A biographical portrait of the pioneering social reformer and first chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau
What the Work Is
My Friend, Julia Lathrop is a biographical work by Jane Addams, first published in 1935. The book examines the life and career of Julia Lathrop, a fellow social reformer and Hull House resident who became the first director of the United States Children’s Bureau. The work covers Lathrop’s life up to her 1912 appointment to the Children’s Bureau, as well as the period from 1922 to 1932. A preface note indicates that an account of the intervening years was to be written by Grace Abbott, another prominent social reformer associated with Hull House.
What the Book Is About
The book is a biographical portrait of Julia Lathrop, tracing her development as a social reformer and her significant public service career. Addams, who co-founded Hull House with Lathrop and worked alongside her for decades, offers an intimate account of Lathrop’s path from settlement house work to national leadership in child welfare. The work situates Lathrop within the broader context of Progressive Era reform, particularly the movement to establish federal oversight of children’s welfare and to apply scientific methods to social problems.
Key Ideas and Themes
The biography reflects several themes central to both Lathrop’s career and the reform milieu from which she emerged. Lathrop’s appointment to head the Children’s Bureau represented a landmark moment for women in public administration, and Addams presents her friend’s career as emblematic of the growing role of women in shaping social policy. The book emphasizes Lathrop’s commitment to using empirical research and systematic investigation as tools for social change, an approach that characterized the Hull House circle’s methodology.
The work also illuminates the collaborative nature of Progressive Era reform. Addams portrays Lathrop’s achievements not as isolated accomplishments but as part of a network of women reformers who supported one another’s work. The book’s very existence—written by one prominent reformer about another—testifies to the mutual reinforcement and collective identity of this group of women who came of age professionally in the settlement house movement.
Structure and Approach
The book is organized chronologically around the major phases of Lathrop’s public life. The first portion covers her early career and work at Hull House, culminating in her 1912 appointment to the Children’s Bureau. The later portion addresses the period from 1922 to 1932, following her tenure at the Bureau. The preface’s note that Grace Abbott would cover the intervening years suggests the book was conceived as part of a collaborative biographical project, with different authors taking responsibility for different periods of Lathrop’s life.
Significance and Influence
The book stands as a significant document of Progressive Era social reform, written by one of its most prominent figures about another. It preserves the memory of Lathrop’s pioneering role in establishing the Children’s Bureau and her broader contributions to child welfare policy. As a work by Jane Addams, who was herself the most famous woman in American public life at the time of her death in 1935, the biography also offers insight into how the settlement house generation understood and memorialized its own achievements. The book’s publication in the year of Addams’s death gives it additional weight as one of her final statements on the reform movement to which she devoted her life.
The source material provides further details about Jane Addams’s own life and career that contextualize her relationship with Lathrop and the reform environment they shared. Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the youngest of eight children, and her father, John H. Addams, was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party and a state senator who supported Abraham Lincoln. Her mother died when Addams was two years old, and she was subsequently cared for mostly by her older sisters. As a child, she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, which caused a curvature in her spine and lifelong health problems, including a limp.
Addams’s path to social reform was shaped by her education at Rockford Female Seminary, where she edited the college newspaper, was valedictorian, and led the class of 1881. Her readings of Charles Dickens inspired an early interest in the poor, and she initially planned to become a doctor. After her father’s death, she pursued medical studies but did not complete the degree due to health problems. A two-year tour of Europe followed, during which she visited Toynbee Hall in London, the world’s first settlement house, which inspired her to start a similar institution.
Hull House and Its Work
Addams co-founded Hull House in 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr, and the institution became a center for research, empirical analysis, and social reform. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by some 2,000 people. Residents conducted investigations on housing, midwifery, fatigue, tuberculosis, typhoid, garbage collection, cocaine, and truancy. The facilities included a night school for adults, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a gym, a girls’ club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group and a theater, apartments, a library, meeting rooms, an employment bureau, and a lunchroom.
The Hull House neighborhood was a mix of European ethnic groups, including Germans, Jews, Greeks, Irish, French Canadians, and Italians. The settlement house offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted visitors from around the world. In the 1890s, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents made it a world center of social reform activity. The group became involved in city and statewide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women.
Addams’s Reform Activities
Addams’s reform work extended beyond Hull House. In 1901, she and her colleagues founded what would become the Juvenile Protective Association, which provided the first probation officers for the first Juvenile Court in the United States. She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws. In 1894, she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago’s 19th Ward, leading what were called the “garbage wars.” With the help of the Hull House Women’s Club, over 1,000 health department violations were reported to city council within a year.
Addams published A New Conscience and Ancient Evil in 1912, a book about prostitution that was extremely popular. She also wrote The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets in 1909, arguing that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth. She served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America and was appointed to the Chicago Board of Education. She was a charter member of the American Sociological Society, founded in 1905.
Addams’s Public Career and Recognition
Addams was a leader in the history of social work and women’s suffrage. In 1912, she helped start the new Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the win with Nicholas Murray Butler. Earlier, in 1910, she was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school.
Addams called on women to exercise their civic duty to become involved in municipal affairs as a matter of “civic housekeeping,” arguing that women were trained in the delicate matters of human welfare and needed to build upon their traditional roles to become civic housekeepers. She had long discussions with philosopher John Dewey in which they redefined democracy in terms of pragmatism and civic activism. When she died in 1935, Addams was the best-known female public figure in the United States.
