Hull House opened in Chicago’s impoverished Nineteenth Ward on September 14. Founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, former classmates who had been shocked by their encounter with urban poverty during a tour of Europe, Hull House offered a range of health services, English classes, child day care, and cultural activities to Chicago’s underprivileged.

With Addams financing the house out of her own income for the first several years, Hull House was soon providing community services to more than two thousand people a week. Addams’s work at Hull House earned her a national reputation that she used to promote progressive views on feminism, pacifism, and social reform. Her activism was unpopular in some circles, but by the time of her death in 1935 she was recognized as one of the moral forerunners of the New Deal.