Jane Addams

Jane Addams
Born	(1860-09-06)September 6, 1860 Cedarville, Illinois
Died	May 21, 1935(1935-05-21) (aged 74) Chicago, Illinois
Occupation	Activist
Parent(s)	John H. Addams and Sarah Weber

Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House movement, and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Biography

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the eighth of nine children born into a prosperous miller family. Her mother was Sarah Addams (née Weber) and her father was a banker and state senator John H. Addams. She was a first cousin twice removed to Charles Addams, noted macabre cartoonist for The New Yorker. She was born with a congenital spinal defect and although this was later corrected by surgery, she was never truly robust.

Addams' father taught her philanthropy and care for people. He encouraged her to pursue a higher education, but not at the expense of losing her femininity and the prospect of marriage and motherhood, as expected of upper class young women. She was educated in the United States and Europe, graduating from the Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in Rockford, Illinois. After Rockford, she wanted to pursue a degree in medicine, but her parents felt that she was sufficiently educated and feared for her marriage prospects.

While in London, Addams was influenced by Andrew Mearn's essay, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which highlighted slum conditions. She visited Europe when she was 27 years old, visiting Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in the East End of London.

Hull House

In 1889 she and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around two thousand people. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. She is probably most remembered for her adult night school, a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many community colleges today.

Hull House also served as a women's sociological institution. Addams was a friend and colleague to the early members of the Chicago School of Sociology, influencing their thought through her work in applied sociology and, in 1893, co-authoring 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 the mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers' Strike. Although academic sociologists of the time defined her work as "social work", Addams did not consider herself a social worker. She combined the central concepts of symbolic interactionism with the theories of cultural feminism and pragmatism to form her sociological ideas (Deegan, 1988).

Hull House's first resident: Jane describes the Hull Houses "first resident" as an older lady who read to listeners from Hawthorne. She reported that she wanted to live in a place where "idealism ran high" (1910, 101). Volunteers seemed plentiful. Ellen read George Eliot's "Romola" to listeners and Jenny Dow, another volunteer, started a kindergarten (1910).

Hull House also offered an employment bureau, an art gallery, libraries, and music and art classes. 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. The Wikipedia article on Progressivism states that “Progressivism historically advocates the advancement of workers rights and social justice.” However in this article on Progressivism the only mention of women is in regards to Women’s suffrage, which was accomplished with the inclusion of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Beyond this mention the reader would believe that men and women in America experienced the same treatment in the economic, political and social arenas during the late Nineteenth Century and the early Twentieth Century. However, this is quite a misconception for both White women and Black women who faced hurdles in all areas of life that must not be ignored or minimized. Women endured hardships and struggled to be heard throughout the Progressive era in America. It is also unfair to generalize or assume that all women had the same experiences. White working class women inhabited a landscape quite different from that of women from the middle and upper classes. Also, Black women and immigrant women encountered obstacles that were unique to their situation. Wikipedia, rather than glossing over the plight of women during the Progressive era should peruse the historical documents and works that pertain to women and attempt to comprehend the various economic, racial and social disparities that affected the experience of women during the Progressive era. The Wikipedia writers should read My Antonia by Willa Cather to fully grasp the point of view of poor immigrant women who find themselves in a strange new country with language barriers to boot. The hardships and bigotry that these women overcame must be read to be believed. Also, Unbound Feet by Yung depicted the harrowing experiences of Chinese women who arrive in America basically as slaves. As late as 1880 twenty one to fifty percent of Chinese women worked as prostitutes in America. This was quite an auspicious introduction to America for these unfortunate women. Other women and girls worked as domestic servants. How did the Progressive era affect these women? Gender and Jim Crow by Gilmore delved into the lives of Black women in North Carolina after the Civil War and into the Progressive era. If any of the Wikipedia writers read this book they would be horrified at the lack of freedom for Blacks even after the Civil War. A new rabid type of racism in the South embraced lynchings and other types of sordid punishments. The white Best Man were determined to maintain order and proper decorum by subjugating the Blacks to their genetically inferior levels of humanity. Imagine the hurdles that Black Women living in North Caroline must have endured. The White suffragists while pushing for the right for women to vote were forced to compromise with the racial governments in order to gain some type of victory. The experience of Black Women during Progressive era was harrowing and unique. Even before the push for women’s suffrage were the working issues surrounding women. In Out to Work by Kessler Harris, she examines the struggle that working class women endured to acquire higher pay and better jobs. For decades women performed the most menial jobs and were seen as competition for the men. Women had some success in joining unions but more often than not advancement was limited. The social dictate that a woman belonged in the home was a very powerful weapon against women in the workplace. Also, Dubois’ work, “Working women Class Relations and Suffrage militance:” explored the conflicts among the various social and economic classes of women in their drive for suffrage. Class struggle emerged and much compromise was required to present a unified front in the struggle for suffrage. These various classes of women all experienced the Progressive era from various vantage points in the struggle for not just suffrage, but for fair pay, improved working conditions, better jobs and the like. Wikipedia once again is not even scratching the surface by merely mentioning women’s suffrage. The struggles and contributions of women from all classes must be understood, recognized and applauded.

