ial education law. With the creation of the Federal Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the passage of a federal child labor law in 1916, the Hull-House reformers saw their efforts expanded to the national level. Addams believed her efforts were not revolutionary, she simply founded a place where “young women who have been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself; where they might try out some of the things they had been taught.” (Addams, p. 89)Jane Addams established herself as a progressive. She collected a group of people, consisting of women that made it their objective to rid the social evils that plagued the new industrial society during the Gilded Age. Addams main targets were very similar to most progressives, advocating “ending political corruption, bringing more businesslike methods to governing, and offering a more compassionate legislative response to the excesses of industrialization.” This separated Addams from middle class women and what was expected of them. Addams was not taking care of the “private sphere” but engaging in acts that were only suppose to be taken on by men in the “public sphere.” In this way, she liberated women from the constraints of the household. Correspondingly, she was an advocate for science as the guide to social reform. She believed that uncovering the truths about urban industrial society could potentially be restructured for the greater good of the American people. Addams, in addition with many other female social activists at Hull House, focused the scientific practice towards to working class, the poorest people in the neighborhood. As Addams put it, the Hull House’s social science consisted of “a scientific patience in the accumulation of facts and the steady holding of . . .[a person’s] sympathies as one of the best instruments for ...
