Jane Addams
Social Reformer and Nobel Laureate (1860–1935)
by Robert Ellsberg

Contradicting the expectations for women of her time, Jane Addams was a radical from her younger years on through her seventies:  An educated woman who turned her ideals into realities; a physically frail woman who overcame her precarious health throughout her life with unflagging work for countless humanitarian causes; a woman who spent more than 30 years in a loving and committed relationship with another woman, Mary Rozet Smith; a suffragist and ardent supporter of union workers during industrial disputes (resulting in people withdrawing their support for her work); and an enduring pacifist who was ostracized and cruelly criticized for her anti-military stance at the time of WWI.  We honor Jane Addams for her beliefs that social justice and peace are essential for the hope of humanity, and for her life of action true to her beliefs.
- Margaret Wakeley

Jane Addams was born in 1860 in the town of Cedarville, Illinois.  Although she came from a wealthy family, with no particular interest in social work, her study of the Bible implanted in her a desire to serve the poor.  Her personal mission took shape after a trip to England in 1888 when she visited Toynbee Hall, a “settlement house” in a poor slum of London.  Upon returning home she established a similar enterprise in Chicago – Hull House – which remained her home for the rest of her life.  Hull House became the model for a network of similar settlement houses in urban slums.  Aside from offering basic services – kindergarten, adult education, medical care, food, and shelter – the aim of Hull House was to promote community and self-respect among the immigrant poor.  It was a haven for those cast aside by the tide of industrial “progress.”

Although she was baptized in the Presbyterian Church, Addams remained aloof from organized religion.  Yet she saw her work in Hull House and in social reform as consonant with the great humanitarian spirit that animated the early Christian movement, and that now sought to embody itself “not in a sect but in society itself.”  While churches tended to promote “personal virtue,” the time had come, she believed, to promote the exercise of “social virtue” in the service of humanity.

Addams was a central figure in most of the progressive movements of her day.  She fought for child-labor laws, women’s rights, and housing reform, and against political corruption.  She was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  Her work among immigrants and the destitute won her praise and admiration.  One editorial described her as “a great professor without a university chair, a guiding woman in a man-made world, a brooding spirit of the mother hovering with gentle sympathy over the troubled sea of poverty, of weakness, of arrogance, of pride, of hate, of force.”

But her strong pacifist stand during World War I quickly turned the tide of public opinion against her.  Teddy Roosevelt, whom she had previously regarded as a friend, called her “the most dangerous woman in America”; she was denounced in editorials and headlines as a “Red” and a traitor.  It was one thing to help the poor; it was another thing to draw connections between the violence of poverty and the system of militarism.

After the war Addams helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, serving as its president for the rest of her life.  Though she so longer commanded the widespread admiration of her fellow citizens, her efforts continued to be recognized abroad.  In 1931 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

She died on May 21, 1935.

Sincere thanks to Robert Ellsberg
for permission to use this chapter from his book Blessed Among All Women:  Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time.

Additional Resources
See:   James Weber Linn, Jane Addams (New York:  D. Appleton-Century, 1935); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York:  Macmillan, 1934).