ADDAMS, JANE

b. 6 September 1860, Cedarville, Illinois;
d. 21 May 1935, Chicago, Illinois

Key works
(1909) Twenty Years at Hull-House, New York: Macmillan.
(1910) The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, New York: Macmillan.

Jane Addams, the first American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, is remembered as a clinical sociologist, social worker, peace activist and urban reformer. In 1889, Addams and her good friend Ellen Gates Starr established a settlement house in the decaying Hull Mansion in Chicago. Hull-House, as it was called, had many aims, not the least of which was to give privileged, educated young people contact with the real life of the majority of the population. The core Hull-House residents, an important group in the development of urban sociology, were well-educated women bound together by their commitment to progressive causes such as labour unions, the National Consumers League and the suffrage movement. During the next 45 years, Jane Addams would travel widely, but Hull-House remained her home.
Hull-House, a national symbol of the settlement house movement, was a centre of activities for the ethnically diverse, impoverished immigrants in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago. Within five years, some forty clubs were based in the settlement house and over 2,000 people came into the facility each week. Hull-House operated a day nursery, hosted meetings of four women’s unions, established a labour museum, ran a coffee house, and held economic conferences bringing together businessmen and workers. The Working People’s Social Science Club held weekly meetings, and a college extension programme offered evening courses for neighbourhood residents. A few University of Chicago courses were available there and the Chicago Public Library had a branch reading room on the premises.
Addams challenged the competency of male city administrators. She criticized their civic housekeeping skills, questioned their willingness to meet social needs and thought they deprived American citizens of genuine democracy. Nearly every major reform proposal in Chicago (1895–1930) had Jane Addams’s name attached in some way. Her involvement in major issues—such as factory inspection, child labour laws, improvements in welfare procedures, recognition of labour unions, compulsory school attendance and labour disputes—catapulted her to national prominence. Intellectuals, including Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb, came from around the world to Chicago to meet Addams and her colleagues.
Hull-House was a base for promoting political, economic and social reform as well as systematic investigation. In 1895, Hull-House Maps and Papers was published. This ground-breaking document, dealing with tenement conditions, sweat-shops and child labour, was the first systematic attempt to describe immigrant communities in an American city.
Addams was a prolific writer whose most successful book was her moving autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Her years of work and writing in the interest of peace and democracy earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. When she died in 1935, Addams was America’s best-known female public figure.

Further reading
Elshtain, J. (ed.) (2002) The Jane Addams Reader, New York: Basic Books.

✍️ JAN MARIE FRITZ