Jane Addams
Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was a leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage. In 1889, Addams co-founded Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, in Chicago, Illinois, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. Philosophically a "radical pragmatist", she was arguably the first woman public philosopher in the United States. In the Progressive Era, when even presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and might be seen as social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers.
An advocate for world peace, and recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States, in 1931 Addams became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; she shared the win with Nicholas Murray Butler. Earlier, Addams was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University in 1910, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Addams helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, as well as the domestic work assigned to women, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. In her essay "Utilization of Women in City Government", Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women's roles in the private sphere. When she died in 1935, Addams was the best-known female public figure in the United States.
Early life
Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the youngest of eight children born into a prosperous northern Illinois family of English-American descent which traced back to colonial Pennsylvania. In 1863, when Addams was two years old, her mother, Sarah Addams, died while pregnant with her ninth child. Thereafter Addams was cared for mostly by her older sisters. By the time Addams was eight, four of her siblings had died: three in infancy and one at the age of 16.Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, and attending Sunday school. When she was four she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, known as Potts's disease, which caused a curvature in her spine and lifelong health problems. This made it complicated as a child to function with the other children, considering she had a limp and could not run as well. As a child, she thought she was ugly and later remembered wanting not to embarrass her father, when he was dressed in his Sunday best, by walking down the street with him.
Jane Addams adored her father, John H. Addams, when she was a child, as she made clear in the stories in her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House. He was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party, served as an Illinois State Senator, and supported his friend Abraham Lincoln in his candidacies for senator and the presidency. He kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk, and Addams loved to look at it as a child. Her father was an agricultural businessman with large timber, cattle, and agricultural holdings; flour and timber mills and a wool factory. He was the president of The Second National Bank of Freeport, Illinois. He remarried in 1868 when Addams was eight years old. His second wife was Anna Hosteler Haldeman, the widow of a miller in Freeport.
During her childhood, Addams had big dreams of doing something useful in the world. As a voracious reader, she became interested in the poor from her reading of Charles Dickens. Inspired by his works and by her own mother's kindness to the Cedarville poor, Addams decided to become a doctor so that she could live and work among the poor.
Addams's father encouraged her to pursue higher education but close to home. She was eager to attend the new college for women, Smith College in Massachusetts, but her father required her to attend nearby Rockford Female Seminary, in Rockford, Illinois.
Her experience at Rockford put her in the first wave of U.S. women to receive a college education. She excelled in this all-women environment. She edited the college newspaper, was the valedictorian, participated in the debate club and led the class of 1881. Addams recognized that she and others who were engaged in post-secondary education would have new opportunities and challenges. She expressed this in Bread Givers, a speech she gave during her junior year. She noted the "change which has taken place... in the ambition and aspirations of women." In the process of developing their intellect and direct labor, something new was emerging. Educated women of her generation wished "not to be a man nor like a man" but claimed "the same right to independent thought and action." Each young woman was gaining "a new confidence in her possibilities, and a fresher hope in her steady progress." At 20, Addams recognized a changing cultural environment and was learning the skills at Rockford to lead the future settlement movement.
Whilst at Rockford, her readings of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy and others became significant influences. After graduating from Rockford in 1881, with a collegiate certificate and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, she still hoped to attend Smith to earn a proper B.A. That summer, her father died unexpectedly from a sudden case of appendicitis. Each child inherited roughly $50,000.
That fall, Addams, her sister Alice, Alice's husband Harry, and their stepmother, Anna Haldeman Addams, moved to Philadelphia so that the three young people could pursue medical educations. Harry was already trained in medicine and did further studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Jane and Alice completed their first year of medical school at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, but Jane's health problems, a spinal operation and a nervous breakdown prevented her from completing the degree. She was filled with sadness at her failure. Her stepmother Anna was also ill, so the entire family canceled their plans to stay two years and returned to Cedarville. her brother-in-law Harry performed surgery on her back, to straighten it. He then advised that she not pursue studies but, instead, travel. In August 1883, she set off for a two-year tour of Europe with her stepmother, traveling some of the time with friends and family who joined them. Addams decided that she did not have to become a doctor to be able to help the poor.
Upon her return home in June 1887, she lived with her stepmother in Cedarville and spent winters with her in Baltimore. Addams, still filled with vague ambition, sank into depression, unsure of her future and feeling useless leading the conventional life expected of a well-to-do young woman. She wrote long letters to her friend from Rockford Seminary, Ellen Gates Starr, mostly about Christianity and books but sometimes about her despair.
Her nephew was James Weber Linn who taught English at the University of Chicago and served in the Illinois General Assembly. Linn also wrote books and newspaper articles.
Settlement house
Meanwhile, Addams gathered inspiration from what she read. Fascinated by the early Christians and Tolstoy's book My Religion, she was baptized a Christian in the Cedarville Presbyterian Church in the summer of 1886. Reading Giuseppe Mazzini's Duties of Man, she began to be inspired by the idea of democracy as a social ideal. Yet she felt confused about her role as a woman. John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women made her question the social pressures on a woman to marry and devote her life to family.In the summer of 1887, Addams read in a magazine about the new idea of starting a settlement house. She decided to visit the world's first, Toynbee Hall, in London. She and several friends, including Ellen Gates Starr, traveled in Europe from December 1887 through the summer of 1888. After watching a bullfight in Madrid, fascinated by what she saw as an exotic tradition, Addams condemned this fascination and her inability to feel outraged at the suffering of the horses and bulls. At first, Addams told no one about her dream to start a settlement house, but, she felt increasingly guilty for not acting on her dream. Believing that sharing her dream might help her to act on it, she told Ellen Gates Starr. Starr loved the idea and agreed to join Addams in starting a settlement house.
Addams and another friend traveled to London without Starr, who was busy. Visiting Toynbee Hall, Addams was enchanted. She described it as "a community of University men who live there, have their recreation clubs and society all among the poor people, yet, in the same style in which they would live in their own circle. It is so free of 'professional doing good,' so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries seems perfectly ideal." Addams's dream of the classes mingling socially to mutual benefit, as they had in early Christian circles seemed embodied in the new type of institution.
The settlement house as Addams discovered was a space within which unexpected cultural connections could be made and where the narrow boundaries of culture, class, and education could be expanded. They doubled as community arts centers and social service facilities. They laid the foundations for American civil society, a neutral space within which different communities and ideologies could learn from each other and seek common grounds for collective action. The role of the settlement house was an "unending effort to make culture and 'the issue of things' go together." The unending effort was the story of her own life, a struggle to reinvigorate her own culture by reconnecting with diversity and conflict of the immigrant communities in America's cities and with the necessities of social reform.