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Addams, Jane
Born: 1860 Died: 1935
Occupation: Progressive reformer, founder of Hull-House, Nobel Peace prize winner
From: American Social Leaders and Activists, American Biographies.
One of the most prominent and influential Progressive
reformers, Jane Addams was the founder of Hull-House as
well as an advocate of peace. She was born on September
6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois, to John Huy Addams, a
businessman, and Sarah Weber Addams.
According to Daniel Levine in Jane Addams and the Liberal
Tradition (1971), the stronger parental influence on Jane
Addams was her father's. He made for an impressive role
model. John Addams owned a prosperous mill, invested
profitably in a railroad, and engaged in numerous projects
to help his community, while adhering to his principles
regardless of what anyone else said or did. He opposed
slavery and fought against its expansion into the western
territories by helping to found the Republican Party. Jane
Addams revered his ambition, his community service, and
his moral values.
After Jane completed her secondary school education, she wanted to head east to Smith
College, but her father insisted that she stay closer to home, so she enrolled at Rockford
Female Seminary and in 1881 graduated at the top of her class. Just a few months later
her father died.
That fall, Addams entered the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, but her declining
health forced her to withdraw. Some historians believe that her illness owed less to
physical ailments than to psychosomatic ones, perhaps stirred by trauma caused by her
father's death.
For the next few years, Addams groped for direction in her life. She traveled to Europe,
learned foreign languages, returned to the United States, and helped her brother, George,
as he sank into insanity and his life faded away.
In 1887 she took a second trip to Europe in a continuing search for direction. Some of her
drifting was the result of her personal experiences, but a good deal of it was a reaction to
the restrictions society placed on women. The ideal woman was expected to stay at home
and take care of her husband and children. This meant that intelligent and ambitious
young women, such as Addams, were largely prevented from applying their talents to
politics or the professions.
In the past, women who chafed under such constraints found an outlet in social reform—in
abolitionism, the women's rights movement, and the temperance movement. Jane Addams
followed a similar route. While in Europe in 1888 she began to take note of the poor, and
she and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr, agreed that when they returned home they would do
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something to help poor people in America.
By that time a reform movement, called Progressivism, had emerged in the United States
with the goal of correcting the worst industrial abuses, such as corrupt politics, abusive
child labor, and slum housing. Progressive reformers challenged the prevailing social
Darwinist ideology, which held that life was survival of the fittest and anything that
interfered with that process would do more harm than good. The Progressives countered
with reform Darwinism, the belief that changing the environment in which people lived
could improve their lives. Reform Darwinism encouraged an active approach to social
problems, and in that Jane Addams agreed.
Addams insisted that cities could be improved by encouraging community—in effect
reaching back to the era of the close-knit village. In England, she had seen what
community could do in the urban environment when she visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement
house founded to help the poor. In 1886 Stanton Coit applied the Toynbee concept to a
settlement house he began in New York City. Three years later, two of Coit's colleagues
opened a second settlement house in New York.
In September 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull-House in Chicago. A
city of contrasts, Chicago was known for its new technology and explosive business
growth, represented by its motto, "I will," but it was also an immigrant city—more than
half the population consisted of immigrants or the children of immigrants—and a city of
large poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
Addams and Starr applied their own brand of "I will" to social reform when they located
Hull-House in an immigrant neighborhood. They decided that they, and those who worked
with them, would live in the house, among the immigrants, so they could grasp the
problems facing the neighborhood and deal with them directly. Hull-House provided
immigrants with hot lunches, child care, classes on speaking English, lectures on art and
history, and rooms for union meetings. Addams built Hull-House into a political center, too,
from which she could launch reform campaigns.
She attracted to Hull-House men and women who became leading Progressive reformers.
These included John Dewey, Florence Kelley, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, and Alice
Hamilton. At Hull-House Addams put together a minicommunity to build a large
community; years later she recalled, "More gratifying than any understanding or response
from without could possibly be, was the consciousness that a growing group of residents
was gathering at Hull-House, held together in that soundest of all social bonds, the
companionship of mutual interests." Hull-House was so successful, and Addams so forceful
in publicizing her work, that it inspired other Progressives to establish settlement houses
elsewhere.
In line with prevailing Progressive thought, Addams articulated ever more strongly the
view that poverty resulted not from innate shortcomings of the poor but from problems in
industrial society at large, such as low wages and inadequate public services. She believed
that women should take the lead in correcting abuses. Addams said women had a special
talent and an instinct for nurturing that made them more effective reformers than men—
an assessment similar to one she would make years later when she became a leader in the
peace movement and insisted that women could do more for peace than men because they
were less warlike.
