Social Reformer

Early Life.

Jane Addams was born on 6 September 1860 at Clearville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous miller, banker, abolitionist, and community leader who served eight terms as a state senator. Her mother died when Jane was two, and young Jane became devoted to her father, who remarried about two years later. In 1877 Addams entered the Rockford Female Seminary, in nearby Rockford, Illinois, where she became a student leader, graduating in 1881. The seminary encouraged young women to become Christian missionaries in foreign lands, but Addams resisted pressure to enter service abroad. As she wrote in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), "I was quite settled in my mind that I should study medicine and live with the poor."

Finding Her Way.

After her father's death during the summer after her graduation from Rockford, Addams entered a difficult period. She left Women's...