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ADDAMS, Jane

Born 6 September 1860, Cedarville, Illinois; died 21 May 1935, Chicago, Illinois

Daughter of John and Sarah Weber Addams

Jane Addams attended Rockford Female Seminary, and, for one year, Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia. She never married; the closest emotional ties over her lifetime were to her father and to a few women friends.

Addams' name is most often associated with Hull House, the renowned settlement she founded in 1889 in the immigrant slums of Chicago. Her experiences there formed the basis for her efforts, carried out on a local, national, and international scale, for social reform. She devoted herself to such causes as child labor legislation, women's suffrage, educational reform, and world peace. She helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and served as its president until her death. In 1931, she was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams wrote ten books, countless articles, and lectured extensively. This presented to a wide audience her conviction that citizens of the new urban-industrial age must move beyond individualism toward a new social ethic. By the time she died in 1935, Addams had become one of the best known and most respected women of her time.

Her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), is a perceptive analysis of the new industrial American society peopled by masses of immigrants and urban poor. In six essays adapted from earlier articles and lectures, Addams suggests that changes in industrial and household relations, in politics, education and organized charity, and in ways of understanding the role of women will be necessary if true democracy is to be extended successfully into the new age. Her view that women's political and social roles should be expanded so women could become caretakers of the well-being and morality not just of their families, but of society at large, is typical of the viewpoint known as social feminism.

Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) continues and expands Addams' analysis, suggesting that as a social ethic of morality is put into practice, the need for war will disappear. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), Addams' own favorite among her books, and A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), a study of prostitution, are pioneering contributions to the field of urban sociology.

Addams' best known work is Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes (1910), the classic autobiography she published at age fifty. The book describes Hull House and its cultural, educational, political, and humanitarian activities, but its broader focus is the education of Addams herself. She was indebted to the thought or moral example of such diverse figures as John Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, her friend John Dewey, and to the founders of the settlement house in London, known as Toynbee Hall. But she also learned from the ideas and problems of her immigrant neighbors, for she viewed Hull House not as a charitable mission to the downtrodden but as a forum where diverse nationalities and social classes could interact for the betterment of all.

Like all autobiographies, Twenty Years at Hull-House is selective and stylized in its presentation of events. Addams writes lucidly and sometimes movingly, enlivening her narrative with anecdotal accounts of the people and situations she met in her Hull House work. She adopts the persona of a seeker rather than dispenser of enlightenment, but she writes with moral earnestness and naive optimism that justice and peace will be made to prevail.

During the next two decades, Addams passed for a time beyond liberal social reform to positions which many regarded as radical and even seditious. She was a pacifist during World War I, an internationalist in the isolationist 1920s, a supporter of civil liberties when the prevailing mood was suppressive of dissent. Addams discusses her peace efforts, and the condemnation and self-doubt she suffered because of her unpopular views in Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), and in The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (1930). The latter book is a disjointed but still interesting account of Addams' continuing reform activities and of her view of the postwar years. It includes one of Addams' favorite pieces: an analysis of a rumor (spread widely in 1913), that a devil baby resided at Hull House.

Even before her death, Addams had become a legendary figure. Unfortunately, the image of her which survives is that of the do-gooder Saint Jane, the lady in long skirts who helped the poor. But Addams was a social reformer of far-ranging breadth and influence, a gifted writer, and a first-rate intellect. She was not so much an original thinker as a perceptive observer of the society around her, and an able synthesizer and popularizer of the ideas of the leading social theorists of her time. Addams' work and writing helped make possible the liberal reforms of the Progressive Era and of the New Deal and helped arouse the social conscience of two generations of Americans.