Jane Addams

For other people with a similar name, see Jane Adams.

Jane Addams
c. 1926
Born	(1860-09-06)September 6, 1860 Cedarville, Illinois, U.S.
Died	May 21, 1935(1935-05-21) (aged 74) Chicago, Illinois, U.S
Education	Rockford Female Seminary
Occupation	Social and political activist, author and lecturer, community organizer, public intellectual
Parent(s)	John H. Addams Sarah Weber (Addams)
Awards	Nobel Peace Prize (1931)
Signature

Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She co-founded, with Ellen Gates Starr, the first settlement house in the United States, Chicago's Hull House. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped America to address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy. In 1889 she co-founded Hull House, and in 1920 she was a co-founder for the ACLU. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.

Early life

Jane Addams as a young woman, undated studio portrait by Cox, Chicago

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 New England; her father was politically prominent. Three of her siblings died in infancy, and another died at age 16, leaving only four by the time Addams was age 8. Her mother, Sarah Addams (née Weber), died when Jane was two years old.

Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, and attending Sunday school. When she was four, she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, 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.

Addams adored her father when she was a child, as she made clear in the stories of her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). John Huy Addams was an agricultural businessman with large timber, cattle, and agricultural holdings; flour and timber mills; and a woolen factory. He was the president of The Second National Bank of Freeport. He remarried in 1868, when Jane was eight years old. His second wife was Anna Hostetter Haldeman, the widow of a miller in Freeport.

John Addams was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party, served as an Illinois State Senator (1855–70), and supported his friend Abraham Lincoln in his candidacies, for senator (1854) and the presidency (1860). John Addams kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk, and Jane Addams loved to look at it as a child.

In her teens, Addams had big dreams—to do something useful in the world. Long interested in the poor from her reading of Dickens and inspired by her mother's kindness to the Cedarville poor, she decided to become a doctor so that she could live and work among the poor. It was a vague idea, nurtured by literary fiction. She was a voracious reader.

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 (now Rockford University), in Rockford, Illinois. 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 (equivalent to $1.23 million today).

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 Philadelphia, 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. Stepmother Anna was also ill, so the entire family canceled their plans to stay two years and returned to Cedarville.

The following fall her brother-in-law/step brother 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 the 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.

Settlement house

Meanwhile, Jane 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 up 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.

Hull House

Main article: Hull House

Jane Addams, 1915

In 1889 Addams and her college friend and paramour Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago. The run-down mansion had been built by Charles Hull in 1856 and needed repairs and upgrading. Addams at first paid for all of the capital expenses (repairing the roof of the porch, repainting the rooms, buying furniture) and most of the operating costs. However gifts from individuals supported the House beginning in its first year and Addams was able to reduce the proportion of her contributions, although the annual budget grew rapidly. A number of wealthy women became important long-term donors to the House, including Helen Culver, who managed her first cousin Charles Hull's estate, and who eventually allowed the contributors to use the house rent-free. Other contributors were Louise DeKoven Bowen, Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, and others.

Addams and Starr were the first two occupants of the house, which would later become the residence of about 25 women. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by some 2,000 people. The Hull House was a center for research, empirical analysis, study, and debate, as well as a pragmatic center for living in and establishing good relations with the neighborhood. Residents of Hull-house conducted investigations on housing, midwifery, fatigue, tuberculosis, typhoid, garbage collection, cocaine, and truancy. Its facilities included a night school for adults, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group and a theater, apartments, a library, meeting rooms for discussion, clubs, an employment bureau, and a lunchroom. Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In addition to making available social services and cultural events for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, Hull House became a 13-building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp (known as Bowen Country Club).

One aspect of the Hull House that was very important to Jane Addams was the Art Program. The art program at Hull house allowed Addams to challenge the system of industrialized education, which "fitted" the individual to a specific job or position. She wanted the house to provide a space, time and tools to encourage people to think independently. She saw art as the key to unlocking the diversity of the city through collective interaction, mutual self-discovery, recreation and the imagination. Art was integral to her vision of community, disrupting fixed ideas and stimulating the diversity and interaction on which a healthy society depends, based on a continual rewriting of cultural identities through variation and interculturalism.

With funding from Edward Butler, Addams opened an art exhibition and studio space as one of the first additions to Hull House. On the first floor of the new addition there was a branch of the Chicago Public Library, and the second was the Butler Art Gallery, which featured recreations of famous artwork as well as the work of local artists. Studio space within the art gallery provided both Hull House residents and the entire community with the opportunity to take art classes or to come in and hone their craft whenever they liked. As Hull House grew, and the relationship with the neighborhood deepened, that opportunity became less of a comfort to the poor and more of an outlet of expression and exchange of different cultures and diverse communities. Art and culture was becoming a bigger and more important part of the lives of immigrants within the 19th ward, and soon children caught on to the trend. These working-class children were offered instruction in all forms and levels of art. Places such as the Butler Art Gallery or the Bowen Country Club often hosted these classes, but more informal lessons would often be taught outdoors. Addams, with the help of Ellen Gates Starr, founded the Chicago Public School Art Society (CPSAS) in response to the positive reaction the art classes for children caused. The CPSAS provided public schools with reproductions of world-renowned pieces of art, hired artists to teach children how to create art, and also took the students on field trips to Chicago's many art museums.

Neighborhood

The Hull House neighborhood was a mix of European ethnic groups that had immigrated to Chicago around the start of the 20th century. That mix was the ground where Hull House's inner social and philanthropic elitists tested their theories and challenged the establishment. The ethnic mix is recorded by the Bethlehem-Howard Neighborhood Center: "Germans and Jews resided south of that inner core (south of Twelfth Street) [...] The Greek delta formed by Harrison, Halsted, and Blue Island Streets served as a buffer to the Irish residing to the north and the Canadian–French to the northwest." Italians resided within the inner core of the Hull House Neighborhood [...] from the river on the east end, on out to the western ends of what came to be known as Little Italy. Greeks and Jews, along with the remnants of other immigrant groups, began their exodus from the neighborhood in the early 20th century. Only Italians continued as an intact and thriving community through the Great Depression, World War II, and well beyond the ultimate demise of Hull House proper in 1963.

Hull House became America's best known settlement house. Addams used it to generate system-directed change, on the principle that to keep families safe, community and societal conditions had to be improved. The neighborhood was controlled by local political bosses.

Ethics

Starr and Addams developed three "ethical principles" for social settlements: "to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy, that is, egalitarian, or democratic, social relations across class lines." Thus Hull House offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world, in including William Lyon Mackenzie King, a graduate student from Harvard University who later became prime minister of Canada. In the 1890s Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents of the house made it a world center of social reform activity. Hull House used the latest methodology (pioneering in statistical mapping) to study overcrowding, truancy, typhoid fever, cocaine, children's reading, newsboys, infant mortality, and midwifery. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city- and statewide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women. Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world, and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. In 1912, she helped start the new Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt.

"Addams' philosophy combined feminist sensibilities with an unwavering commitment to social improvement through cooperative efforts. Although she sympathized with feminists, socialists, and pacifists, Addams refused to be labeled. This refusal was pragmatic rather than ideological."

Emphasis on children

Hull House stressed that the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants, and fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth. Hull-House featured multiple programs in art and drama, kindergarten classes, boys' and girls' clubs, language classes, reading groups, college extension courses, along with public baths, a free-speech atmosphere, a gymnasium, a labor museum and playground. They were all designed to foster democratic cooperation and collective action and downplay individualism. She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws.

Along with her colleagues from Hull House, in 1901 Jane Addams founded what would become the Juvenile Protective Association. JPA provided the first probation officers for the first Juvenile Court in the United States until this became a government function. From 1907 until the 1940s, JPA engaged in many studies examining such subjects as racism, child labor and exploitation, drug abuse and prostitution in Chicago and their effects on child development. Through the years, their mission has now become to improve the social and emotional well-being and functioning of vulnerable children so they can reach their fullest potential at home, in school, and in their communities.

Documenting social illnesses

Addams and her colleagues documented the geography of typhoid fever and reported that poor workers bore the brunt of illness. She identified the political corruption and business avarice that caused the city bureaucracy to ignore health, sanitation, and building codes. Linking environmental justice and municipal reform, she eventually defeated the bosses and fostered a more equitable distribution of city services and modernized inspection practices. Addams spoke of the "undoubted powers of public recreation to bring together the classes of a community in the keeping them apart." Addams worked with the Chicago Board of Health and served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America.

Emphasis on prostitution

In 1912 Addams published "A New Conscience and Ancient Evil", about prostitution. This book was extremely popular because it was published in the traffic time of the white slave trade. Addams believed that prostitution was a result of kidnapping only.

Feminine ideals

Addams and her colleagues originally intended Hull House as a transmission device to bring the values of the college-educated high culture to the masses, including the Efficiency Movement. However, over time, the focus changed from bringing art and culture to the neighborhood (as evidenced in the construction of the Butler Building) to responding to the needs of the community by providing childcare, educational opportunities, and large meeting spaces. Hull-House became more than a proving ground for the new generation of college-educated, professional women: it also became part of the community in which it was founded, and its development reveals a shared history.

Addams called on women, especially middle class women with leisure and energy as well as rich philanthropists, to exercise their civic duty to become involved in municipal affairs as a matter of "civic housekeeping." Addams thereby enlarged the concept of civic duty to include roles for women beyond motherhood (which involved child rearing). Women's lives revolved around "responsibility, care, and obligation," and this area represented the source of women's power. This notion provided the foundation for the municipal or civil housekeeping role that Addams defined, and gave added weight to the women's suffrage movement that Addams supported. Addams argued that women, as opposed to men, were trained in the delicate matters of human welfare and needed to build upon their traditional roles of housekeeping to be civic housekeepers. Enlarged housekeeping duties involved reform efforts regarding poisonous sewage, impure milk (which often carried tuberculosis), smoke-laden air, and unsafe factory conditions. Addams led the "garbage wars"; in 1894 she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago's 19th Ward. With the help of the Hull-House Women's Club, within a year over 1000 health department violations were reported to city counsel and garbage collection reduced death and disease.

