Jane Addams was a pioneer social reformer and women’s rights and peace activist, perhaps best known for her work at Hull House, a social settlement house that offered social services and educational opportunities to the poor immigrants and laborers of working-class Chicago.

She was born in Cedarville, Illinois in 1860 into a prosperous family, the youngest of eight children.  When she was four years old, she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, causing a curvature in her spine.  She walked with a limp and considered herself ugly.

She loved to read, and in her teens she decided to become a doctor so that she could live and work among the poor.  She completed a first year of medical school, but her health and a nervous breakdown prevented her from completing the degree.  About this time, she had surgery on her back, to straighten it.  In 1883, she toured Europe for two years with her stepmother, then returned home to live with her stepmother in Cedarville.  During this time, she sank into depression, feeling useless and unsure about her future.

In the summer of 1887, she read an article in a magazine about starting a settlement house.  A famous settlement house at that time was Toynbee Hall in London, and she traveled abroad and visited the Hall, and was fascinated with what she saw and learned.

In 1889, she and a friend, Ellen Gates Starr, rented a run-down mansion in the slums of one of Chicago’s poorest industrial areas and founded Hull House.
The idea behind the settlement house was to provide a place where volunteer settlement workers could live and share their experience and abilities in providing services for the immigrant and poor population in the neighborhood.

To the largely immigrant population living and working in the industrial neighborhood, Hull-House offered kindergarten and day-care facilities for children of working mothers, an art gallery, libraries, music and art classes, and an employment bureau. By its second year, Hull-House was serving over 2,000 residents every week and, by 1900, had grown to include a book bindery, gymnasium, pool, cooperative residence for working women, theater, labor museum, and meeting place for trade union groups.

In the coming years, the influence of Hull House spread, inspiring the creation of hundreds of similar houses across the United States.

One immigrant from Poland, Hilda Satt Polacheck, who benefited from the programs and classes at Hull House as a child, later wrote in her memoirs:

“The American people still do not quite realize that it was Jane Addams who woke the conscience of America to the debt that it owed to the great masses of people who were pouring into America. It was Jane Addams who pointed out that these immigrants were making the clothing that Americans wore. They knitted the mittens and sweaters to keep American children warm. ..There was almost no phase of American life in which these immigrants did not serve.”

Jane Addams’ impact spread into many national and international arenas.  In 1907, she became a founding member of the National Child Labor Committee, which played a significant role in passage of a Federal Child Labor Law in 1916.  She fought for women’s rights, and was an officer in the National American Women’s Suffrage Association.  She was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
                   

She championed peace, and was active in the international peace movement in the early 20th century.  She spoke out publicly against America’s entry into the first world war. She organized the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which worked to end the war, and because of this she was attacked, and even expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution.  Many called her an enemy of the people.

But in the end she triumphed.  In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  She ended, perhaps, as the world’s best-known and best-loved woman.

In our own times, when the nation’s doors are being shut, and ties severed internationally; when we withdraw into our own smaller self, attempting to build walls against the tide of the world’s peoples, it’s good to remember the spirit of a woman who reached out to help those less fortunate and to welcome the world.

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