Jane Addams

Born September 6, 1860

Cedarville, Illinois

Died May 21, 1935

Chicago, Illinois

Founder of Hull-House and of modern social work

"Teaching in a Settlement requires distinct methods, for it is true of people who have been allowed to remain undeveloped and whose facilities are inert and sterile, that they cannot take their learning heavily."

C hicago, Illinois, 1890. "Hog Butcher for the World," poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) called it, in his 1916 poem, "Chicago." "Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; / Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders." In 1890, Chicago was all these things, and more. It was the new home of thousands of Italians and Lithuanians, Poles and Bohemians, Germans and Greeks, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe recently arrived in America with pockets full of dreams and little else. Chicago was also the new home of a well-educated, sophisticated, and independent young woman. Despite her uncertain health, she did not feel like settling for the conventional life of a housewife in her all-American hometown of Cedarville, Illinois. Her dreams were about compassion and social justice, about helping to save struggling people whose lives were threatened by the mercilessness of industrial America at the turn of the twentieth century. She, too, put her stamp on the City of the Big Shoulders. Her name was Jane Addams.

The genius of Addams was her ability to take direct action and ease the suffering of factory workers and their families. She dealt not only with immigrants but also with natives of the United States who came to the big city in search of work and money. Addams met their problems head-on and took the house she lived in and turned it into a community and social center called Hull-House. By so doing, Addams founded the field of social work in the United States. She later branched out to become a force in education, labor relations, women's rights, civil rights, and civil liberties. She won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931, the first American woman to do so.

Cedarville

Jane Addams was born into a large family in Cedarville, Illinois, west of Chicago. Her mother died when she was two years old. Her father, John Addams, was the prosperous owner of a mill that ground wheat into flour, a local political leader, and a friend of President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65). John Addams had been among the founders of the Republican Party, founded in 1852, which led the opposition to slavery before the American Civil War (1861–65). He remarried in 1868. His daughter Jane was almost the baby of the family—she was the eighth of nine children. Jane absorbed her father's sense of responsibility to work for social improvement. What she did not absorb was the usual idea, in the middle of the nineteenth century, of what a proper daughter of a Republican leader in a small midwestern town ought to do with her life after her education.

Jane Addams was an excellent student in school. She had ambitions to attend one of the East Coast colleges for women that had been founded recently, and from there perhaps become a medical doctor. Her parents disapproved of Jane's traveling so far east for college, and they preferred that she become educated with the idea of becoming a better wife. Instead of going east, Jane stayed near home, attending Rockford Female Seminary (later Rockford College for Women, and now Rockford College). Her father was a trustee, or overseer, of Rockford. Addams graduated first in her class in 1881, still thinking about attending medical school.

A grand tour

Addams spent the next six years focusing on her future. She enrolled in the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but had to drop out because of pain from a lifelong curvature of her spine. After undergoing corrective back surgery, Addams spent a year strapped into a brace that left her almost immobile. Afterwards, she spent a year and a half touring Europe. Shortly after she returned home, her beloved father died suddenly. She spent two years at home thinking about what to do with her life, then embarked on another trip to Europe. While in London, she visited an institution called Toynbee Hall, a settlement house that had been established to help ease some of the social difficulties experienced by poor working people in England's capital city. The original idea for settlement houses was to have people from universities move to a working-class neighborhood to help relieve the poverty that existed and to learn about the plights of the poor. The visit was the turning point in Addams's life.

On her second European tour, Addams was struck by the wide range of social problems encountered by workers affected by the Industrial Revolution, a period of industrial growth that introduced the mass production of goods in factories instead of in homes or in smaller individual workshops as had previously been the case. In that era, governments did not address issues arising from the growth of industrial cities, such as inadequate housing or poverty brought on by unemployment. Poor and uneducated workers were on their own. The result was often widespread suffering of whole families who lacked the resources to solve their problems. London's Toynbee Hall was an example of how such problems could be addressed on a local scale. Residents of Toynbee Hall offered counseling, advice, and education in ways of coping with the change from living in a rural village to living in a large city.

In 1889, Addams and a traveling companion, teacher Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940), went to Chicago to establish a settlement house like Toynbee Hall. They found a large house that had been built by Chicago real estate developer Charles J. Hull (1820–1889) on the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. Addams and Starr moved into the house, according to the Nobel e-Museum web site, to "provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic (charitable) enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago."

Hull-House

Addams and Starr made Hull-House a place where families could turn for help. A person could get a hot lunch, leave a child in day care, learn English, or get medical care or legal advice. By its second year, Hull-House hosted two thousand people a week. It had added kindergarten classes for toddlers and evening classes for adults. It had an art gallery, a gymnasium, a music school, and an employment bureau where men and women could look for jobs.

At the center of the project was Addams. She had always believed that women could play bigger roles than housewives, and she attracted like-minded young women to help her set up new programs for the working poor in the neighborhood. Addams's reputation quickly spread throughout the city (and eventually, throughout the world). Even though women could not yet vote, Addams was elected to the Chicago Board of Education and became chairperson of its School Management Committee.

