American national biography online jane addams nobel

Laura Jane Addams [ 1 ] September 6, — May 21, was an American settlement activist , reformer , social worker, [ 2 ] [ 3 ] sociologist , [ 4 ] public administrator , [ 5 ] [ 6 ] philosopher, [ 7 ] [ 8 ] and author. She was a leader in the history of social work and Women's suffrage. Philosophically a "radical pragmatist ", she was arguably the first woman public philosopher in the United States.

An advocate for world peace , and recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States, in Addams became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers or extensions of the domestic-work assigned to women, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace.

In her essay "Utilization of Women in City Government", Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women's roles in the private sphere. Born in Cedarville, Illinois , [ 18 ] Jane Addams was the youngest of eight children born into a prosperous northern Illinois family of English-American descent which traced back to colonial Pennsylvania.

Thereafter Addams was cared for mostly by her older sisters. By the time Addams was eight, four of her siblings had died: three in infancy and one at the age of Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, and attending Sunday school. When she was four she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, known as Potts's disease , which caused a curvature in her spine and lifelong health problems.

This made it complicated as a child to function with the other children, considering she had a limp and could not run as well. Jane Addams adored her father, John H. Addams , when she was a child, as she made clear in the stories in her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House He kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk, and Addams loved to look at it as a child.

He remarried in when Addams was eight years old. His second wife was Anna Hosteler Haldeman, the widow of a miller in Freeport. During her childhood, Addams had big dreams of doing something useful in the world. As a voracious reader, she became interested in the poor from her reading of Charles Dickens. Inspired by his works and by her own mother's kindness to the Cedarville poor, Addams decided to become a doctor so that she could live and work among the poor.

Addams's father encouraged her to pursue higher education but close to home. She was eager to attend the new college for women, Smith College in Massachusetts; but her father required her to attend nearby Rockford Female Seminary now Rockford University , in Rockford, Illinois. Her experience at Rockford put her in a first wave of U. She excelled in this all women environment.

She edited the college newspaper, was the valedictorian, participated in the debate club and led the class of Addams recognized that she and others who were engaged in post secondary education would have new opportunities and challenges. She expressed this in Bread Givers , a speech she gave her junior year. Educated women of her generation wished "not to be a man nor like a man" but claim "the same right to independent thought and action.

That summer, her father died unexpectedly from a sudden case of appendicitis. That fall, Addams, her sister Alice, Alice's husband Harry, and their stepmother, Anna Haldeman Addams, moved to Philadelphia so that the three young people could pursue medical educations. Harry was already trained in medicine and did further studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jane and Alice completed their first year of medical school at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania , [ 18 ] but Jane's health problems, a spinal operation [ 18 ] and a nervous breakdown prevented her from completing the degree. She was filled with sadness at her failure. Her stepmother Anna was also ill, so the entire family canceled their plans to stay two years and returned to Cedarville.

He then advised that she not pursue studies but, instead, travel. In August , she set off for a two-year tour of Europe with her stepmother, traveling some of the time with friends and family who joined them. Addams decided that she did not have to become a doctor to be able to help the poor. Upon her return home in June , she lived with her stepmother in Cedarville and spent winters with her in Baltimore.

Addams, still filled with vague ambition, sank into depression, unsure of her future and feeling useless leading the conventional life expected of a well-to-do young woman. She wrote long letters to her friend from Rockford Seminary, Ellen Gates Starr , mostly about Christianity and books but sometimes about her despair. Linn also wrote books and newspaper articles.

Meanwhile, Addams gathered inspiration from what she read. Fascinated by the early Christians and Tolstoy's book My Religion , she was baptized a Christian in the Cedarville Presbyterian Church in the summer of Yet she felt confused about her role as a woman. John Stuart Mill 's The Subjection of Women made her question the social pressures on a woman to marry and devote her life to family.

In the summer of , Addams read in a magazine about the new idea of starting a settlement house. She decided to visit the world's first, Toynbee Hall , in London. She and several friends, including Ellen Gates Starr , traveled in Europe from December through the summer of After watching a bullfight in Madrid , fascinated by what she saw as an exotic tradition, Addams condemned this fascination and her inability to feel outraged at the suffering of the horses and bulls.

American national biography online jane addams nobel

At first, Addams told no one about her dream to start a settlement house; but, she felt increasingly guilty for not acting on her dream. Starr loved the idea and agreed to join Addams in starting a settlement house. Addams and another friend traveled to London without Starr, who was busy. She described it as "a community of University men who live there, have their recreation clubs and society all among the poor people, yet, in the same style in which they would live in their own circle.

It is so free of 'professional doing good,' so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries seems perfectly ideal. The settlement house as Addams discovered was a space within which unexpected cultural connections could be made and where the narrow boundaries of culture, class, and education could be expanded.

They doubled as community arts centers and social service facilities. They laid the foundations for American civil society, a neutral space within which different communities and ideologies could learn from each other and seek common grounds for collective action. The role of the settlement house was an "unending effort to make culture and 'the issue of things' go together.

In [ 43 ] Addams and her college friend and paramour Ellen Gates Starr [ 44 ] co-founded Hull House , a settlement house in Chicago. The run-down mansion had been built by Charles Hull in and needed repairs and upgrading. Addams at first paid for all of the capital expenses repairing the roof of the porch, repainting the rooms, buying furniture and most of the operating costs.

However gifts from individuals supported the House beginning in its first year and Addams was able to reduce the proportion of her contributions, although the annual budget grew rapidly. Some wealthy women became long-term donors to the House, including Helen Culver , who managed her first cousin Charles Hull's estate, and who eventually allowed the contributors to use the house rent-free.

Addams and Starr were the first two occupants of the house, which would later become the residence of about 25 women. At its height, [ 47 ] Hull House was visited each week by some 2, people. Hull House was a center for research, empirical analysis, study, and debate, as well as a pragmatic center for living in and establishing good relations with the neighborhood.

Among the aims of Hull House was to give privileged, educated young people contact with the real life of the majority of the population. The core Hull House residents were well-educated women bound together by their commitment to labour unions, the National Consumers League and the suffrage movement. Harriett Alleyne Rice joined Hull House to provide medical treatment for poor families.

In addition to making available social services and cultural events for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, Hull House became a building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp known as Bowen Country Club.

The art program at Hull House allowed Addams to challenge the system of industrialized education, which "fitted" the individual to a specific job or position. She wanted the house to provide a space, time and tools to encourage people to think independently. She saw art as the key to unlocking the diversity of the city through collective interaction, mutual self-discovery, recreation and the imagination.

Art was integral to her vision of community, disrupting fixed ideas and stimulating the diversity and interaction on which a healthy society depends, based on a continual rewriting of cultural identities through variation and interculturalism. With funding from Edward Butler, Addams opened an art exhibition and studio space as one of the first additions to Hull House.

On the first floor of the new addition there was a branch of the Chicago Public Library , and the second was the Butler Art Gallery, which featured recreations of famous artwork as well as the work of local artists. Studio space within the art gallery provided both Hull House residents and the entire community with the opportunity to take art classes or to come in and hone their craft whenever they liked.

As Hull House grew, and the relationship with the neighborhood deepened, that opportunity became less of a comfort to the poor and more of an outlet of expression and exchange of different cultures and diverse communities. Art and culture was becoming a bigger and more important part of the lives of immigrants within the 19th ward, and soon children caught on to the trend.

These working-class children were offered instruction in all forms and levels of art. Places such as the Butler Art Gallery or the Bowen Country Club often hosted these classes, but more informal lessons would often be taught outdoors. The CPSAS provided public schools with reproductions of world-renowned pieces of art, hired artists to teach children how to create art, and also took the students on field trips to Chicago's many art museums.

The Hull House neighborhood was a mix of European ethnic groups that had immigrated to Chicago around the start of the 20th century. That mix was the ground where Hull House's inner social and philanthropic elitists tested their theories and challenged the establishment. Only Italians continued as an intact and thriving community through the Great Depression, World War II, and well beyond the ultimate demise of Hull House proper in Hull House became America's best known settlement house.

Addams used it to generate system-directed change, on the principle that to keep families safe, community and societal conditions had to be improved. Starr and Addams developed three "ethical principles" for social settlements: "to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy, that is, egalitarian, or democratic, social relations across class lines.

In the s Julia Lathrop , Florence Kelley , and other residents of the house made it a world center of social reform activity. Hull House used the latest methodology pioneering in statistical mapping to study overcrowding, truancy, typhoid fever, cocaine, children's reading, newsboys, infant mortality, and midwifery. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city and statewide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women.

Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. In , she helped start the new Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt. Although she sympathized with feminists, socialists, and pacifists, Addams refused to be labeled.

This refusal was pragmatic rather than ideological. Hull House stressed the importance of the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants. This philosophy also fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth.

Hull House featured multiple programs in art and drama, kindergarten classes, boys' and girls' clubs, language classes, reading groups, college extension courses, along with public baths, a gymnasium, a labor museum and playground, all within a free-speech atmosphere. They were all designed to foster democratic cooperation, collective action and downplay individualism.

She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws. JPA provided the first probation officers for the first Juvenile Court in the United States until this became a government function. From until the s, JPA engaged in many studies examining such subjects as racism, child labor and exploitation, drug abuse and prostitution in Chicago and their effects on child development.

Through the years, their mission has now become improving the social and emotional well-being and functioning of vulnerable children so they can reach their fullest potential at home, in school, and in their communities. Addams and her colleagues documented the communal geography of typhoid fever and reported that poor workers were bearing the brunt of the illness.

She identified the political corruption and business avarice that caused the city bureaucracy to ignore health, sanitation, and building codes. Linking environmental justice and municipal reform, she eventually defeated the bosses and fostered a more equitable distribution of city services and modernized inspection practices. This book was extremely popular.

Addams believed that prostitution was a result of kidnapping only. Addams and her colleagues originally intended Hull House as a transmission device to bring the values of the college-educated high culture to the masses, including the Efficiency Movement , a major movement in industrial nations in the early 20th century that sought to identify and eliminate waste in the economy and society, and to develop and implement best practices.

Hull House became more than a proving ground for the new generation of college-educated, professional women: it also became part of the community in which it was founded, and its development reveals a shared history. Addams called on women, especially middle-class women with leisure time and energy as well as rich philanthropists, to exercise their civic duty to become involved in municipal affairs as a matter of "civic housekeeping".

Addams thereby enlarged the concept of civic duty to include roles for women beyond motherhood which involved child rearing. Women's lives revolved around "responsibility, care, and obligation", which represented the source of women's power. Addams argued that women, as opposed to men, were trained in the delicate matters of human welfare and needed to build upon their traditional roles of housekeeping to be civic housekeepers.

Enlarged housekeeping duties involved reform efforts regarding poisonous sewage, impure milk which often carried tuberculosis , smoke-laden air, and unsafe factory conditions. Addams led the "garbage wars"; in she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago's 19th Ward. With the help of the Hull House Women's Club, within a year over 1, health department violations were reported to city council and garbage collection reduced death and disease.

Addams had long discussions with philosopher John Dewey in which they redefined democracy in terms of pragmatism and civic activism, with an emphasis more on duty and less on rights. Addams's construction of womanhood involved daughterhood, sexuality, wifehood, and motherhood. In A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil she dissected the social pathology of sex slavery, prostitution and other sexual behaviors among working-class women in American industrial centers from to Addams's autobiographical persona manifests her ideology and supports her popularized public activist persona as the "Mother of Social Work", in the sense that she represents herself as a celibate matron who served the suffering immigrant masses through Hull House, as if they were her own children.

Although not a mother herself, Addams became the "mother to the nation", identified with motherhood in the sense of protective care of her people. Addams kept up her heavy schedule of public lectures around the country, especially at college campuses. She declined in order to maintain her independent role outside of academia. Furthermore, she wanted no university controls over her political activism.

Addams was appointed to serve on the Chicago Board of Education. She gave papers to it in , , and She was the most prominent woman member during her lifetime. Generally, Addams was close to a wide set of other women and was very good at eliciting their involvement from different classes in Hull House's programs. Nevertheless, throughout her life Addams did have romantic relationships with a few of these women, including Mary Rozet Smith and Ellen Starr.

Her relationships offered her the time and energy to pursue her social work while being supported emotionally and romantically. From her exclusively romantic relationships with women, she would most likely be described as a lesbian in contemporary terms, similar to many leading figures in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom of the time.

Her first romantic partner was Ellen Starr , with whom she founded Hull House, who she met when both were students at Rockford Female Seminary. In , the two visited Toynbee Hall together and started their settlement house project, purchasing a house in Chicago. Her second romantic partner was Mary Rozet Smith , who was wealthy and supported Addams's work at Hull House, and with whom she shared a house.

They remained together until , when Mary died of pneumonia, after 40 years together. When apart, they would write to each other at least once a day — sometimes twice. Addams would write to Smith, "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death". Addams's religious beliefs were shaped by her wide reading and life experience. The Barnetts held a great interest in converting others to Christianity, but they believed that Christians should be more engaged with the world and, in the words of one of the leaders of the social Christian movement in England, W.

Fremantle, "imbue all human relations with the spirit of Christ's self-renouncing love". According to Christie and Gauvreau , while the Christian settlement houses sought to Christianize, Jane Addams "had come to epitomize the force of secular humanism. According to Joslin , "The new humanism, as [Addams] interprets it comes from a secular, and not a religious, pattern of belief".

Others, like Hull-House [co-founded by Addams], were secular. Hilda Satt Polacheck, a former resident of Hull House, stated that Addams firmly believed in religious freedom and bringing people of all faiths into the social, secular fold of Hull House. The one exception, she notes, was the annual Christmas Party, although Addams left the religious side to the church.

The Bible served Addams as both a source of inspiration for her life of service and a manual for pursuing her calling. The emphasis on following Jesus' example and actively advancing the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth is also evident in Addams's work and the Social Gospel movement. A staunch supporter of the Progressive Party, she nominated Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency during the Party Convention , held in Chicago in August She went on to speak and campaign extensively for Roosevelt's presidential campaign.