Addams wrote several books during this time, including The Spirit of Youth and the City
Streets (1909), which looked into conflicts among different generations of immigrants;
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), which described her experiences at the settlement
house; and Ancient Evil (1912), which discussed prostitution.
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Addams's settlement work made her keenly aware of how industries exploited child labor.
More than anything else, she said, the factory harmed children by making them work long
hours at routine, monotonous tasks that either dulled them or made them rebellious. "By
premature factory work, for which youth is unprepared," Addams said, "society perpetually
extinguishes that variety and promise, that bloom of life which is the unique possession of
the young." She added:
The discovery of the labor power of youth was to our age like the discovery of
a new natural resource, although it was merely incidental to the invention of
modern machinery and the consequent subdivision of labor. In utilizing it thus
ruthlessly we are not only in danger of quenching the divine fire of youth, but
we are imperiling industry itself when we venture to ignore those very sources
of beauty, of variety, and of suggestion.
Addams also campaigned for prohibition and women's suffrage. In 1912 she supported the
Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, whose nomination
she seconded at the national convention, and who lost to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Addams's decision to back him was especially interesting given his bellicosity in foreign
affairs and her own pacifism. Addams and Roosevelt parted ways when World War I began,
as her pacifist views led her to become chair of the Women's Peace Party and president of
the International Congress of Women.
In 1915 Addams traveled to Europe in a futile effort to negotiate a settlement of the war.
After the United States entered the conflict in 1917, she cofounded the Women's Peace
Party (WPP) and served as its chairwoman. She explained that she formed the party
because "in this case the demand has been so universal and spontaneous over the country
that it seemed to me best to take it up." In its platform, the WPP demanded that neutral
nations meet to mediate the war; that arms be limited; that women be consulted on all
issues of war and peace; that a world court be established; and that the economic causes
of war be eliminated.
The party's stand against military preparedness found support among many Americans
who, though not pacifists, wanted the country to stay out of the war; isolationists, for
example, sided with the WPP. But once the United States entered the war, the WPP was
labeled as extremist, and even un-American, when it opposed the Conscription Act. As
criticism of the WPP escalated, Addams endured considerable strain. In 1917 she
complained that she was weary of being a social outcast.
When the war ended, Addams worked for Herbert Hoover's war relief staff in Europe. A
strong internationalist, she was elected president of the Women's International League for
Peace and Freedom in 1919. She supported American entry into the League of Nations—
which never came about—and argued that political internationalism, which the league
would foster, would lead to humanitarian internationalism.
In the 1920s Addams came under attack from conservatives who accused her of being a
socialist, even a Bolshevik. They were angered by her pacifism during the war and by her
support for the League of Nations, and many conservatives disliked her support for unions.
Indeed, in conflicts between capital and labor, Addams had long sided with labor and had
supported strikes. But ideally she wanted a society devoid of class consciousness and,
toward that end, saw unions as only a stopgap to counterbalance corporate power; in the
long run, she believed, unions would foster class consciousness rather than erase it.
Addams stopped short of advocating a socialist system. In a letter to a newspaper she
protested:
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I am not in any sense a Socialist, have never belonged to the party and have
never especially affiliated with them. I am certainly not a communist or
bolshevik. I am, of course, president of the Women's International League for
Peace and Freedom and we have advocated recognition of soviet Russia, not
because we have been in favor of the government any more than we were
with that of the czars....
I do not know why I am called a bolshevik except as a term of opprobrium
that is easily flung about.
Whereas Addams wanted the government to regulate business to make society more just,
according to the historian Victoria Bissell Brown, the reformer favored compromise too
much ever to be an ideological socialist.
In 1931 Jane Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize. She died on May 21, 1935, of
cancer. "I am not so sure that we succeeded in our endeavors," she wrote in Twenty Years
at Hull-House. "But Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of
classes on each other is reciprocal."
Brown, Victoria Bissell, ed. Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes. Boston: Bedford
Books, 1999.
Davis, Allen Freeman. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
2000.
Linn, James Weber. Jane Addams: A Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Text Citation (Chicago Manual of Style format):
Hamilton, Neil A. "Addams, Jane." American Social Leaders and Activists, American Biographies. New York:
Facts On File, Inc., 2002. American History Online. Facts On File,
Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?
ItemID=WE52&iPin=ASL003&SingleRecord=True (accessed October 6, 2014).
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