Jane Addams: Tension Between Urban And Rural Life

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During the progressive era, there was tension between urban and rural life. Tension derived from immigrants migrating to America to take the factory jobs and drive down wages for the working class Americans. In response to improving impoverished urban life, places like Hull House, developed by Jane Addams, were established. Hull House became a social, educational, and artistic center for the working class in Chicago. It was places like Hull House that incited social reform to help unify the urban and rural populations. Jane Addams was crucial in relieving this conflict between the urban and rural populations through her philanthropic work in Hull house. “Over the years Jane Addams built a bridge between the immigrants and the old-stock americans,…show more content…
Although at the time of the large influx of immigrants the farmers did experience a period of posterity because of the increased demand for food, the rural population opposed the immigrants because of their nativist views that the immigrants are ruining the American culture. These conflicts between “true Americans” and immigrants sparked social reform because they rural population depended on the cities as their seaports, and the urban population depended on the countryside because it was their main access to…show more content…
Jane Addams accounts, “It was during this winter that I became permanently impressed with the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman who lives upstairs willingly shares her breakfast with the family below because she knows which will make life in America more possible.”(123) The people that worked at Hull House were known as “residence” and were available to aid people at all hours of the night. These workers were normally women because at this time women started being embraced as more than just birth givers. They were beginning to be acknowledged as being good with children and education and capable of holding jobs in these

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