Peace Movement

Addams helped organize the Women's Peace Party and the International Congress of Women in an effort to avert the first World War. In 1917, after America entered the war, she was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In 1919 she was elected first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the successor organization to the Women's Peace Party. She continued in the presidency until her death.

Personal Relationships

Throughout her life Addams was close to many women and was very good at eliciting the involvement of women from different classes in Hull Houses's programmes. Her closest adult companion, friend and lover was Mary Rozet Smith, who nurtured and supported Addams and her work at Hull House, and with whom she owned a summer house in Bar Habor, Maine.

Legacy

File:Addams.JPG

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

Jane Addams was a member of the NAACP, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and the first vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911. In 1901 she founded the Juvenile Court Committee which has since become the Juvenile Protective Association, a private nonprofit organization in Chicago that protects children from abuse and neglect. She was also actively involved with Pi Gamma Mu, the social science honor society, from the 1920s until her death, because of its emphasis on social service and the humanization of the social science disciplines. In 1998 the British Columbia Branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom commissioned Canadian artist Christian Cardell Corbet to create a bronze medallion of Jane Addams to celebrate her life and achievements. The medallion has since been collected by several important museums.

The Jane Addams Peace Association, together with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, give the annual Jane Addams Children's Book Awards to children's books that promote peace, equality, multiculturalism, and peaceful solutions.

A 2007 joint resolution of the Illinois General Assembly, HJR 19 (Currie), would rename the Northwest Tollway as the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway.

The Jane Addams Trail is a bicycling, hiking, snowmobiling, and cross country skiing trail which stretches from Freeport, Illinois to the Wisconsin state line. It is 12.85 miles (20.68 km) long, and is part of the larger Grand Illinois Trail, which is over 575 miles (925 km) long. The trail is located near her birthplace of Cedarville, Illinois.

See also

• Florence Kelley
• Flora Dunlap
• Mary Treglia
• Jane Addams Burial Site
• Jane Addams School for Democracy
• John H. Addams Homestead
• John Dewey
• Community practice social work
• Stanton Street Settlement

References

Jane Addams on a US postage stamp of 1940

Further reading

• Bowen, Louise de Koven. Growing up with a City. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926.
• Deegan, Mary. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, Inc., 1988.
• Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Polacheck, Hilda Satt. I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl. Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

External links

Additional articles

• Jane Addams - general article at Citizendium
• Maurice Hamington. "Jane Addams". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Looks at her as "the first woman 'public philosopher' in United States history".
• Featured in Netcetera on findingDulcinea, 12/11/07, detailing her legacy

Archival material

• Works by Jane Addams at Project Gutenberg
• 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.
• Works by Jane Addams listed at the Online Books Page

Other

• 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

Tutorials

• Review materials for studying Jane Addams