How did the Hull House women try to help immigrants?
DAPHNE SPAIN: Some of the programs that Hull House sponsored were intended to help tide families over if they were in extreme poverty. And they were quite innovative for the time, and perceived as something of socialist and therefore somewhat radical for the time too. But one was a coal cooperative. People in the neighborhood could buy their coal at a lower price if they belonged to this cooperative. It was an alternative to children going out on the street and picking up pieces of coal that had fallen out of bins that were being hauled, or falling off the railroad car, for example. That entitled a family to earn certain points of the purchase and the reduced price of their next coal allotment or their next coal purchase. The lunch room that Jane Addams sponsored initially was patterned after the New England kitchen that Ellen Sloane Richards developed in Boston, Massachusetts, and Richards was one of the first professional nutritionists who advocated the creation of collective kitchen
