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ADDAMS, JANE 1860-1935

REFORMER; PEACE ACTIVIST; FOUNDER OF
HULL HOUSE

Background

Jane Addams was best known for her role as a leader of the settlement-house movement in the United States and as the founder of Hull House in Chicago. But she was also a prominent peace activist, an ardent campaigner for women's suffrage, and one of the intellectual leaders of the progressive movement. Born to a wealthy businessman and Illinois state senator and his wife, she graduated from Rockford (Illinois) Seminary in 1881. Addams then attended the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, but after a year she had to drop out for health reasons. For seven years she searched for something meaningful to do with her life, and finally found it on a trip to Europe. For young women of Addams's background, a trip to Europe was intended as the cap-stone of their cultural education, the final preparation for lives as wives, mothers, and club women. But Addams, as she recalled in her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), rejected "the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all about her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her; it peers at her in the form of heavy-laden market women and underpaid street laborers, gibing her with a sense of her uselessness."

Hull House

While in London, Addams visited Toynbee Hall, one of the world's first settlement houses, where educated men and women lived in a slum neighborhood in order to be on the spot to help the neighborhood residents. She decided to open such a house in Chicago. With her friend Ellen Gates Starr she bought the old Hull mansion on South Halsted Street, and moved in on 18 September 1889. It soon became the most important settlement house in the United States. Eventually, it had thirteen buildings, a staff of sixty-five, and an annual budget of $100,000. Addams made Hull House a center of political, cultural, and educational activities in the neighborhood. Hull House sponsored lecturers (among them John Dewey, a personal friend of Addams, and Frank Lloyd Wright) and encouraged its immigrant neighbors to maintain their ethnic traditions even as it helped them through the process of assimilation. Well into the 1920s Addams was among the most famous American women and an acknowledged leader in the growing field of social work.

Progressive Reformer

Addams was an engaging public speaker, a tireless fund-raiser, and a prolific author, and she put all of these talents to use in the service of a variety of progressive causes. Among her ten books and five hundred articles were Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) and Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). Addams was a strong defender of organized labor and women's suffrage. In part because of her influence, Illinois passed a Factory Act in 1893, and she also lobbied heavily for the national Child Labor Act. Addams's influence was widespread. She was one of the leading figures in the Progressive Party, and an important supporter of Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Bull Moose presidential campaign.

Peace Activist

When World War I began, Addams remained more firmly committed than ever to her pacifist principles. She was the chair of the Women's Peace Party and president of the 1915 International Conference of Women in The Hague. She was criticized severely in some quarters: the Daughters of the American Revolution revoked her membership because of her opposition to American involvement in the war. However, her life-time of efforts on behalf of world peace were recognized in 1931, when she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler.