Jane Addams: The Woman Who Built a City's Conscience
In 1889 two young women rented a decaying mansion on Chicago's Near West Side, in a district of immigrant tenements the city preferred not to think about, and moved in. Hull House grew into a thirteen-building complex taking two thousand visitors a week and it changed what Americans believed a society owed its poorest members. Forty-two years later Jane Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize — by then, after a decade of being called a traitor in the national press.
Cedarville
She was born on 6 September 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois, the youngest of eight children in a prosperous English-American family. Her mother, Sarah Weber, died in 1863, when Jane was two. Her father, John H. Addams, was an Illinois state senator and a founder of the Republican Party, and his moral seriousness marked her permanently. At four she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, Pott's disease, which left her with a curvature she carried for life. Her father remarried in 1868.
An Education and a Collapse
She went to Rockford Female Seminary, edited the college newspaper, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduated valedictorian in 1881 and took a collegiate certificate. Then she enrolled at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and lasted a single year, withdrawing in 1881–82 after ill health and a nervous breakdown. It was the standard crisis of the first generation of college-educated American women: trained for work that society had no intention of offering them. Addams later described what that generation actually wanted — "the same right to independent thought and action," and "a new confidence in her possibilities, and a fresher hope in her steady progress."
Toynbee Hall
The answer arrived in London, at Toynbee Hall, the settlement where university men lived among the East End poor rather than visiting them. Addams was struck less by the charity than by the absence of condescension — "a community of University men... so free of 'professional doing good,' so unaffectedly sincere." She and Ellen Gates Starr, whom she had met at Rockford, resolved to build the same thing in Chicago.
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They opened it in 1889 in a run-down mansion built by Charles Hull in 1856. What made Hull House different from a mission was that its staff lived there as neighbours, and that it supplied not alms but capacity: a night school for adults, clubs for children and young people, a public kitchen and bathhouse, an art gallery, a gymnasium, a music school, a drama group and theatre, a library, an employment bureau, a book bindery, a lunchroom, and eventually a playground and a summer camp. Addams stated the principles plainly — to teach by example, to practise cooperation, and to practise social democracy, meaning egalitarian relations across class lines.
The residents it attracted became a roll-call of American reform: Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Louise DeKoven Bowen, Dr Harriett Alleyne Rice, Mary Rozet Smith. In 1894 Addams was appointed sanitary inspector for Chicago's 19th Ward, the first woman to hold such a post, having concluded that the neighbourhood's death rate was a garbage-collection problem before it was anything else. In 1901 she co-founded the Juvenile Protective Association, and in 1920 she was among the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Sociology of a Neighbourhood
Hull House was also a research institute. Its residents conducted empirical studies of housing, midwifery, industrial fatigue, tuberculosis, typhoid, garbage collection, cocaine and truancy, and in 1893 published *Hull-House Maps and Papers*, which used statistical mapping to render an urban district legible — a technique that shaped social research thereafter. Addams was a charter member of the American Sociological Society founded in 1905, presented papers to it in 1912, 1915 and 1919, and published five articles in the *American Journal of Sociology* between 1896 and 1914. She was a colleague of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, and with Dewey redefined democracy in pragmatist terms as civic activism — with the emphasis more on duty than on rights.
She wrote steadily: *Democracy and Social Ethics* (1902), *Newer Ideals of Peace* (1907), *The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets* (1909), the autobiography *Twenty Years at Hull House* (1910), *A New Conscience and An Ancient Evil* (1912) on prostitution, *The Long Road of Woman's Memory* (1916), *Peace and Bread in Time of War* (1922) and *The Second Twenty Years at Hull House* (1930).
The Peace Campaign
Her pacifism predated the World War: in 1898 she joined the Anti-Imperialist League against the annexation of the Philippines. In 1912 she nominated Theodore Roosevelt for the Progressive Party presidency and campaigned for him. In January 1915 she became national chairman of the Woman's Peace Party, and that April she presided over the International Congress of Women at The Hague, chairing the commission that sought a negotiated end to the war. In 1919 she was elected president of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace at Zürich; the body became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Her doctrine of "positive peace" held that the absence of fighting was not enough — peace required social justice and democratic institutions underneath it.
Emily Greene Balch, watching her chair the Hague congress in April 1915, wrote: "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."
Vilification and Blind Spots
The cost was severe. After a pacifist speech at Carnegie Hall in 1915 she was booed off the stage. Newspapers including the *New York Times* branded her unpatriotic; the Daughters of the American Revolution expelled her; the American Legion depicted the WILPF as dangerously naive females. Her record has a genuine stain of its own: as vice president of the American Social Hygiene Association she advocated eugenics as a means of eliminating perceived social ills, and counted the eugenicists David Starr Jordan and Charlotte Perkins Gilman among her close friends.
Recognition and Later Years
Yale gave her an honorary Master of Arts in 1910, the first woman it so honoured. In 1931 she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler and gave her prize money to the WILPF. Her health failed after a heart attack in 1926, and she died in Chicago on 21 May 1935, aged seventy-four, buried at Cedarville. Her closest relationships were with women: first Ellen Gates Starr, then Mary Rozet Smith, her partner for forty years until Smith's death in 1934, with whom she shared a summer house in Bar Harbor. "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death," she wrote to her.
Why Addams Matters
When she died she was the best-known woman in American public life. Hull House is the origin point of professional social work in the United States, of juvenile justice reform, and of the idea that poverty is a structural condition to be researched rather than a moral failure to be scolded. Her insistence that peace is built rather than merely declared runs through a century of international organising. She got things wrong, publicly and consequentially. She also demonstrated, in one Chicago ward, what a democracy might look like if it took its own claims seriously.
