Before Hull-House: Jane Addams in Rockford

When Jane Addams arrived in Rockford as a young woman, Hull-House did not exist. She had not won the Nobel Peace Prize. She had not become one of America's most influential social reformers, a leader of the international peace movement, or one of the foundational figures in the development of modern social work.

She was a student.

In 1877, the seventeen-year-old Addams came to Rockford Female Seminary, the institution that would eventually become Rockford College and, much later, Rockford University. Her father had insisted on Rockford, despite his daughter's desire to attend an eastern college. It turned out to be one of those decisions whose consequences become much easier to see looking backward.

Because some of the roots of Jane Addams's extraordinary life were planted in Rockford.

Rockford Female Seminary

Rockford Female Seminary itself was already a remarkable institution. Chartered by the Illinois legislature in 1847, when Rockford had a population of only about 2,500 people, it was created during a period when the idea that women should receive the same rigorous higher education available to men was still controversial.

Rockford residents pledged $3,500 toward the new school. Its first classes were held in the old downtown courthouse before the seminary established a campus between the Rock River and Seminary Street. That is important to remember when imagining Jane Addams in Rockford: she did not attend classes on the present-day Rockford University campus. The college would not move to the east side of the city until the 1960s.

The Rockford that educated Jane Addams was a nineteenth-century river city, and the school she attended stood much closer to its center.

Under the leadership of Anna Peck Sill, Rockford Female Seminary offered women an unusually serious education. Sill had come west with an ambitious idea about what women were intellectually capable of doing, and Addams later remembered her with enormous respect.

That environment appears to have suited Addams.

She became president of her class. She was involved in debate. She became literary editor of the Rockford Seminary Magazine, which had published an early essay of hers in 1878. The young woman who would eventually write books, deliver speeches around the world and argue publicly about poverty, democracy, war and the responsibilities of citizenship was already learning how to formulate an argument and put it before an audience in Rockford.

And she wasn't the only consequential person there.

The Rockford Women Who Went to Hull-House

At Rockford Female Seminary, Addams met Ellen Gates Starr.

That friendship became one of the most important relationships of Addams's life. In 1889, Addams and Starr established Hull-House in Chicago, creating what became one of the most famous settlement houses in the United States.

Another Rockford Female Seminary student, Julia Lathrop, later joined them at Hull-House. Lathrop went on to become a nationally important social reformer and the first chief of the United States Children's Bureau. Rockford University still identifies Starr and Lathrop among the important Rockford connections surrounding Addams and Hull-House.

That makes the local connection considerably more interesting than saying Jane Addams "went to college in Rockford."

Part of the human network that became Hull-House was formed here.

Before there was a Hull-House in Chicago, there were young women meeting one another at Rockford Female Seminary.

The Valedictorian Who Wanted to Change Her Own School

Addams graduated from the seminary on June 22, 1881, as part of a class of seventeen women who called themselves the "Glorious Seventeen."

She was the class valedictorian.

And Addams used the occasion for something more substantial than saying goodbye.

In her valedictory address, she challenged the seminary's trustees to respond to the students' growing demand that Rockford Female Seminary become a fully accredited college capable of granting bachelor's degrees. She told her classmates that they stood united in a belief in "beauty, genius and courage," and in the ability of those things to transform the world.

The following year, Rockford Female Seminary awarded its first bachelor's degrees.

Jane Addams received one of them.

There is something wonderfully characteristic about the episode. The woman who would spend much of her adult life arguing that institutions could be made better was already challenging an institution she cared about while she was still a student inside it.

Rockford Female Seminary became Rockford College in 1892.

Addams, meanwhile, went on to something much larger.

From Rockford to Hull-House

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull-House in a mansion on Chicago's Near West Side.

Its work eventually encompassed education, childcare, labor reform, public health, arts and culture, assistance to immigrants and investigations of the conditions under which Chicago's working poor lived. Addams became one of the country's best-known reformers.

Her concerns expanded beyond Chicago. She became deeply involved in the peace movement and helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1931, she received the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Rockford remained part of her story.

More than forty years after her graduation, Addams returned to Rockford College for its 75th anniversary.

On June 14, 1922, she delivered a commencement address titled A New Challenge to the Scholar. By then she was sixty-one years old and internationally famous. Yet she began by looking backward.

She remembered Anna Peck Sill.

She remembered the old Rockford Female Seminary.

And she remembered the radical idea underlying the institution in the first place: that women deserved serious higher education.

"There is something about milestones," Addams told the audience, that causes people to reflect upon the past. She described Sill as a pioneer and spoke about the courage required to establish such a school in the West in 1847.

It must have been an extraordinary circle to complete.

The young woman who had once stood before the trustees asking them to imagine something larger for their school returned four decades later as one of the most famous women in America.

Jane Addams's Rockford

Today, it is easy to associate Jane Addams almost entirely with Chicago. Hull-House deserves that prominence. It became the center of her life's work and secured her place in American history.

But there is an earlier chapter.

It happened in Rockford.

Jane Addams learned here. She wrote here. She debated here. She formed friendships here. She challenged the institution educating her to become something more ambitious. Some of the women who would later help build the Hull-House movement were women she knew from Rockford Female Seminary.

Even the geography of the story has largely disappeared. The campus where Addams studied is gone, and Rockford College eventually migrated across the city before becoming Rockford University in 2013. But the institutional line remains unbroken: Rockford Female Seminary became Rockford College, and Rockford College became Rockford University.

The university's archives today preserve Jane Addams material as well as papers connected to other Hull-House women, including Julia Lathrop.

Rockford sometimes has a peculiar relationship with its own history. Events of national importance can happen here, or people of national importance can emerge from here, without becoming deeply embedded in the way the city thinks about itself.

Jane Addams should be an exception.

Before Hull-House, before the international peace movement, before the Nobel Prize, there was a seventeen-year-old girl arriving at a small women's seminary beside the Rock River.

Four years later, she stood before her classmates and told them that beauty, genius and courage could transform the world.

Then she spent the rest of her life trying to prove it.