By Emma Jamrin
In Chicago, Illinois, immigrants from around the world came searching for new opportunities, but instead were met with a lack of housing that could not keep up with the increase in new settlers. To help remedy this issue, social reformers and activists Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened the Hull House in 1889, a settlement house to aid European immigrants facing poverty. Overcrowding and social decay had also escalated as a result, but Hull House acted as both a residential building and a community center where classes taught language and skills to help residents better integrate into American culture. Those involved with Hull House were integral components in establishing child labor laws, juvenile courts and protection agencies, trade unions, and welfare programs, as well as the women’s suffrage movement and peace movements worldwide. In 1895, The Hull-House Maps and Papers were published, significantly improving the lives of impoverished people.
Florence Kelley, a socialist, political reformer, and translator for Friedrich Engels, led the Hull House’s Maps and Papers project. Her wage maps of Chicago took inspiration from Charles Booth’s poverty maps of London and revolutionized sociology and mapping. Along with a research team of Hull House residents and Bureau of Labor workers, Kelley collected data from locals in four areas of Chicago, creating two maps illustrating nationalities and weekly household incomes. These two maps, side by side, reveal which countries people emigrated from and how successful they became in America. For example, English-speaking residents tended to earn the most income, highlighting the need for language lessons in Hull House. For labor and housing rights, Kelley’s visualization of this data helped spur positive change as viewers were able to conceptualize the issues and take action.
These comprehensive maps detail the nationalities in Polk Street, Twelfth Street, which is now Roosevelt Road, Halsted Street, and Jefferson Street, and the nationalities of those included are primarily Eastern, Central, and Southern European. The first map of nationalities labels those who speak English except those from Ireland, Dutch, Russian, Polish, German, Italian, Swiss, French, French Canadian, Bohemian, Chinese, and “Colored.” The second map illustrates wages, showing that households earned between five and fifteen dollars weekly. The Hull-House Maps and Papers, which took years of systematic surveys and analysis, were revolutionary in the science of social and demographic mapping. The use of color quickly allowed onlookers and policymakers to draw the lines between wages and factors such as race, ethnicity, and language. Florence Kelley’s maps also highlight female social scientists’ groundbreaking work in the 19th century.
Florence Kelley is the daughter of two abolitionists and women’s rights activists. She studied history and social science at Cornell University but, as a woman, was unable to pursue a graduate program. With the encouragement of Susan B. Anthony, Kelley pursued a law degree at the University of Zurich but completed it at Northwestern University. In addition to The Hull-House Maps and Papers, Kelley reported on Chicago’s smallpox epidemic as the chief of the State Board of Factory Inspectors. Kelley was the first woman to become a factory inspector in the United States, and throughout her life, she transformed the culture of industrialization. Her wage and nationality maps have been compared to John Snow’s maps of London’s cholera outbreak.
Sources:
Chicago Wage Maps (orthoslogos.fr) – Florence Kelley
Chicago Wage Maps | People’s Graphic Design Archive
Hull House | History, Significance, Jane Addams, & Museum | Britannica
Hull House Maps Its Neighborhood
Nationalities Map No. 1 Nationalities Map No. 2 Nationalities Map No. 3 Nationalities Map No. 4