Who was Jane Addams?
Jane Addams was born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois. Her father was a miller and a state senator. A visit to Toynbee Hall in London inspired her. In 1889 she and her friend Ellen Gates Starr started Hull-House in a crowded Chicago district full of newcomers from Europe. It ran classes, clubs and a library, and its residents studied local problems and pushed for change. Addams also served on the Chicago school board and was a founder of the Progressive Party in 1912. In 1915 she chaired a women's peace congress at The Hague and afterwards headed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and died four years later, in 1935.
Political views
- Campaigned for better housing, safer factories and limits on child labor. She also helped create America's first juvenile court.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Backed trade unions, arguing that they were trying to win for themselves what government ought to guarantee to everyone.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Argued that real progress had to spread sideways and raise everybody, not just honour a few high achievers.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Believed women should have the vote so that they could shape the laws that governed them.Source: nobelprize.org
- Was a founder of the 1912 Progressive Party, where she seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Criticized American imperialism and argued against entering the First World War. From 1915 she was chair of the Women's Peace Party.Source: nobelprize.org
- In 1920 she helped found the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union.Source: en.wikipedia.org
Legacy
Addams is often called a pioneer of American social work and one of the leading Progressive Era reformers. Today philosophers also study her as a pragmatist thinker. Her admirers say Hull-House developed services and research that led to child labor laws, juvenile courts and health reforms. Her stand against the First World War brought harsh attacks, many of them aimed at her as a woman. The press turned on her and her public standing dropped. The Daughters of the American Revolution removed her from membership. Her reputation recovered, and in 1931 she won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to receive it.
In their own words
“Women had discovered that the unrepresented are always liable to be given what they do not want by legislators who merely wish to placate them.”