Eight Years of Looking for the Work
Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, the daughter of a mill owner and state senator who corresponded with Abraham Lincoln. A spinal condition treated in childhood left her in pain and shaped an early sense of frailty. She graduated at the top of her class at Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, intending to study medicine, and then collapsed into nearly a decade of illness, travel and drift, blocked by what she later called the family claim on an unmarried daughter's time.
The release came in 1888, when she and her college friend Ellen Gates Starr visited Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, a settlement where university men lived among the poor rather than visiting them. The model answered a problem Addams had been unable to name: educated women had been trained for work that society then refused to let them do. The following year the two rented a decaying mansion built by Charles Hull in a crowded immigrant ward on the west side of Chicago.
What Hull-House Actually Did
Hull-House began with a kindergarten and evening classes and grew into thirteen buildings containing a gymnasium, a theatre, a public bath, a coffee house, a labour museum and a residence for the workers who ran it. The residents were remarkable in their own right: Florence Kelley, who led the fight against sweated labour; Julia Lathrop, later the first head of the federal Children's Bureau; the physician Alice Hamilton, who founded industrial toxicology; and the social scientists Edith and Grace Abbott.
They insisted on evidence. Hull-House Maps and Papers, published in 1895, plotted wages and nationalities street by street and became a model for American urban sociology. The house pushed through the first Illinois factory inspection law, campaigned for compulsory schooling and against child labour, and helped establish the world's first juvenile court in 1899. Frustrated by uncollected refuse, Addams had herself appointed the ward's garbage inspector and followed the carts at dawn. The inspector's post was salaried, genuine and deeply unpopular with the contractors it inconvenienced.
The Unpopular Position
She became one of the most admired women in the country, seconded Theodore Roosevelt's nomination at the Progressive convention of 1912, and was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her record on race was nonetheless mixed: Hull-House served European immigrants far more readily than the Black families arriving from the South, and later scholars have noted a paternalism in the settlement's confidence that it knew what its neighbours needed. Black contemporaries noticed the contradiction at the time, and several said so plainly.
In 1915 she chaired the Woman's Peace Party and presided over an international congress of women at The Hague, work that became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. When the United States entered the war her opposition made her a national target. She was denounced as unpatriotic, expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution and watched by federal agents. In 1931 she became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and gave her share of the money away.
