Addams, (Laura) Jane b. September 6, I860; Cedarville, Illinois d. May 21, 1935; Chicago, Illinois
One of the founders of Chicago’s HullHouse settlement and an internationally known peace activist, Jane Addams was one of the best-known reformers of the Progressive Era and one of the most widely admired women of her day.
Adams graduated from Rockford [Illinois] Female Seminary in 1881. As part of the first generation of college-educated women in the United States, Addams struggled for a way to put her talents to use. Uninterested in careers traditionally open to women, such as teaching, Addams sought a way to better the world. In 1889, she joined with Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull-House in a rundown mansion built decades earlier by Charles Hull. Located in the largely immigrant Nineteenth Ward, it served as the initial settlement house in Chicago and the model for many others. Designed initially to allow wealthy women to uplift the poor by sharing their knowledge of literature and art, Hull-House quickly shifted into a provider of social services and an employer of women eager to find some socially worthwhile use for their brains. Just as importantly, it served as a means of preserving the culture of the Old World. Hull-House offered visiting nurses, legal services, a nursery and kindergarten for the children of working mothers, a theater, a music school, multiple reading groups, a museum of immigrant crafts, a butcher shop, a coffee shop, and a bakery. German immigrants, often better educated than other newcomers to the United States, came to Hull-House to pursue courses in German history and literature. They used the settlement to introduce German arts, especially music, to their American-born offspring. At a time when the sons and daughters of immigrants dismissed all of the Old World and wholeheartedly embraced Americanization, Hull-House promoted respect for German heritage. Hull-House would remain as Addams’s home until her death, and its accomplishments made her into a national figure.
During the 1890s and 1900s, she lobbied city, state, and national authorities for an eight-hour day, employment regulations for women and children, unemployment insurance, improved sanitation, factory legislation, municipal playgrounds, public kindergartens, a juvenile court system, and the enforcement of antiprostitution and antidrug laws. Addams served on the Chicago School Board and as a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
One of the first public intellectuals, Ad- dams wrote and spoke prolifically. Peace activism and suffrage were among her favorite topics, all of which centered on the obligation of citizens to redefine government to be more responsive to the needs of the people. Although she occasionally published in scholarly journals, most of her work went into mass-circulation magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and McClure’s. Addams wrote six books during her lifetime, including the best-selling autobiographicy Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910).
A self-possessed woman, Addams did not fear to take the side of unpopular causes. Advocacy of a role for women in public life had cost her the goodwill of many conservatives, and in 1901, she spoke out for the civil rights of anarchists arrested by the police in the wake of President William McKinley’s assassination. But she did not expect to be vilified for her pacifist beliefs during World War I. When Addams broke with most Progressives by opposing U.S. entry into the war, she experienced ostracism for the first time. She
Jane Addams of Hull-House, Chicago, Illinois, ca. 1913. (Library of Congress)
had once believed that immigration, commerce, the telephone, and the telegraph would establish a truly international culture that would make violence between western European states and the United States virtually unthinkable, but the war crushed these hopes.
Addams viewed World War I as a twofold threat because it halted progress toward civilized methods of conflict resolution while diverting resources away from community projects and toward military spending. As a founder of the Woman’s Peace Party, the chair of the Emergency Federation of Peace Forces, and the symbol of feminine conscience in the United States, Addams sought to stop the fighting. Politicians and the public attacked her activities as treasonous and foolish. Undeterred, Addams helped create the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom immediately after the war in 1919.
Addams did her best to fight the cruelty and self-righteousness shown by the United States in dealing with Germans during and after World War I. The American Protective League, a vigilante organization with quasi-official status from the U.S. government, singled out the city of Chicago as a hotbed of pro-German sympathizers and placed Hull-House under a cloud of suspicion of disloyalty for its work with German Americans. Addams did not attack her attackers. Instead, she responded to verbal assaults by bemoaning the general acceptance of standardization and advocating an America that permitted voluntary assimilation at the immigrant’s pace. As a member of the International Congress of Women, Addams issued a call in 1915 for the lifting of the wartime blockade of Germany so that food could get to noncombatants. During a 1919 fact-finding mission to Germany, she documented widespread starvation among children as a result of the blockade.
By the late 1920s, Addams had regained most of her reputation and her place as one of the greatest Americans. The culmination of this restoration came when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Caryn E. Neumann
See also Anarchists; Chicago; International Council of Women
References and Further Reading
Davis, Allen F American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
------. The Jane Addams Reader. New York: Basic Books, 2002.