago Woman’s Club leaders were “true maternalists,” inspired by their role as

74 Addams, Twenty Years, 251-253.75 Bowen, Open Windows, 214-215.76 Hull House Bulletin (1905-1906), The Jane Addams Papers, 53/857-858.77 Hull House Bulletin, (1904, 1905-1906), The Jane Addams Papers, 53/832-873.


mothers “to work for society’s dependents, especially women and children.” Hull House reform women were essentially social scientists.78 I would argue that Louise Bowen was largely responsible for the degree of cooperation between these two groups. As the wife of Joseph Tilton Bowen and member of Chicago’s “old” aristocracy, and as a president of the Hull House Woman’s Club and a prominent supporter of Hull House, Bowen easily had a foot in both camps. Her facilitation of the cooperation of these two groups increased the effectiveness of both groups as well as her own influence.

Bowen’s increasing gravitation toward Hull House as her philanthropy of choice becomes clearer in light of the Hull House Woman’s Club. Through the Hull House Woman’s Club, Bowen discovered that she could acquire influence and command respect by funneling her wealth through a networked, publicly popular vehicle that was malleable enough to be adapted to many of her personal priorities. It was through the Woman’s Club that Bowen fledged her civic wings, learning parliamentary procedure, public speaking, and leadership. From Addams personally Bowen learned speech-writing and fund-raising. When she finally gave up the presidency of the Hull House Woman’s Club after seventeen years, it was to step into the presidency of the Chicago Woman’s Club.79

For sheer funding levels, even Bowen’s funding for the Woman’s Club pales in comparison to her support of the new Hull House Boy’s Club. In the fall of 1905, only six months after the opening of the Woman’s Club building, Addams approached Bowen about funding for a new Boy’s Club building. Bowen responded, "I think I can manage the building provided it doesn't cost over $25 to $30,000, so you can consider it settled."80

By the end of the project the building cost $50,000, and Bowen footed the entire bill.81

Having firmly established her power locus with the Hull House Woman’s Club, Bowen now had not only the resources but the vehicle to address her highest concerns with the financing of the Hull House Boy’s Club. Ground was broken for the new Boy’s Club building on May 1, 1906. It was announced as the “largest and most elaborate in the Hull House group,”82 a five-story building to accommodate facilities for the use of twenty-five hundred boys and men.83 Linn reported in 1936 that it was still the most commodious of Hull House’s nineteen buildings, and that Bowen had thoroughly investigated other successful boys clubs throughout the country before building it.84 It included a library and study room, class rooms, a game room and social rooms, a wood shop, a billiard room and a bowling alley. The upper floors contained apartments available for club members to rent. The person given charge of the new Boy’s Club was Mr. Riddle, a Hull House resident well known to the boys of the Hull House neighborhood and one of Bowen’s Juvenile Court officers.85

Jane Addams recalled that Bowen was extremely concerned about “the problem of the city boy” and “the prerogative of all youth to wholesome recreation.”86 Bowen reportedly built the Boy’s Club “after she had become familiar with the great need for better recreational facilities in the vicinity and the influence politicians often obtain over

78 Elizabeth J. Clapp, “Welfare and the Role of Women: The Juvenile Court Movement,” Journal of American Studies, 28 (Dec. 1994), 359-373.

79 Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House; A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (State University of New York Press, 1997), 170.

80 Louise de Koven Bowen to Jane Addams, November 23, 1905, The Jane Addams Papers, 4/1183-1184.81 Louise deKoven Bowen to Jane Addams, May 6, 1906, The Jane Addams Papers, 4/1346-52.82 Hull House Bulletin, (1905-1906), The Jane Addams Papers, 53/873.83 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” The Jane Addams Papers, 48/473.84 Linn, Addams, 141-142.85 Hull House Bulletin (1905-1906), The Jane Addams Papers, 53/873.86 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” The Jane Addams Papers, 48/313.


young men through the control not only of saloons, but of club and billiard rooms as well.” First with her Huron Street club, then with the Hull House Men’s Club and the Hull House Woman’s Club, and finally with the spectacular Hull House Boy’s Club, Bowen increasingly developed her own philanthropic agenda. After Bowen learned the ropes and lined up her allies at Hull House, she moved forward to become Vice President of the United Charities of Chicago and President of the Woman’s City Club of Chicago, to serve on the State Council of Defense during the war, and to serve as the Woman Fair Price Commissioner for Illinois. She was a huge force for training women in civic influence before women’s suffrage.87

Louise Bowen was a committed wife and mother. She could not and would not have aligned herself with someone who eschewed family values. Jane Addams did not preach feminism. She espoused the virtues of motherhood and housekeeping, and helped make female involvement in civic life respectable by portraying it as a simple extension of homemaking. “As society grows more complicated it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would continue to preserve the home in its entirety,” wrote Addams, calling a woman’s duty to home and family her “paramount obligation.”88 The irony is that she released herself from that obligation. She never married. She also moved away from her family in Rockford, thereby escaping both aspects of the “family claim.” She developed into one of the most influential women in America and chose another woman as her life partner. Addams lived an essentially feminist life. As Elizabeth Clapp explained, “the Hull House women were not ‘true maternalists’, although they often used maternalist rhetoric to justify their actions.”89 Addams was an acceptable associate for Bowen because she gave voice to traditional female values of home and family, but she was only able to be an effective associate for Bowen—a path to power—because she did not live those values. Louise Bowen’s association with Addams allowed her to support her agenda for children, mothers and family values . . . from a position of power.

