Jane Addams

Born September 6, 1860 (Cedarville, Illinois)

Died May 21, 1935 (Chicago, Illinois)

Social worker

Jane Addams founded the pioneering social settlement of Hull House in Chicago in 1889. It operated by the principle that only through living among the poor could aid workers truly understand their situation and provide help. She and her fellow workers were women from relatively wealthy and educated backgrounds who were determined to improve the dangerous and unhealthy living conditions in the city's poorer neighborhoods. Located in one such area, Addams's Hull House provided a variety of social services to the largely immigrant population, and it went on to become a model for many other settlement houses and community centers around the United States. Addams was widely known and honored during her lifetime, and in 1931 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for peace.

"Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment, as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race."

Addams came from the town of Cedarville, Illinois. Her newlywed parents had arrived there not long after the last local Native American tribe, the Pottawatomies, had sold their lands and left the area. She was born Laura Jane Addams on September 6, 1860, the eighth child in her family but only the fifth to survive—cholera (a disease that affects the stomach and intestines) had claimed three previous siblings. When she was two, her pregnant mother collapsed and was taken to bed, but neither mother nor baby survived. Addams later said that this was one of her first memories.

Early life and education

Addams was devoted to her father during her childhood and teens. John Huy Addams (1854–1870) was a prosperous local leader, one of the founders of Cedarville and the owner of the town's sawmill and gristmill (a mill for grinding grain). A native of Pennsylvania, he was a Quaker and was known for his unshakable honesty. He was already serving in the Illinois state senate by the time Addams was born and was friends with another Illinois political figure, future U.S. president Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65).

Addams's father encouraged her to read extensively, and she emerged as an excellent student in her teens. She hoped to enroll at Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the new, women-only Eastern schools that featured a challenging academic program, but her father would not permit it because the school was too far away. Instead she entered nearby Rockford Women's Seminary, as her sisters had done. Addams hoped that she might help the less fortunate in society by becoming a doctor—still a relatively rare occurrence for a woman in her time—but her family was opposed to this plan as well, considering it an unseemly profession for a female. She graduated in 1881 as her class valedictorian.

In the years after she finished at Rockford, Addams occupied her time with travel and independent study, and she took courses at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia for a time. Ill health forced her to quit, and back at home she was frustrated by the lack of choices open to her outside of marriage and motherhood. Her stepmother, Ann Haldeman Addams, urged her to marry a son from her first marriage, George, whom Addams had thought of as a brother for much of her life, but she rejected this idea. Addams suffered from several health issues during these years, including what may have been chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition marked by tiredness, confusion, and sometimes fever. She also underwent spinal surgery and wore a back brace made from leather, steel, and whalebone.

The rise of Hull House

Addams found her direction in life after an 1888 visit to London, England, where she went to see Toynbee Hall, the first so-called settlement house, which was located in an overcrowded, extremely poor section of the city of Whitechapel. Toynbee Hall was a pleasant contrast to the rest of the area, however. It was the work of Reverend Samuel A. Barnett (1844–1913) and was staffed by Oxford University students. The idea was to live among the poor, which was believed to be the best way to improve their living conditions and show a commitment to Christian charity and helping those less fortunate.

Addams decided to move to Chicago with a friend from her Rockford school days, Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940; see entry) and establish her own settlement house. She arrived in the city in early 1889 and went to work finding a suitable property. Due to the widespread railroad network, Chicago had become a national transportation center, and industry in the area was growing rapidly. Although the city was thriving—it was the second largest city in the United States after New York—it was overcrowded and struggling with the arrival of many new residents from the farms of the Midwest and from Europe. The European immigrants lived in the worst neighborhoods. They had come to the city to find work in Chicago's giant meatpacking houses, where cattle and hogs arrived daily by train from the Midwest and were slaughtered for the canned meat products that had become a main part of the American diet. The average laborer worked ten- or twelve-hour shifts, usually for less than $4 a day, and under harsh and often dangerous conditions.

Addams found a property to rent at Halsted and Polk streets, a mansion surrounded by some of the city's worst slums. It had been built three decades earlier by a real estate developer, Charles J. Hull (1820–1889), but with the rise of the nearby meatpacking and shipbuilding industries, shaky wooden houses had sprung up in the area and multiplied. Three or four families often shared small houses that had no indoor plumbing. Outside, sidewalks were made from wooden planks that fell apart quickly, and the streets became rivers of mud during the springtime. Fishing for rats underneath the sidewalks was a popular pastime for children in the neighborhood. The bodies of horses that collapsed on the job were often left to rot.

A divided America

The rapid inflow of immigrants who provided cheap labor for the Industrial Revolution had become one of the defining events of American social history and was a major focus of Addams's newfound mission to serve others. She saw that there had been much wealth created suddenly in the city, thanks to the shift from a farming economy to a manufacturing one, but she also recognized that such prosperity came at a price. The city's housing supply simply could not expand quickly enough to accommodate all those who came looking for low-wage jobs and there were almost no social services to help the poor.

Urban areas like Chicago became severely divided between the rich and the poor. The rich began to fear this new lower class, as some new radical political movements emerged among the poor. Addams and other idealists of the era fought to raise awareness of another radical new idea gaining some popularity at the time: that the poor were not responsible for their troubles—the system was. The poor would remain an underclass, some believed, so long as they were forced to live in conditions that were harmful to the creation of a stable household and safe community. For example, only about one third of the children in the neighborhood where Hull House began were even enrolled in school.