Addams had long discussions with philosopher John Dewey in which they redefined democracy in terms of pragmatism and civic activism, with an emphasis more on duty and less on rights. The two leading perspectives that distinguished Addams and her coalition from the modernizers more concerned with efficiency were the need to extend to social and economic life the democratic structures and practices that had been limited to the political sphere, as in Addams' programmatic support of trade unions; and second, their call for a new social ethic to supplant the individualist outlook as being no longer adequate in modern society.

Addams' construction of womanhood involved daughterhood, sexuality, wifehood, and motherhood. In both of her autobiographical volumes, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930), Addams's gender constructions parallel the Progressive-Era ideology she championed. In A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912) she dissected the social pathology of sex slavery, prostitution and other sexual behaviors among working class women in American industrial centers during 1890-1910. Addams's autobiographical persona manifests her ideology and supports her popularized public activist persona as the "Mother of Social Work," in the sense that she represents herself as a celibate matron, who served the suffering immigrant masses through Hull-House, as if they were her own children. Although not a mother herself, Addams became the "mother to the nation," identified with motherhood in the sense of protective care of her people.

Teaching

Addams kept up her heavy schedule of public lectures around the country, especially at college campuses. In addition, she offered college courses through the Extension Division of the University of Chicago. She declined offers from the university to become directly affiliated with it, including an offer from Albion Small, chair of the Department of Sociology, of a graduate faculty position. She declined in order to maintain her independent role outside of academia. Her goal was to teach adults not enrolled in formal academic institutions, because of their poverty and/or lack of credentials. Furthermore, she wanted no university controls over her political activism.

Addams was a charter member of the American Sociological Society, founded in 1905. She gave papers to it in 1912, 1915, and 1919. She was the most prominent woman member during her lifetime.

Relationships

Generally, Addams was close to a wide set of other women and was very good at eliciting their involvement from different classes in Hull House's programs. Nevertheless, throughout her life Addams did have significant romantic relationships with a few of these women, including Mary Rozet Smith and Ellen Starr. Her relationships offered her the time and energy to pursue her social work while being supported emotionally and romantically. From her exclusively romantic relationships with women, she would most likely be described as a lesbian in contemporary terms, similar to many leading figures in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom of the time.

Her first romantic partner was Ellen Starr, with whom she founded Hull House, and whom she met when both were students at Rockford Female Seminary. In 1889, both had visited Toynbee Hall together, and started their settlement house project, purchasing a house in Chicago.

Her second romantic partner was Mary Rozet Smith, who was financially wealthy and supported Addams's work at Hull House, and with whom she shared a house. Lilian Faderman, the notable historian, writes that she was in love and she addressed Mary as "My Ever Dear", "Darling" and "Dearest One", and conclusively establishes that they shared the intimacy of a married couple. Their couplehood did not end until 1934, when Mary died of pneumonia, after forty years together. It was said that, "Mary Smith became and always remained the highest and clearest note in the music that was Jane Addams' personal life". Together they owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine. When apart, they would write to each other at least once a day - sometimes twice. Addams would write to Smith, "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death". The letters also show that the women saw themselves as a married couple: "There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together", Addams wrote to Smith.

Religion and religious motives

According to Christie and Gauvreau (2001), while the Christian settlement houses sought to Christianize, Jane Addams "had come to epitomize the force of secular humanism." Her image was, however, "reinvented" by the Christian churches.

According to Joslin (2004), "The new humanism, as [Addams] interprets it comes from a secular, and not a religious, pattern of belief".

According to the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, "Some social settlements were linked to religious institutions. Others, like Hull-House [co-founded by Addams], were secular."

In fact, the co-founders of Toynbee Hall, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, shared Addams's desire to bring Christianity back to its roots. Part of what was called the "social Christian" movement, the Barnetts held a great interest in converting others to Christianity, but they believed that Christians should be more engaged with the world, and, in the words of one of the leaders of the movement in England, W.H. Fremantle, "imbue all human relations with the spirit of Christ's self-renouncing love." Addams learned about social Christianity from them, soon considered herself one, and soon made friends among the leaders of the "social Christian" movement in the United States.

Jane Addams's religious faith was thus a central motive in co-founding Hull House with Starr. She sought to convert others to Christianity in greater numbers. A brief experiment in weekly prayer among the residents of the settlement house, requested by some of them, was highly religious and retained many converts to Christianity, to the delight of Addams and the other founder's helpers. Other settlements in both Great Britain and the United States later followed a religious approach and sought conversions.

Addams's own religious beliefs were shaped by her wide reading and life experience. By the time she had graduated from Rockford Seminary, she knew the Bible (especially the New Testament) thoroughly, having studied it throughout her young life, including in college courses. She had also been required to memorize a verse from the Bible every day at Rockford, and listen to a short sermon on the daily verse by the school's principal. Evidence of this deep familiarity with Scripture can be found throughout her later writings.

While she remained a member of a Presbyterian church, Addams regularly attended a Unitarian Church and Ethical Society in Chicago. At one point, she was appointed "interim lecturer" at the Ethical Society. Addams also established a close relationship with members of the established Jewish community, notably with the rabbi of Chicago Sinai Congregation, Emil G. Hirsch, and several of Sinai's congregants, among them Judge Julian Mack and Julius Rosenwald.

Politics

Peace movement

Delegation to the Women's Suffrage Legislature Jane Addams (left) and Miss Elizabeth Burke of the University of Chicago, 1911

In 1898 Addams joined the Anti-Imperialist League, in opposition to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. A staunch supporter of the 'Progressive' Party, she nominated Theodore Roosevelt for the Presidency during the Party Convention, held in Chicago in August 1912. She signed up on the party platform, even though it called for building more battleships. She went on to speak and campaign extensively for Roosevelt's 1912 presidential campaign.

In January 1915 she became involved in the Woman's Peace Party and was elected national chairman. Addams was invited by European women peace activists to preside over the International Congress of Women in The Hague, 28–30 April 1915, and was chosen to head the commission to find an end to the war. This included meeting ten leaders in neutral countries as well as those at war to discuss mediation. This was the first significant international effort against the war. Addams, along with co-delegates Emily Balch and Alice Hamilton, documented their experiences of this venture, published as a book Women at The Hague (University of Illinois).

In her journal, Balch recorded her impression of Jane Addams (April 1915):

"Miss Addams shines, so respectful of everyone's views, so eager to understand and sympathize, so patient of anarchy and even ego, yet always there, strong, wise and in the lead. No 'managing', no keeping dark and bringing things subtly to pass, just a radiating wisdom and power of judgement."

Addams was elected president of the International Committee of Women for a Permanent Peace, established to continue the work of the Hague Congress; at a conference in 1919 in Zurich, Switzerland, the International Committee developed into the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Addams continued as president, a position that entailed frequent travel to Europe and Asia.

In 1917 she became also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA (American branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation founded in 1919) and was a member of the Fellowship Council until 1933. When the US joined the war, in 1917, Addams started to be strongly criticized. She faced increasingly harsh rebukes and criticism as a pacifist. Her 1915 speech on pacifism at Carnegie Hall received negative coverage by newspapers such as the New York Times, which branded her as unpatriotic. Later, during her travels, she spent time meeting with a wide variety of diplomats and civic leaders and reiterating her Victorian belief in women's special mission to preserve peace. Recognition of these efforts came with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Addams in 1931. As the first U.S. woman to win the prize, Addams was applauded for her "expression of an essentially American democracy." She donated her share of the prize money to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Pacifism

Addams was a major synthesizing figure in the domestic and international peace movements, serving as both a figurehead and leading theoretician; she was influenced especially by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and by the pragmatism of philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. She envisioned democracy, social justice and peace as mutually reinforcing; they all had to advance together to achieve any one. Addams became an anti-war activist from 1899, as part of the anti-imperialist movement that followed the Spanish–American War. Her book Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) reshaped the peace movement worldwide to include ideals of social justice. She recruited social justice reformers like Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Emily Greene Balch to join her in the new international women's peace movement after 1914. Addams's work came to fruition after World War I, when major institutional bodies began to link peace with social justice and probe the underlying causes of war and conflict.

Addams in 1914

Addams damned war as a cataclysm that undermined human kindness, solidarity, civic friendship, and caused families across the world to struggle. In turn her views were denounced by patriotic groups and newspapers during World War I (1917–18). Oswald Garrison Villard came to her defense when she suggested that armies gave liquor to soldiers just before major ground attacks. "Take the case of Jane Addams for one. With what abuse did not the [New York] Times cover her, one of the noblest of our women, because she told the simple truth that the Allied troops were often given liquor or drugs before charging across No Man's Land. Yet when the facts came out at the hands of Sir Philip Gibbs and others not one word of apology was ever forthcoming." Even after the war the WILPF's program of peace and disarmament was characterized by opponents as radical, Communist-influenced, unpatriotic, and unfeminine. Young veterans in the American Legion, supported by some members of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the League of Women Voters, were ill prepared to confront the older, better-educated, more financially secure and nationally famous women of the WILPF. Nevertheless, the DAR could and did expel Addams from membership in their organization. The Legion's efforts to portray the WILPF members as dangerously naive females resonated with working class audiences, but President Calvin Coolidge and the middle classes supported Addams and her WILPF efforts in the 1920s to prohibit poison gas and outlaw war. After 1920, however, she was widely regarded as the greatest woman of the Progressive Era. In 1931 the award of the Nobel Peace prize earned her near-unanimous acclaim.

Prohibition

While "no record is available of any speech she ever made on behalf of the eighteenth amendment", she nonetheless supported prohibition on the basis that alcohol "was of course a leading lure and a necessary element in houses of prostitution, both from a financial and a social standpoint." She repeated the claim that "professional houses of prostitution could not sustain themselves without the 'vehicle of alcohol.'"

Legacy

See also: History of social work

Hull House and the Peace Movement are widely recognized as the key tangible pillars of Addams' legacy. While her life focused on the development of individuals, her ideas continue to influence social, political and economic reform in the United States as well as internationally.

Willard Motley, a resident artist of Hull House, extracting from Addams' central theory on symbolic interactionism, used the neighborhood and its people to write his 1948 best seller, Knock on Any Door.

Addams is honored in the 'Famous Americans Series', postal Issues of 1940

Addams' role as reformer enabled her to petition the establishment at and alter the social and physical geography of her Chicago neighborhood. Although contemporary academic sociologists defined her engagement as "social work," Addams' efforts differed significantly from activities typically labeled as "social work" during that time period. Before Addams' powerful influence on the profession, social work was largely informed by a "friendly visitor" model in which typically wealthy women of high public stature visited impoverished individuals and, through systematic assessment and intervention, aimed to improve the lives of the poor. Addams rejected the friendly visitor model in favor of a model of social reform/social theory-building, thereby introducing the now-central tenets of social justice and reform to the field of social work.

Hull House enabled Addams to befriend and become a colleague to early members of the Chicago School of Sociology. Her influence, through her work in applied sociology, impacted their thoughts and their direction. In 1893, she co-authored the Hull-House Maps and Papers that came to define the interests and methodologies of the School. She worked with George H. Mead on social reform issues including promoting women's rights, ending child labor, and mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers' Strike.

Addams worked with labor as well as other reform groups toward goals including the first juvenile-court law, tenement-house regulation, an eight-hour working day for women, factory inspection, and workers' compensation. She advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and supported women's suffrage. She was a strong advocate of justice for immigrants and blacks, becoming a chartered member of the NAACP. Among the projects that the members of the Hull House opened were the Immigrants' Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the United States, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic.

A wall-mounted quote by Jane Addams in The American Adventure (Epcot) in the World Showcase pavilion of Walt Disney World's Epcot.

Addams' writings and speeches, on behalf of the formation of the League of Nations and as peace advocate, influenced the later shape of the United Nations.

Remembrances

On December 10, 2007, Illinois celebrated the first annual Jane Addams Day. Jane Addams Day was initiated by a dedicated school teacher from Dongola, Illinois, assisted by the Illinois Division of the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Chicago activist Jan Lisa Huttner traveled throughout Illinois as Director of International Relations for AAUW-Illinois to help publicize the date, and later gave annual presentations about Jane Addams Day in costume as Jane Addams. In 2010, Huttner appeared as Jane Addams at a 150th Birthday Party sponsored by Rockford University (Jane Addams' alma mater), and in 2011 she appeared as Jane Addams at an event sponsored by the Chicago Park District.

There is a Jane Addams Memorial Park located near Navy Pier in Chicago.

In 2007, the state of Illinois also renamed the Northwest Tollway as the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway.

In 2008 Jane Addams was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

In 2012 Jane Addams was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and people.

In 2014, Jane Addams was one of the first 20 honorees awarded a 3-foot x 3-foot bronze plaque on San Francisco's Rainbow Honor Walk (www.rainbowhonorwalk.org) paying tribute to LGBT heroes and heroines.

In 2015, Addams was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.

Outside Illinois, Jane Addams House is a residence hall built in 1969 at Connecticut College.

Hull House had to be demolished for the establishment of the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, in 1963, and relocated. The Hull residence itself was preserved as a museum and monument to Jane Addams.

The Jane Addams College of Social Work is a professional school at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Jane Addams Business Careers Center is a high school in Cleveland, Ohio.

Jane Addams High School For Academic Careers is a high school in The Bronx, NY.

See also

• Jane Addams Burial Site
• Jane Addams School for Democracy
• Jane Addams Middle School
• Jane Addams Children's Book Award
• John H. Addams Homestead
• List of American philosophers
• List of female Nobel laureates
• List of peace activists
• List of suffragists and suffragettes
• List of women's rights activists
• John Dewey
• Florence Kelley
• Flora Dunlap
• Mary Treglia
• Elizabeth Harrison (educator)
• Community practice social work
• Stanton Street Settlement
• Progressive Party (United States, 1912)
• American philosophy
• International Fellowship of Reconciliation
• Addams (crater)
• American Commission for Peace in Ireland Interim Report

Further reading

Archival resources

• Jane Addams Collection, 1838-date (bulk 1880-1935) (130 linear feet (40 linear metres)) is housed at Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
• Jane Addams Papers, 1904-1960 (bulk 1904-1936) (1.5 linear feet (0.46 linear metres)) is housed at Smith College Sophia Smith Collection.
• Jane Addams Correspondence, 1872-1935 (inclusive) (23 reels) is housed at Harvard University Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study.

Biographies

• Berson, Robin Kadison. Jane Addams: a biography (2004), 140pp.
• Brown, Victoria Bissell. The Education of Jane Addams: Politics and Culture in Modern America. (2003). 421 pp. excerpt and text search
• Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (1973), 339pp, solid scholarship but tends toward debunking
• Diliberto, Gioia. A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams. (1999). 318 pp.
• Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life Basic Books: 2002 online edition, by a leading conservative scholar
• Haldeman-Julius, Marcet. Jane Addams As I Knew Her. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications, ca. 1936. Marcet was Addams's niece.
• Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. (2005). 582 pp.; biography to 1899 online edition
• Knight, Louise W. Jane Addams: Spirit in Action. (2010). 334 pp., complete biography aimed at a broader audience.
• Joslin, Katherine. Jane Addams: A Writer's Life. (2004). 306 pp.
• Linn, James W. Jane Addams: A biography. (1935) 457 pp, by her admiring nephew

Specialty studies

• "How Did Changes in the Built Environment at Hull-House Reflect the Settlement's Interaction with Its Neighbors, 1889–1912?" by Kathryn Kish Sklar, Rima Lunin Schultz, Melissa Doak, Marian Horan, and Kerry Lippincott. Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
• Alonso, Harriet Hyman. "Nobel Peace Laureates, Jane Addams And Emily Greene Balch: Two Women Of The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom." Journal Of Women's History 1995 7(2): 6–26.
• Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Tamara. "Becoming Jane Addams: Feminist Developmental Theory and' The College Woman'" Girlhood Studies (2014) 7#2 pp: 61-78.
• Beer, Janet and Joslin, Katherine. "Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" and "Selected Short Stories" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Journal of American Studies 1999 33(1): 1–18. ISSN 0021-8758
• Bowen, Louise de Koven. Growing up with Pity. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926.
• Brinkmann, Tobias. Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago (2012), on Addams relationship with Chicago Jews.
• Bryan, Mary Linn McCree, and Allen F. Davis. One Hundred Years at Hull-House (1990), a history of the programs there
• Craraft, James. Two Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy, and the Quest for Global Peace (Lanham: Lexington, 2012).179 pp.
• Carson, Minal. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930 (1990)
• Chansky, Dorothy. "Re-visioning Reform," American Quarterly vol 55 #3 (2003) 515–523 online at Project Muse
• Curti, Merle. "Jane Addams on Human Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 22, No. 2 (Apr., 1961), pp. 240–253 in JSTOR
• Danielson, Caroline Page. "Citizen Acts: Citizenship and Political Agency in the Works of Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Emma Goldman." PhD dissertation U. of Michigan 1996. 331 pp. DAI 1996 57(6): 2651-A. DA9635502 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Dawley, Alan. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003)
• Deegan, Mary Jo. "Jane Addams, the Hull-House School of Sociology, and Social Justice, 1892 to 1935." Humanity & Society (2013) 37#3 pp: 248-258.
• Deegan, Mary. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918. (Transaction, Inc., 1988)
• Donovan, Brian. White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887-1917. (U of Illinois Press. 2006). 186 pp.
• Duffy, William. "Remembering is the Remedy: Jane Addams's Response to Conflicted Discourse." Rhetoric Review (2011) 30#2 pp: 135–152.
• Fischer, Marilyn, et al. eds. Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy (2009), 230pp; 11 specialized essays by scholars excerpt and text search
• Foust, Mathew A. "Perplexities of Filiality: Confucius and Jane Addams on the Private/Public Distinction," "Asian Philosophy" (2008) 18(2): 149-166.
• Grimm, Robert Thornton, Jr. "Forerunners for a Domestic Revolution: Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the Ideology Of Childhood, 1900-1916." Illinois Historical Journal 1997 90(1): 47–64. ISSN 0748-8149
• Gustafson, Melanie. Women and the Republican Party, 1854-1924 (University of Illinois Press, 2001).
• Hamington, Maurice. "Jane Addams," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007) online edition, Addams as philosopher
• Hamington, Maurice. Embodied Care Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics (2004) excerpt and online search at amazon.com
• Hamington, Maurice. "Jane Addams and a Politics of Embodied Care," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy v 15 #2 2001, pp. 105–121 online at Project Muse
• Hamington, Maurice. "Public Pragmatism: Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells on Lynching," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy v. 19#2 (2005), pp. 167–174 online at Project Muse
• Hansen, Jonathan M. "Fighting Words: The Transnational Patriotism of Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and W. E. B. Du Bois." PhD dissertation Boston U. 1997. 286 pp. DAI 1997 57(10): 4511-A. DA9710148 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Henderson, Karla A. "Jane Addams: Leisure Services Pioneer". Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, (1982) 53#2 pp. 42–45
• Imai, Konomi, and 今井小の実. "The Women's Movement and the Settlement Movement in Early Twentieth-Century Japan: The Impact of Hull House and Jane Addams on Hiratsuka Raichō." Kwansei Gakuin University humanities review 17 (2013): 85-109. online
• Jackson, Shannon. Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (2000). 384 pp.
• Joslin, Katherine. Jane Addams: A writer's Life (2009) excerpt and text search
• Krysiak, Barbara H. "Full-Service Community Schools: Jane Addams Meets John Dewey.". School Business Affairs, v67 n8 pp. 4–8 Aug 2001. ISSN 0036-651X
• Knight, Louise W. "An Authoritative Voice: Jane Addams and the Oratorical Tradition." Gender & History 1998 10(2): 217–251. ISSN 0953-5233 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Knight, Louise W. "Biography's Window on Social Change: Benevolence and Justice in Jane Addams's 'A Modern Lear.'" Journal Of Women's History 1997 9(1): 111–138. ISSN 1042-7961 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Lissak, R. S. Pluralism and Progressives: Hull-House and the New Immigrants. (1989)
• Matassarin, Kat. "Jane Addams of Hull-House: Creative Drama at the Turn of the Century". Children's Theatre Review, Oct 1983. v32 n4 pp 13–15
• Morton, Keith. "Addams, Day, and Dewey: The Emergence of Community Service in American Culture". Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Fall 1997 v4 pp 137–49 * Oakes, Jeannie. Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Civic Virtue in Education Reform. (2000). ISBN 0-7879-4023-2
• Ostman, Heather Elaine. "Social Activist Visions: Constructions of Womanhood in the Autobiographies of Jane Addams and Emma Goldman." PhD dissertation Fordham U. 2004. 240 pp. DAI 2004 65(3): 934-A. DA3125022 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Packard, Sandra. "Jane Addams: Contributions and Solutions for Art Education". Art Education, 29, 1, 9–12, Jan 76.
• Phillips, J. O. C. "The Education of Jane Addams". History of Education Quarterly, 14, 1, 49–68, Spr 74.
• Philpott, Thomas. L. The Slum and the Ghetto: Immigrants, Blacks, and Reformers in Chicago, 1880–1930. (1991).
• Platt, Harold. "Jane Addams and the Ward Boss Revisited: Class, Politics, and Public Health in Chicago, 1890–1930." Environmental History 2000 5(2): 194–222. ISSN 1084-5453
• Polacheck, Hilda Satt. I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl. Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
• Sargent, David Kevin. "Jane Addams's Rhetorical Ethic." PhD dissertation Northwestern U. 1996. 275 pp. DAI 1997 57(11): 4597-A. DA9714673 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Scherman, Rosemarie Redlich. "Jane Addams and the Chicago Social Justice Movement, 1889-1912." PhD dissertation City U. of New York 1999. 337 pp. DAI 1999 60(4): 1297-A. DA9924849 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Schott, Linda. "Jane Addams and William James on Alternatives to War." Journal Of The History Of Ideas 1993 54(2): 241–254. in JSTOR
• Seigfried, Charlene H. "A Pragmatist Response to Death: Jane Addams on the Permanent and the Transient" "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" (2007) 21(2): 133-141.
• Shields, Patricia M. 2006. "Democracy and the Social Feminist Ethics of Jane Addams: A Vision for Public Administration". Administrative Theory & Praxis, vol. 28, no. 3, September, pp. 418–443. https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/3959
• Shields, Patricia M. 2011. Jane Addams' Theory of Democracy and Social Ethics: Incorporating a Feminist Perspective. In Women in Public Administration: Theory and Practice. Edited by Maria D'Agostiono and Helisse Levine, Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlet.
• Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers," Signs, Vol. 10, No. 4, (Summer, 1985), pp. 658–677 in JSTOR
• Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "'Some of us who deal with the Social Fabric': Jane Addams Blends Peace and Social Justice, 1907-1919." Journal Of The Gilded Age And Progressive Era 2003 2(1): 80–96. ISSN 1537-7814 Fulltext: at History Cooperative
• Stebner, E. J. The Women of Hull-House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship. (1997).
• Stiehm, Judith Hicks. Champions for Peace: Women Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
• Sullivan, M. "Social work's legacy of peace: echoes from the early 20th century." Social Work, Sep93; 38(5): 513–20. EBSCO
• Toft, Jessica and Abrams, Laura S. "Progressive Maternalists and the Citizenship Status of Low-Income Single Mothers." Social Service Review 2004 78(3): 447-465. ISSN 0037-7961 Fulltext: Ebsco