As Addams continued to work to improve the lives of the working people around her—both immigrants and native-born Americans—Addams became convinced that political changes were needed in addition to volunteer charity work. She started campaigning for laws to limit the hours and ages at which children could work, to require children to attend school, and to inspect factories for unsafe conditions. She became the voice of the working poor, representing their cause to the city government by lobbying for, or promoting, street paving, public parks, and playgrounds in poorer neighborhoods. She encouraged workers to form labor unions, associations that worked for better wages and working conditions. In 1912, Addams seconded the nomination of former president Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; served 1901–9) at the convention of the Progressive Party. She campaigned for Roosevelt during the election, but his bid for reelection failed.

Addams's observations of immigrants at Hull-House

The people who received assistance from Hull-House included both native-born Americans who had moved from farms or small towns to Chicago, looking for work, and immigrant families. Addams took special note of the problems facing immigrants. Addams set up Hull-House during a period of large-scale immigration into the United States from southern and eastern Europe. At the time, most immigrants came from a rural background in some of the poorest regions of Europe. They had grown up with a way of life that had changed little for hundreds of years. Suddenly, they were in an urban environment, unable to speak the language and utterly unused to the urban industrial culture developing in the United States.

Addams was a sensitive observer of the newly arrived and struggling families. She noticed, for example, that the role of parent and child was often reversed, with teenaged children showing their parents how to function in the new society. In one case, an Italian woman was used to baking her own bread every day, but not at home. In Italy, it had been done in a community oven. In Chicago, the woman had no idea how to operate the oven in her household and had to depend on her daughter to show her.

Addams also noted that young women submitted to their parents' expectations for their lives. They often were required to assume the social roles that might have been appropriate for young women in a rural village of Russia or Italy—primarily limited to staying at home to tend to children and performing household tasks—but that seemed completely out of touch with Chicago around the year 1900. Young city women in the United States were expected to bring in money by working outside the home. (Addams may have seen something of her own reluctance to settle for a conventional woman's role in the experiences of young immigrant women.)

In her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull-House, published in 1910, Addams noted how the role of fathers was changed, even crushed, by the immigrant experience. She told of a father from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) whose daughter took classes at Hull-House. The father was often drunk. He eventually committed suicide in the midst of a strong reaction against too much alcohol. Only after his death did Addams learn from his widow that in Europe, he had been a highly skilled goldsmith who had made his wife, now a widow, a beautiful wedding ring. In America, in Chicago, he had been forced to find a job shoveling coal in the furnace room of a factory. The wife had usually been able to calm her husband's fits of frustration and anger by handing him a bit of metal to work on at home. "This story threw a flood of light upon the dead man's struggle and on the stupid maladjustment [inability to adjust to human demands] which had broken him down," Addams wrote in Twenty Years at Hull-House. "Why had we never been told? Why had our interest in the remarkable musical ability of his child, blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of the father? We had forgotten that a long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man [found comfort] may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament."

Twenty Years at Hull-House served as a diary for Addams and as a handbook for workers at institutions similar to Hull-House. Her book also served as a document of American industrialized society in the era, and was widely read. Other books followed about every two years.

Addams grew from a young woman intent on helping the workers of Chicago to one who played a role on the national

stage. At the start of World War I (1914–18), she was determined to promote international peace. She opposed America's entry into the European war, and in 1915 she helped found the Women's Peace Party. She traveled to Europe to campaign for a quick, peaceful solution to the war between England and France on one side and Germany and Austria on the other. She favored establishing a permanent international peacekeeping organization. After World War I, Addams became an assistant to Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), a businessman placed in charge of organizing delivery of emergency food aid to the defeated nations in Europe after the war ended. (Hoover was elected president in 1928.)

The causes promoted by Addams in international affairs met with mixed success. The United States eventually entered World War I on the side of Britain and France in 1917. The League of Nations, an international organization similar to the United Nations, was organized much as had been proposed by President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924; served 1913–21), as a means of preventing any future world war. But the U.S. Senate never agreed to join the League. In 1919, Addams was elected first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, a private group devoted to promoting peace, including U.S. membership in the League of Nations.

In 1926, Addams suffered a heart attack, and she never fully recovered her health. On December 10, 1931, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman so honored. On the same day, Addams was admitted to a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Four years later, she was diagnosed with cancer and died on May 21, 1935. Her funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull-House in Chicago.

—James L. Outman

For More Information

Books

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Reprint, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. New York: Harper & Bros., 1860. Reprint, New York: Knopf, 1992.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Hovde, Jane. Jane Addams. New York: Facts on File, 1989.

Periodicals

Kornblatt, Mark, and Pamela Renner. "'Saint' Jane." Scholastic Update (February 23, 1990): p. 10.

Levinsohn, Florence Hamlish. "A Tribute to a Life of Caring; Halsted Street's Living Memorial to Jane Addams." Chicago (November 1986): p. 304.

Web Sites

Carl Sandburg Chicago Poems.http://carl-sandburg.com (accessed on March 4, 2004).

Holli, Melvin G. "Hull House and the Immigrants." Illinois Periodicals Online.http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/iht1010323.html (accessed on March 4, 2004).

"Jane Addams Biography." Nobel e-Museum.http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.html (accessed on March 4, 2004).

Luft, Margaret. "About …." Jane Addams Hull House.http://www.hullhouse.org/about.asp (accessed on March 4, 2004).