While Bowen’s involvement undoubtedly increased Hull House’s visibility and legitimacy, it was her overflowing largesse as a donor that allowed Addams to develop Hull House into the virtual empire it became.

Reports from college acquaintances to wealthy patrons bear out that there was a poise and personal integrity about Jane Addams that induced admiration and loyalty. But Bowen’s largess toward Hull House had a self-serving component. Bowen’s social position and wealth, once placed upon the springboard of Hull House, enabled her to possess a degree of power that has gone curiously unrecognized by historians. At Hull House, Bowen found that "Miss Addams had a rare way of putting people in a position of responsibility and then letting them work out their own plans.”90

It is important to remember that at this time, women had no direct political power. Even after women suffrage, as late as 1923, when Bowen asked the liberal republican leadership to sponsor her campaign for mayor, the response in the press was that women should not run for office, but should instead help elect an appropriate man.91 Although

87 Addams, “Biographical sketch,” The Jane Addams Papers, 48/477.88 Addams, Jane, "Why Women Should Vote," in The Social Thought of Jane Addams, Christopher Lasch, ed. (Indianapolis:

The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965), 144.89 Clapp, “Welfare and the Role of Women,” 359-373.90 Bowen, Growing Up, 8891 Maureen Flanagan, “‘They Will Bring Sweetness and Light’: Women’s Demands for Political Power and Male

Accommodation in Progressive Era Chicago,”<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~shgape/papers/1995.aha.html>, unpublished paper given at AHA, January 1995.


Bowen was a consummate networker, public speaker, and administrator, she had to find nonpolitical vehicles through which to operate. By associating herself with Hull House and then providing it the resources to become an institution of influence, Bowen helped to created her own alternative to male political channels. The network of women Bowen connected to herself through Hull House became a powerful political mechanism: in the words of Carol Smith-Rosenberg, “through their efforts to re-from urban America . . . the New Women amassed greater political power and visibility than any other group of women in American experience.”92

Bowen was astoundingly wealthy. She was so thoroughly aristocratic that she could not bridge the yawning cultural gap between herself and immigrant workers. Addams, however, had as one of her defining qualities a universal understanding derived from a need to comprehend human nature, which positioned her to be Bowen’s liaison to the underprivileged. Bowen acknowledged this when she wrote that "Miss Addams . . . was really an interpreter between working men and women and the people who lived in luxury on the other side of the city and she also gave the people of her own neighborhood quite a different idea about the men and women who were ordinarily called ‘capitalists.’”93 Bowen said that her relationship with Addams “opened for me a new door into life,” and that through Hull House she discovered “problems and situations about which I would otherwise have known nothing.” 94 More telling, though, was Bowen’s confession that “I often felt at this Hull House club [the Woman’ Club] that not even in church did I ever get the inspiration or the desire for service, so much as when I was presiding at the meeting of the club and sat on the platform and looked down on the faces of 800 or 900 women.”95 Here is the heart of what Bowen got in return for her support of Hull House.

At a time when married women, even those who were widowed, were largely defined by the identity of their husbands and their role as wives and mothers, it is interesting that Jane Addams, in her 1922 biographical sketch of Louise Bowen, barely mentions Bowen’s husband and children. In spite of the language of universal motherhood and civic housekeeping in which Addams had always clothed her work, here we have a window in to her true perspective. For nine pages Addams dwelled upon Bowen’s achievements, mentioning her husband only at the occasions of his marriage to Bowen and his death, and mentioning Bowen’s children only twice. She concluded by observing that Bowen “carries with her a reassuring sense of competence and power.” [Italics mine]. Empathetic, caring, nurturing were all words that women of Bowen’s class and generation might have used to describe one another, but not powerful. Power was at the heart of the Addams/Bowen relationship: power for both of them. It is fitting that Bowen assumed the presidency of Hull House Association after Addams’ death, the only one besides Addams to ever hold that position.

ConclusionHistorians have focused on the most visible reformers associated with Jane

Addams: Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Alzina Stevens. But historiography has overlooked the women whose money made the efforts of these front-

92 Carol Smith-Rosenberg, “The New Woman as Androgyne”, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985), 255-256.

