Jane Addams

Jane Addams 1860-1935, American social worker, b. Cedarville, Ill., grad. Rockford College, 1881. In 1889, with Ellen Gates Starr, she founded Hull House in Chicago, one of the first social settlements in the United States (see settlement house ). Based on the university settlements begun in England by Samuel Barnett , Hull House served as a community center for the neighborhood poor and later as a center for social reform activities. It was important in Chicago civic affairs and had an influence on the settlement movement throughout the country. An active reformer throughout her career, Jane Addams was a leader in the woman's suffrage and pacifist (see pacifism ) movements, and was a strong opponent of the Spanish-American War. She was the recipient (jointly with Nicholas Murray Butler ) of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. Her books on social questions include The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), and Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).

Bibliography: See her autobiographical Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930); the selected works in The Jane Addams Reader (ed. by J. B. Elshtain, 2001); biographies by J. W. Linn, her nephew (1935), A. F. Davis (1973), G. Diliberto (1999), and L. W. Knight (2005); studies by D. Levine (1971) and J. B. Elshtain (2001).

Addams, Jane (1860–1935), American social reformer, settlement house founder, pacifist, and writer.Addams was born 6 September 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois. Heir to her father's political sensibilities, Jane Addams's early heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Giuseppe Mazzini. A member of the first generation of college women, she found a way to put her social gospel and piety directly to work with the founding (with Ellen Gates Starr) of Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago's immigrant ghetto. In 1889, Addams claimed that democratic political governance was, in fact, a form of civic housekeeping: she became a leading social reformer of the era and a founder of modern social work.

Jane Addams's world was turned upside down with the outbreak of World War I. Her defense of radicals and anarchists, her brave and often lonely devotion to pacifism and opposition to “the idea of war” as well as its terrible reality, placed her outside the American mainstream and brought down derision and abuse. In 1915, Addams, Emily Greene Balch, and others helped to create the Woman's Peace Party, which called for “continuous mediation.” This was the forerunner to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in 1919, of which Jane Addams was a founding mother and president from its inception in 1915 to her death. An advocate of women's suffrage, Addams in her articles, speeches, and books traced the powerful role women must play in promoting peace as an imperative to preserve human life. Her understanding of feminism set it in “unalterable” opposition to militarism.

Unfairly and inaccurately called a traitor and a Bolshevik, Addams never reneged on her commitments to civil liberties or to pacifism. Her joint recognition (with Nicholas Murray Butler) for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and her embodiment of the notion of service helped restore her stature as one of America's foremost humanitarians.

Bibliography

Christopher Lasch, ed., The Social Thought of Jane Addams, 1965.
Daniel Levine , Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition, 1980.

Jean Bethke Elshtain