Addams spent nearly $5,000 of her own money to renovate the Hull mansion and raised additional money from local civic leaders. She and Starr moved in, and in September 1889 Hull House opened its doors to their somewhat mismatched new neighbors. There was even the occasional burglar at first, and Addams surprised one in her room one night. The intruder moved to leave by the second-story window, but Addams calmly told him to use the stairs instead and let himself out the front door. Soon, the younger neighborhood children were coming to Hull House to play and take part in crafts activities, and they were followed by older siblings and then parents. Addams, Starr, and the other women who joined them taught classes in sewing, the arts, and even English as a second language. They organized a variety of clubs for children and adults, held a regular lecture series, and ran a community kitchen that served hot, healthy lunches. Hull House soon featured Chicago's first kindergarten and day care center, as well as the city's first playground on a nearby lot. There was a gymnasium, a library, and even an employment agency, and by the second year college-level courses were being offered. Off-site, Addams established affordable cooperative housing for the young working women who worked in the city's shops. She also joined other local leaders in the movement to end child labor in factories and meatpacking houses.

Hull House's Historic Firsts

During its years of operation Hull House achieved many historic firsts, some of which are listed below.

• First social settlement that allowed both male and female residents in the United States.
• First citizenship preparation classes for immigrants in the United States.
• First day care and kindergarten in Chicago.
• First public playground in Chicago.
• First public gymnasium and swimming pool in Chicago.
• First college extension courses offered in Chicago.
• Hosted Chicago's first Boy Scout troop.

Social reform efforts

Many of the men and women from educated or middleclass backgrounds who came to help out at Hull House and similar institutions were highly influential in the creation of the Progressive political movement in America. The Progressive Era was the period of the Industrial Revolution that spanned roughly from the 1890s to about 1920 during which reformers worked together in the interest of distributing political power and wealth more equally in the United States. The Progressive political party was founded by President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; served 1901–9), who often visited Hull House over the years and supported Addams's mission. In turn she became a delegate to the Progressive Party's first national convention in 1912 and seconded Roosevelt's nomination as the party's presidential candidate. Other prominent visitors to Hull House included American educational reformer John Dewey (1859–1852); English Labour Party leader James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937); Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1859–1947 and 1858–1943), also from England and heads of the Fabian Socialist movement, whose ideals appealed to English intellectuals; and feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935).

Because of the reputation it achieved, Hull House and its mission became closely linked to political and social movements that sought reform during the twentieth century. Advocates for the working classes helped secure the passage of federal and state laws that granted workers the right to organize. Activists also urged authorities to regulate a variety of health issues that affected daily life. Such groups vastly improved the standard of living for generations of working men and women.

Addams took an active role in such efforts. In 1894 a typhoid epidemic broke out in the Halsted Street area. The disease passed from person to person, causing headaches, weakness, and intestinal problems. Addams decided that the piles of rotting garbage littering the neighborhood, which caused the illness, needed to be removed. Chicago was divided into wards (districts) run by officials called aldermen, many of whom had been elected through dishonest means. Addams knew that her ward's alderman had given the garbage collection job to a political supporter, who simply took the money without doing the work. She decided to submit a bid to the city council to do the garbage collection herself. Her bid was rejected, but her daring challenge attracted much press coverage, and the mayor appointed her the garbage collection supervisor for the 19th Ward, where Hull House was located. She was the first woman in the city to hold such a job.

Addams was named to many other commissions and investigative panels, including an 1895 one that reported on the terrible conditions at the Cook County poorhouse, and a campaign that regulated the safety of milk. Hull House earned national attention, and many articles were written about Addams's work in magazines and newspapers of the era. By 1892, its third year of operation, Hull House was one of six settlement houses in the United States. Five years later that number had risen to seventy-four, and then to more than one hundred by 1910. Addams was regarded as one of the founding figures in the profession of social work.

Emerged as renowned national figure

Hull House's two-decade anniversary was marked with Addams's 1910 autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull House. Addams served as the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, founded the National Foundation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, and in 1910 became the first woman to be granted an honorary degree by Yale University. She publicly opposed World War I (1914–18; a war in which Great Britain, France, the United States and their allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies), campaigned for women's suffrage (the right to vote), and was one of the main figures of the Women's Peace Party, formed in 1915. Later she became president of the International Congress of Women, which evolved into the Women's International Peace League for Peace and Freedom, and she held its presidency until her death.

In 1931 Addams was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for peace, sharing it with Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947), a noted educator and longtime president of Columbia University. She did not attend the ceremony, however, due to a heart condition, and she died of cancer on May 21, 1935. She was buried at her family's plot in Cedarville, but Hull House continued operation for many years after her death. In the 1960s the original compound became part of the new Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, and Hull House survived there as a museum into the early twenty-first century.

For More Information

Books

Diliberto, Gioia. A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams. New York: Scribner/A Lisa Drew Book, 1999.

Linn, James Weber. Jane Addams: A Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Web Sites

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889–1963. http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/urbanexp/contents.htm (accessed on July 7, 2005).