Addams, Jane

Addams, Jane (1860–1935), settlement‐house leader.Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois. Her mother died when she was three; her father, a Quaker businessman and state legislator, subsequently remarried. Graduating from Rockford (Illinois) Female Seminary in 1881, Addams entered the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania but dropped out because of illness. Eight years of foreign travel, vocational uncertainty, and unfocused anxiety ended when Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr purchased Hull House in 1889 as a “settlement house,” or neighborhood social center on Chicago's Halsted Street.

Supported by wealthy Chicagoans, especially Addams's longtime partner Mary Rozet Smith, Hull House offered its working‐class immigrant neighborhood educational and cultural programs as well as practical help and even material aid. It also became a political and intellectual center for a group of women intellectuals excluded from university and governmental careers. Florence Kelley began her reform career at Hull House. Pursuing the agendas of Progressivism, Addams and her colleagues fought prostitution and saloons and lobbied for sweatshop regulation, health and housing codes, and worker‐protection laws, especially for women. Addams encouraged women social experts and helped bring into politics the influence of organized women, whom she viewed as “social housekeepers” with different political priorities from men.

Addams was notably successful in shaping her own image. Her two memoirs, Twenty Years at Hull‐House (1910) and Second Twenty Years (1930), created a benevolent, all‐knowing persona. Although remembered as a social worker, Addams was primarily a public intellectual who lectured widely and published extensively on reform issues. Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) offers the most comprehensive statement of her social thought. She was active in the woman suffrage movement, and in 1912 backed Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party candidacy. John Dewey often visited Hull House during his years at the University of Chicago.

A lifelong pacifist, Addams broke with Dewey and other Progressive Era reformers to oppose America's entry into World War I. During the war she lectured for Herbert Hoover's Food Administration, which supplied food to war refugees. She described her wartime experiences in Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922). From 1919 to her death she was President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In the 1920s, Addams's pacifism and her support for the Sheppard‐Towner Act of 1921 (providing federally funded health care for mothers and children) made her a target of Red‐baiters. But by 1931, when she won the Nobel Peace Prize, her reputation had recovered. While scholars have noted the race and class limitations of the settlement movement, Addams is widely recognized as an advocate for social citizenship and leader in the Progressive Era reform movement.
See also Immigration; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Settlement Houses; Society of Friends; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Allen F. Davis , American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams, 1973.
Ruth Crocker , Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1992.

Ruth Crocker