In January , she became involved in the Woman's Peace Party and was elected national chairman. This included meeting ten leaders in neutral countries as well as those at war to discuss mediation. This was the first significant international effort against the war. Addams, along with co-delegates Emily Balch and Alice Hamilton , documented their experiences of this venture, published as a book, Women at The Hague University of Illinois.

Miss Addams shines, so respectful of everyone's views, so eager to understand and sympathize, so patient of anarchy and even ego, yet always there, strong, wise and in the lead. No 'managing', no keeping dark and bringing things subtly to pass, just a radiating wisdom and power of judgement. In , she also became a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA American branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation founded in and was a member of the Fellowship Council until She faced increasingly 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 , which branded her as unpatriotic. Recognition of these efforts came with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Addams in Addams was a major synthesizing figure in the domestic and international peace movements, serving as both a figurehead and leading theoretician; she was influenced especially by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and by the pragmatism of philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.

Addams became an anti-war activist from , as part of the anti-imperialist movement that followed the Spanish—American War. Her book Newer Ideals of Peace [ 98 ] reshaped the peace movement worldwide to include ideals of social justice. She recruited social justice reformers like Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald , Florence Kelley, and Emily Greene Balch to join her in the new international women's peace movement after Addams's work came to fruition after World War I , when major institutional bodies began to link peace with social justice and probe the underlying causes of war and conflict.

In and , world leaders sought peace by convening an innovative and influential peace conference at The Hague. These conferences produced Hague Conventions of and A conference was canceled due to World War I. The void was filled by an unofficial conference convened by Women at the Hague. At the time, both the US and The Netherlands were neutral.

Jane Addams chaired this pathbreaking International Congress of Women at the Hague, which included almost 1, participants from 12 warring and neutral countries. Both national and international political systems excluded women's voices. The women delegates argued that the exclusion of women from policy discourse and decisions around war and peace resulted in flawed policy.

The delegates adopted a series of resolutions addressing these problems and called for extending the franchise and women's meaningful inclusion in formal international peace processes at war's end. Her leadership during the conference and her travels to the capitals of the war-torn regions were cited in nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Addams was opposed to U. In turn, her views were denounced by patriotic groups and newspapers during World War I — Oswald Garrison Villard came to her defense when she suggested that armies gave liquor to soldiers just before major ground attacks. With what abuse did not the [New York] Times cover her, one of the noblest of our women, because she told the simple truth that the Allied troops were often given liquor or drugs before charging across No Man's Land.

Yet when the facts came out at the hands of Sir Philip Gibbs and others not one word of apology was ever forthcoming. Nevertheless, the DAR could and did expel Addams from membership in their organization. After , however, she was widely regarded as the greatest woman of the Progressive Era. Jane Addams was also a philosopher of peace. Positive peace is more complicated.

It deals with the kind of society we aspire to, and can take into account concepts like justice, cooperation, the quality of relationships, freedom, order and harmony. Jane Addams's philosophy of peace is a type of positive peace. Jane Adamas. Accessed 25 July Baughman, et al. Biography in Context , link. Accessed 12 Aug. Jane Addams Collection resources.

Swathmore College. The Jane Addams Papers Project. Ramapo College. Twenty Years at Hull House reprinted online. Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights. Syracuse University Press, m. Davis, Allen F. Oxford University Press, Farrell, John C. The Johns Hopkins Press, Knight, Louise W. Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy.

University of Chicago Press, Jane Addams By Debra Michals, PhD Works Cited. How to Cite this page. Her father had many important friends, including President Abraham Lincoln. In the s, Addams struggled to find her place in the world. Battling with health problems at an early age, she graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary in Illinois in , and then traveled and briefly attended medical school.

On one trip with friend Ellen Gates Starr, the year-old Addams visited the famed Toynbee Hall in London, England, a special facility established to help the poor. She and Starr were so impressed by the settlement house that they sought to create one in Chicago. It wouldn't be long before their dream became a reality. In , Addams and Starr opened one of the first settlements in both the United States and North America, and the first in the city of Chicago: Hull House, which was named after the building's original owner.

The house provided services for the immigrant and poor population living in the Chicago area. Over the years, the organization grew to include more than 10 buildings and extended its services to include childcare, educational courses, an art gallery, a public kitchen and several other social programs. In , the construction of the University of Illinois' Chicago campus forced Hull House to move its headquarters, and, unfortunately, most of the organization's original buildings were demolished as a result.

However, the Hull residence was transformed into a monument honoring Addams that remains standing today. Five years later, in , she became the first female president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections later renamed the National Conference of Social Work. She went on to establish the National Federation of Settlements the following year, holding that organization's top post for more than two decades thereafter.