Jane Addams
Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a pioneer American settlement worker and founder of Hull House in Chicago, Ill., author, pacifist and woman's leader. She was the most prominent woman of the Progressive Era.
Addams was born in Cedarville, Ill., on Sept. 6, 1860; her father, a Yankee, was a prominent Republican politician and supporter of Abraham Lincoln. At Rockford Seminary, Ill., which she attended from 1877 to 1881, the conscientiousness tinged with rebellion that characterized her career began to appear. Valedictorian and president of her class, she played a leading part in transforming the Congregational finishing school school into a degree-conferring college.
In 1881 her father died. Eight restless and unhappy years followed in which she underwent painful operations to correct a spinal curvature. In 1883-1885 and 1887-1888 Jane Addams traveled in Europe seeking a purpose in life. The idea of founding a settlement house for the underprivileged came to her in Spain in 1888. Before returning to America she visited Toynbee Hall, London's famous settlement house, and consulted the head resident, Canon Samuel A. Barnett.
In September 1889, Jane Addams and a friend, Ellen Gates Starr, moved into an 1850s mansion built by banker Charles Hull, but located in a neighborhood that had become a crowded multiethnic slum on the near West Side of Chicago controlled by local political bosses. Hull House, as Jane Addams called it, became America's best known settlement house. It offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world. In the 1890s Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents of the house made it a center of social reform activity. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city- and state-wide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women. Addamd brought in prominent visitors from around the world, and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. In 1912 she helped found the Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, even though his platform called for building more battleships.
After 1915 Addams centered her interests in the peace movement and was a founder and president of the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom. Her pacifist views earned her the enmity of nationalist groups. In her later years, however, she was widely regarded as the greatest woman of her generation and in 1931 she shared the Nobel Peace prize with Nicholas Murray Butler. She died on May 21, 1935, in Chicago. Her books include Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) and Newer Ideals of Peace (1907),=, as well as two influential autobiographies, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (1930).