(Laura) Jane Addams was a social reformer and a pacifist, a woman ahead of her time in realizing that caring intervention may be the best crime deterrent. She is known as the founder of Hull House in Chicago, one of the first social settlements in North America. Addams was the cowinner, with Nicholas Murray Butler, of the 1931 Nobel Prize for Peace.
Born Laura Jane Addams, she was the eighth and last child born to a wealthy family in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860. Her father, John, was a banker, state senator, and mill owner. Her mother, Sarah, died when Jane was three years old. Ignoring the conventions of the day that kept most women at work inside the home, John Addams decided that his youngest child should be college educated to pursue a career if she so chose. He sent her to Rockford Seminary for Females, now Rockford College, in Illinois. She graduated in 1881 and, after a short time at the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia, she left with roommate Ellen Gates Starr for Europe. The trip was partly to restore her poor health and partly to heal her sorrow over her father's death.
After two trips abroad, Addams and Starr returned to Illinois in 1889, both of them changed forever by what they had seen in the slums of East London. Infused with the idea of helping the poor in their own country, they bought a vacant structure built by Charles Hull and opened Hull House in Chicago's overcrowded, poverty-stricken Near West Side. It would be Addams' home for the rest of her life.
Hull House became everything to the poor, largely immigrant population in the area and especially to young working girls. It became a boarding home, a day nursery, a community kitchen, a gymnasium, a little theater, and a place in which to learn social and academic skills. Addams encouraged prominent social reformers of the day to visit Hull House and share their knowledge. Many did, even living at Hull House for brief periods.
Not content with her success, Addams worked for and helped to get passed a state child labor law in 1903. She was instrumental in legislation reducing the working day for women to eight hours. She called for woman's suffrage and fought for research into the causes of poverty and crime. By 1910, Addams had earned national recognition and had become the first woman president of the National Conference of Social Work.
When World War I began in Europe in 1914, Addams began to voice her pacifist sympathies. She was so against the fighting that when President Woodrow Wilson called for all Americans to rally behind the war effort, Addams refused. People called her a Communist. After the war, she called for a mass effort to end war-caused starvation in Europe. But since she wanted the defeated Germans to be included, people denounced her for that as well. Undaunted, Addams turned her attention to helping to found the American Civil Liberties Union and went back to work at Hull House. In time, the public forgave Addams for her antiwar views, and she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
During her lifetime, Jane Addams wrote numerous books and articles. Among the best known is Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). Until her death in 1935, she continued to work for better education and living conditions for the poor, especially immigrants, blacks, and women. Her partner and cofounder of Hull House died five years later. Jane Addams is buried in her hometown of Cedarville. The original Hull House settlement home is a national historic landmark, now part of the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Restored to its late nineteenth-century interior and open daily to visitors, it is known as the Jane Addams Hull House Museum.
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