Jane Addams (1860-1935) was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the daughter of John H. Addams, a mill owner and state senator who had known Abraham Lincoln. She graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, briefly studied at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and after years of illness and travel founded Hull-House in Chicago with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Through Hull-House she and its residents worked for factory and child-labor laws, juvenile courts, public health and the education of immigrants. She wrote widely on social ethics and peace, helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and in 1931 shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
Frequently Cited
“I dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.”
“The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city.”
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.