Review: A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil By Jane Addams
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“Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself,” states Jane Addams. She met Ellen Gates Starr and together in 1889, they single-handedly created the most influential place of their time, Hull-House. There, they would try to find the solution to many issues during that time, such as immigrate rights, labor reform, public housing, health-care, and many other problems. In fact, one of the issues that Addams tries to fix is white slavery, otherwise known today as prostitution. A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil was written 1912. In her book she discusses how young, white, poor girls fall prey to sexual slavery by men in the city, while she brings up various stories taken from Hull-House.…show more content… As a result, Hull-House offered many services, such as helping them find hobbies for themselves, in order for the Immigrants to gain American middle-class values. The Hull-House hosted activities to fix their way of living, such as teaching them to speak English, helping them develop their reading skills, and even adjust their way of eating in order for them to grasp the American ideals. Adding hobbies to their daily life was one of them. This relates to Addams’s book because most of the victims of white slavery were young, immigrant girls who had no way to support themselves. Men took advantage of these young women, since they were not familiar with the life in America. Jane Addams suggests that all young immigrant girls should use their free time on a hobby, that way they will learn the required skills they need in order to adapt to American life and will not have free time to roam around the city for men to misuse them for their own gain. That is why Addams’s solution was to create hobbies for immigrants, because she’s saying that their way of living is the reason why they’re unable to properly support themselves and thus easily tricked into working in…show more content… Addams proves this when she reports that health care should be provided to those who are in need, regardless of their age and gender against diseases such as STDs (Addams 75). At the Hull-house Museum, they showed that during the Depression of 1893, Hull-House offered a free health care clinic. Likewise, many people who lived in Hull-House advocated for better health care, for example, Dr.Rachelle Slobodinsky Yarros who was involved in women’s health and open Chicago’s first birth control clinic. The museum proves that it accurately represents the ideas shown in Addams’s book through her