The Life and Work of Jane Addams
Jane Addams Biography – Women’s Rights Activist, Anti-War Activist, Philanthropist (1860–1935)
Addams, Jane (1860–1935) social worker, philanthropist Jane Addams was a U.S. philanthropist, social worker, Progressive politician, and Nobel Prize winner at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
(Laura) Jane Addams (6 September 1860–21 May 1935) is widely credited as the founder of the modern discipline of social work, but she could also be regarded as a sociologist of the socalled Chicago school. It is in Chicago that she also was most active as a social philanthropist and Progressive politician. A local social service foundation that she opened in 1889 on the Chicago West Side, Hull-House, still exists today.
Addams’s political activities included service on Chicago’s Board of Education (starting in 1905), presidency of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (starting in 1909), and delegacy at the Progressive Party convention in 1912, where she seconded Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination as its presidential candidate. More broadly, it has been said that Addams, as an early advocate of urban social renewal, was indirectly involved in “every major social reform between 1890 and 1925.”
Finally, Addams was a foremost advocate of feminist thought, perhaps best known for her suffragette pamphlet “Why Women Should Vote” (1915) and as a pacifist and internationalist.
In the last of these capacities, she came out in opposition to the U.S. entry into the First World War, and participated as delegate at the 1915 International Congress of Women convened at The Hague. She was then to be recognized as the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. This illustrious career had modest if predictive beginnings. She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children, as the daughter of a mill owner and local political leader. Because of a congenital spinal defect and later heart trouble, Jane was plagued by poor health throughout her life but became better after her spinal difficulty was remedied by surgery.
After college studies and extensive traveling in the 1880s, Addams went on to found the philanthropic social service foundation of Hull-House on Chicago’s West Side in 1889. The services offered to poor people ranged from kindergarten sessions to continuing adult education.
Cultural and recreational facilities, as well as an employment exchange, were added later. The broader civic and political activities Addams pursued were to follow as her reputation grew.
Unable to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony, she died in 1935 of a combination of heart trouble and cancer and was interred in her birthplace of Cedarville after a farewell ceremony in the courtyard of Hull-House.
Addams was herself ambiguous, even critical, toward welfare voluntarism, also advocating a strong role for government action. Thus her life included local government service as well as private social involvement and support to trade unionism. This was evident not least in her personal participation in the (ultimately defeated) campaign to save the Italian-American anarchist labor activists Sacco and Vanzetti from execution. Addams was arguably also opposed to liberal individualism, since she emphasized community-based social integration. Finally, beyond suffragism, Addams’s feminism has remained relevant also for present-day gender struggle. Residents of Hull-House were instrumental in bringing family-planning services to Chicago and in opposing withholding of abortion services, elements in a fight for reproductive rights that still divides America today.
On January 19, 2012, it was announced that Jane Addams Hull House Association would close in the spring of 2012 and file for bankruptcy due to financial difficulties, after 122 years. On Friday, January 27, 2012, Hull House closed unexpectedly and all employees received their final paychecks.Employees learned at time of closing that they would not receive severance pay or earned vacation pay or healthcare coverage.[47] Union officials said that the agency closed while owing employees more than $27,000 in unpaid expense reimbursement claims. The University of Illinois at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (unaffiliated with the agency), however, will remain open.
For more information:
Addams, J. The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1930.
Addams, J. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York:Macmillan, 1910.
Addams, Jane. “Why Women Should Vote.” In Woman Suffrage: History, Arguments, and Results, edited by F. M. Borkman and Annie G. Poritt, 131–150. New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing, 1915.
Elshstain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Fischer, M. “Philanthropy and Injustice in Mill and Adams.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1995): 281–292.
Haslett, D. C. “Hull-House and the Birth Control Movement: An Untold Story.” Affilia-Journal of Women and Social Work 12, no. 3 (1997): 261–277. “Jane Addams, Mother of Social Work.”
Jane Addams Hull House Association.
Selmi, P. “Social Work and the Campaign to Save Sacco and Vanzetti.” Social Service Review 75, no. 1 (2001): 115–134.
Siegfried, C. H. “Socializing Democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29 no. 2 (1999): 207–230.
