Jane Addams opened a house in a Chicago slum and professionalized the act of caring for strangers.
In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago, in the middle of a neighborhood populated by recent immigrants from Italy, Greece, Germany, Poland, and Russia.1 The settlement house offered English classes, childcare, art studios, a library, and a meeting space. It also became a research institution. Addams and her colleagues documented the living conditions, wages, and occupational hazards of the surrounding community with a rigor that rivaled academic sociology.
The settlement house movement, which had begun at Toynbee Hall in London’s East End in 1884, was the seedbed from which professional social work emerged.2 In 1898, the New York Charity Organization Society established the Summer School of Philanthropic Work, one of the first formal training programs for what would become the profession. Mary Richmond, a leader at the Baltimore Charity Organization Society, published Social Diagnosis in 1917, codifying the methods and principles of casework into a professional discipline.3
What had been charitable visiting, an informal activity of middle-class women, became a credentialed profession with university programs, licensing requirements, and a defined scope of practice. The transformation followed the same industrial logic that shaped medicine, law, and engineering during the same period. A generalized human capacity, caring for others, was segmented, standardized, and assigned to specialists.4
Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her work at Hull House and her advocacy for international peace.5 By that time, social work had its own professional organizations, academic journals, and credentialing bodies. The job title had entered the language as a recognizable career category, one that would not have existed a generation earlier.