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
Children	none
Parent(s)	John H. Addams and Sarah Weber

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

Biography

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the eighth of nine children born into a prosperous, loving family. Although she was the eighth child, three of her siblings died in infancy, leaving only six to mature. Her mother, Sarah Addams (née Weber), died from tuberculosis during pregnancy when Jane was just two years old. Jane's father, John H. Addams, was the President of The Second National Bank of Freeport, the Senator of Illinois from 1854 to 1870, and owned the local grain mill; he remarried when Jane was eight. Her father also was a founding member of the Republican Party and supported Abraham Lincoln. Jane was a first cousin twice removed to Charles Addams, noted cartoonist for The New Yorker. She was born with Pott's disease which caused a curvature of the spine and health problems for Jane throughout her life.

Addams' father 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 spent seven months at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia, but dropped out. Her parents felt that she should not forget the common path of upper class young women. After her father's sudden death, Jane inherited $50,000. In 1885, Jane set off for a two year tour of Europe with her stepmother, returned home, and felt bored and restless, indifferent about marriage and wanting more than just the conventional life expected of well-to-do ladies. After painful spinal surgery, she returned to Europe again for a second tour in 1887, this time with her best friend Ellen Starr and a teacher friend. During her second tour, Jane visited London's Toynbee Hall which was a settlement house for boys based on the new philosophy of charity. Toynbee Hall was Jane's main inspiration for Hull House.

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

The exact nature of their relationship has become a controversy after her death, with some historians believing Addams was a lesbian and in love with Smith, and others calling their relationship a romantic friendship, saying that while the women loved each other and lived together, that did not necessarily indicate a sexual relationship.

Hull House

Main article: Hull House

Jane Addams in a car, 1915

In 1889 she and her college friend, Ellen Gates Starr, co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, the first settlement house in the United States. The house was named after Charles Hull, who built the building in 1856. When starting out, all of the funding for the Hull House came from the $50,000 estate she inherited after her father died. Later, the Hull House was sponsored by Helen Culver, the wealthy real estate agent who had initially leased the house to the women. Jane and Ellen were the first two occupants of the house, which would later be the residence of about 25 women. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around 2000 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, bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In addition to making available services and cultural opportunities for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, the Hull House became a 13-building settlement and included a playground.

The Hull House neighborhood was a mix of various European ethnic groups that had immigrated to Chicago beginning at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century. The Bethlehem-Howard Neighborhood Center Records memorializes that mix of immigrants that made up the social laboratory upon which the social and philanthropic elitists comprising Hull House's inner sanctum tested their theories and based their challenges to the establishment. "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 during the early part of the 20th century. The Italians were the only ethnic group that continued as a thriving community through the Great Depression, World War II and well beyond the ultimate demise of Hull House proper in 1963. Taylor Street Archives: Florence Scala

Peace Movement

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

The harsh criticism received by Addams, both for her outspoken pacifism during World War I and her defense of immigrants' civil rights during a period when anarchism and socialism were greatly feared in the United States, never stopped her from putting forth a great amount of effort and energy into Hull House. She even had the time to work on international peace efforts. She spoke and campaigned extensively for Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Presidential campaign on the Progressive Party, but was disillusioned in his 1916 campaign when he abandoned his earlier reform platform.

Jane was elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom which entailed her to travel often to Europe (both during and after World War I) and Asia. During World War I, Addams faced harsh rebukes and criticism as a pacifist. Her speech on pacifism at Carnegie Hall, received negative coverage by newspapers such as the New York Times who argued that she was unpatriotic. This was a difficult time for Jane Addams. Later, during her travels, she would spend 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."

Legacy

See also: History of social work

Hull House and the Peace Movement are widely recognized as the pillars of the legacy left by Jane Addams. There are those who suggest that her legacy goes beyond those two pillars. Her life’s work spans a spectrum that ranges from the development of individuals and the subcultures that harbor them...to the social, political and economic reforms inspired by her sociological ideas.

There are others who suggest that her legacy is more analogous to a river, a tributary, if you will, to the mainstream of social issues prevalent during her day. Her social theories influenced future writers and theorists who continue to grope for an understanding of how individuals are fashioned by their subcultures and/or are forged by forces beyond our ability to measure and comprehend?

Her theories influenced the social and political landscapes for decades beyond her time. Her influence was felt by researchers and social scientists as recent as Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel--1997), whose theory on the Fates of Societies, confirmed in part by Jane Addams' hypothesis, suggests how our physical and social landscapes influenced the fate of subcultures---and Pulitzer Prize winner E. O. Wilson (On Human Nature--1979), who theorized upon the inherent behavior of Groups. 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. Motley’s best selling novel became a popular manifest on human behavior, furthering the concept and acceptance of socio-behaviorism and the role of society in the development of individuals and the subcultures from which they evolve.

Social workers and social theorists were not prone to live in the communities of their jurisdiction. Jane Addams was unique in that respect. She lived in the community that she both served and observed. Favored with economic, intellectual and political resources with which to reshape the slums of the near-west side of Chicago, she moved beyond simply understanding the forces that impacted upon the neighborhood and its inhabitants. Her role as a reformist enabled her to petition the establishment and thus alter the social and physical geography of the neighborhood. The challenges hurled at the establishment by the Hull House elite derived their support from the theories that evolved from her association with sociologists and from her empirical observations of the living conditions to which the immigrant residents of the neighborhood were subjected.

Although academic sociologists of the time defined her work as "social work," Addams' efforts differed significantly from that of other social workers during her time. 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 their supposed superior sophistication, were thought 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, serving as a women's sociological institution, enabled Addams to befriend and become a colleague to the 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 woman 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.[13]

One cannot discount Jane Addams' influence as a peace advocate. Her writings and her speeches, on behalf of the formation of the League of Nations, are well documented. The United Nations--which came to fruition nearly a half century beyond her time--is an integral part of that legacy left to us by Jane Addams.

Memorials

In 2007, a joint resolution of the Illinois General Assembly renamed the Northwest Tollway as the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway.

Jane Addams House is a residence hall built in 1947 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 monument to Jane Addams.

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

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.

Jane Addams has been immortalized further with the naming of a Jesuit Volunteer Corps Southwest community. The house or "casa" as it is known in the organization, is located in Sacramento, California. Located in the city's renowned, Oak Park, seven Jesuit Volunteers live in Casa Jane Addams every year.

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
• Progressive Party (United States, 1912)

References

Jane Addams on a US postage stamp of 1940

Taylor Street Archives

Further reading

• Bowen, Louise de Koven. Growing up with Pity. 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.
• Stiehm, Judith Hicks. "Champions for Peace : Women Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.” Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
• Taylor Street Archives

External links

• 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".
• 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
• 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
• Gay Great article in Fyne Times magazine
• Taylor Street Archives; Hull House: Bowen Country Club