Primary sources

• Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, Barbara Bair, and Maree De Angury. eds., The Selected Papers of Jane Addams Volume 1: Preparing to Lead, 1860-1881. University of Illinois Press, 2002. online excerpt and text search
• Addams, Jane. "A Belated Industry" The American Journal of Sociology Vol. 1, No. 5 (Mar., 1896), pp. 536–550 in JSTOR
• Addams, Jane. The subjective value of a social settlement (1892) online
• Addams, Jane, ed. Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions (1896; reprint 2007) excerpts and online search from amazon.com full text
• Kelley, Florence. "Hull House" The New England magazine. Volume 24, Issue 5. (July 1898) pp. 550–566 online at MOA
• Addams, Jane. "Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption," International Journal of Ethics Vol. 8, No. 3 (Apr., 1898), pp. 273–291 in JSTOR
• Addams, Jane. "Trades Unions and Public Duty," The American Journal of Sociology Vol. 4, No. 4 (Jan., 1899), pp. 448–462 in JSTOR
• Addams, Jane. "The Subtle Problems of Charity," The Atlantic monthly. Volume 83, Issue 496 (February 1899) pp. 163–179 online at MOA
• Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) online at Internet Archive online at Harvard Library
  • 23 editions published between 1902 and 2006 in English and held by 1,570 libraries worldwide
• Addams, Jane. Child labor 1905 Harvard Library online
• Addams, Jane. "Problems of Municipal Administration," The American Journal of Sociology Vol. 10, No. 4 (Jan., 1905), pp. 425–444 JSTOR
• Addams, Jane. "Child Labor Legislation - A Requisite for Industrial Efficiency," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 25, Child Labor (May, 1905), pp. 128–136 in JSTOR
• Addams, Jane. The operation of the Illinois child labor law, (1906) online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. Newer Ideals of Peace (1906) online at Internet Archive
  • 13 editions published between 1906 and 2007 in English and held by 686 libraries worldwide
• Addams, Jane. National protection for children 1907 online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) online at books.google.com, online at Harvard Library
  • 16 editions published between 1909 and 1972 in English and held by 1,094 libraries worldwide
• Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes, 1910 online at A Celebration of Women Writers online at Harvard Library
  • 72 editions published between 1910 and 2007 in English and held by 3,250 libraries worldwide
• Addams, Jane. A new conscience and an ancient evil (1912) online at Harvard Library
  • 14 editions published between 1912 and 2003 in English and held by 912 libraries worldwide
• Addams, Jane; Balch, Emily Greene; and Hamilton, Alice. Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results. (1915) reprint ed by Harriet Hyman Alonso, (2003). 91 pp. online at Harvard Library
• Addams, Jane. The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916) online at Internet Archive online at Harvard Library, also reprint U. of Illinois Press, 2002. 84 pp.
• Addams, Jane. Peace and Bread in Time of War 1922 online edition, online at Harvard Library
  • 12 editions published between 1922 and 2002 in English and held by 835 libraries worldwide
• Addams, Jane. My Friend, Julia Lathrop. (1935; reprint U. of Illinois Press, 2004) 166 pp.
• Addams, Jane. Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (1960) online edition
• Elshtain, Jean B. ed. The Jane Addams Reader (2002), 488pp
• Lasch, Christopher, ed. The Social Thought of Jane Addams. (1965).

External links

Library resources about Jane Addams
Online books Resources in your library Resources in other libraries
By Jane Addams
Online books Resources in your library Resources in other libraries

• Jane Addams at the Internet Movie Database
• Jane Addams on the history of social work timeline
• Harvard University Library Open Collections Program. Women Working, 1870–1930. Jane Addams (1860–1935). A full-text searchable online database with complete access to publications written by Jane Addams.
• FBI file on Jane Addams
• "Jane Addams". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 
• Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
• The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Rev. Andrew Mearns
• Online photograph exhibit of Jane Addams from Swarthmore College's Peace Collection
• Taylor Street Archives; Hull House: Bowen Country Club
• Hamington, Maurice. "Jane Addams". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Looks at her as "the first woman 'public philosopher' in United States history".
• Women at the Hague: the International Congress of Women and its Results By Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, Alice Hamilton. 171 pages, published 1915 by MacMillan.
• International Fellowship of Reconciliation
• Jane Addams at Find A Grave
• Twenty Years at Hull House University of Virginia American Studies Hypertext project.
• Short historical film showing Jane Addams in Berlin in 1915, on her peace mission with Aletta Jacobs and Alice Hamilton.
• Jane Addams Papers Finding Aid, Sophia Smith Collection
• American Commission for Peace in Ireland Interim Report
• Works by Jane Addams at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Jane Addams at Internet Archive
• Works by Jane Addams at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Jane Addams National Women’s Hall of Fame