“If the conclusions of the whole matter are similar to those I have already published at intervals during the twenty years at Hull-House, I can only make the defense that each of the earlier books was an attempt to set forth a thesis supported by experience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace the experiences through which various conclusions were forced upon me.”

In the preface, Addams sets out her motive for writing the book. She traces the life experiences that led her to become a social reformer and shaped her ideas about how to solve the difficulties presented by industrialization and immigration in the modern American city. Only the book’s first four chapters are strictly autobiographical, since Addams’s primary goal is to describe the principles that she learned through the Settlement Movement and the Hull-House activities.

“Only as we neared the church door did I venture to ask what could be done about it, receiving the reply that it might never be righted so far as clothes went, but that people might be equal in things that mattered much more than clothes, the affairs of education and religion, for instance, which we attended to when we went to school and church, and that it was very stupid to wear the sort of clothes that made it harder to have equality even there.”

Addams emphasizes her father’s influence on her childhood because he instilled moral concerns and a desire for social justice. One day when Jane had dressed in a gorgeous, new cloak, her father advised her to wear her old, warm cloak to avoid making the other little girls feel badly. This incident heightened Jane’s awareness of economic inequalities. She learned from her father that providing people with access to education and freedom to worship could improve their condition.

“That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen, seized me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and summon the family from below.”

When Addams watched over the ailing, elderly nurse who had reared her, she witnessed the woman’s departure from life. In this description of Addams’s first experience of someone’s death: her sense of solitude and being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless forces, one can trace Addams’s later impulse to create a welcoming house of volunteers that provided a social safety net for struggling people in a community.