93 Bowen, Growing Up, 93.94 Stebner, Women of Hull House, 169-173.95 Stebner, Women of Hull House, 169.


line reformers possible. I contend that the real power came from the combination of these female reformers with female donors. The reform women needed the donors to fund their activities, and the donors needed the activities of the reform women to advance their agendas for social progress and develop influence. The power emanating from these donors and the networks they helped established has gone largely unacknowledged. While there have been some nods to Bowen’s wealth in discussions of Hull House, Smith’s power particularly has been overlooked.

By all accounts, Addams was a lodestone, but there something even greater at work. There was an inherent benefit bestowed upon the female supporters of Hull House by the act of giving.

Estelle Freedman has theorized that female separatism is a viable political strategy. What Freedman labels “female institution building” is a potent political advantage. Freedman argued that settlements such as Hull House extended women's concerns into the public realm, utilizing the female sphere rather than repudiating it. Settlements and clubs provided networks of support that women could draw upon to advance their agenda.96 Linda Alcoff also celebrated the validity of using gender as a political position and a center from which to perceive values and express concerns. 97 It is this same inherent value of gender difference that Virginia Woolf addressed when she tackled the issue of influence. In Three Guineas, Woolf described a woman's hesitance to join a society of men. Gender difference, she implied, is the source of women's usefulness to society. Our positional perspective as women has made us defenders of children, families, liberty, peace. To join the male society would be to lose that positional perspective, and relinquish the very difference about women that is beneficial to society. Woolf's analogy deals with the prevention of war but the lesson is salient: “since we are different, our help must be different. . . . [W]e [women] can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. We can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society.”98

The culture that Addams, Smith, and Bowen belonged to did not question the legitimacy of separation by gender. Additionally, their generation held a growing belief that what was needed to cure the social ills of their time was the influence of women. What they did was to recognize and reinforce the value of female separation by bolstering it with economic power. They gradually discovered that their financial support of Addams and her female reformers had the reciprocal effect of increasing the efficacy of their money.

Moreover, Addams had personal qualities that made her the ideal vehicle for the wealth of Smith and Bowen. These two strong-minded women had agendas of their own, agendas that were not always exactly in line with each other or with Addams’ agenda. But Addams was a great mediator, and her aptitude for compromise enabled her to accommodate the goals of Smith, Bowen, and other wealthy women—including landlord Helen Culver and board member Mary Wilmarth.

96 Freedman, Estelle. "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930," in Women and Power in American History, Vol. II from 1870, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, eds. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991), 10-24.

97 Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” chap in Culture/Power/History, Nicholas B. Dirks, et al. eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 116-117.

98 Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1938), 104, 143.


Andrew Carnegie gave voice to the progressive reform idea of his generation: that it was better to provide opportunity than charity to the working classes. What attracted Bowen and Smith to Addams is that she took this ideal a step further. She openly declared that “the dependency of classes on each other is reciprocal,”99 acknowledging that reform work satisfied a need for fulfillment in the upper classes.

Jane Addams’ core purpose is stated clearly in the mission statement of the Hull House Association charter. The charter did not say that the mission of the Association was to work for social justice. The charter did not say that the mission was to provide a higher civic and social life for the working classes. What the charter said was that the purpose of Hull House was “to provide a center (italics mine) for higher civic and social life”—meaning a center for Hull House residents and board members as well as for the immigrants of Chicago’s nineteenth ward. The distinction is fine, but critical.100 This is not to say that Addams did not truly care for the problems of Chicago’s poor. She worked extremely hard: during the 1890s upwards of three thousand people per week were visiting Hull House or using its facilities, and an associate recalled that Addams personally interacted with the majority of these people, working fourteen- and sixteen-hour days. Louise Bowen said of Addams at this time that “she impressed me then as always being very sad, as if the sorrows of the neighborhood were pressing upon her, which indeed they were.”101 This, to Addams, and then to Smith and Bowen, was the salient point: being overworked and weighed down by the problems of the working classes was preferable to a life in which they were superfluous. It gave them worth, weight, and meaning. This is what attracted Smith and Bowen to Addams, what made Addams a better funnel for their wealth than other philanthropies: Hull House was as much about personal fulfillment as any higher purpose. Jane Addams was wise enough to structure Hull House to allow her donors the wide discretion and power in the pursuit of that fulfillment. Via Addams and Hull House, Smith and Bowen could escape the valueless existence of the late nineteenth century woman of means and find their raison d’être. Smith and Bowen’s terms in return for their largess required that they acquire power, and a feeling that they mattered. Jane Addams saw to it that these terms were met.

99 Davis, Heroine, 18-20.100 Linn, Addams, 111.101 Linn, Addams, 435.


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hull house's hidden power: the donors behind and beside jane addams

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