Jane Addams

Jane Addams was born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois, the daughter of a mill owner and state senator who was a friend of Abraham Lincoln. She graduated from Rockford Female Seminary and began medical school but left because of poor health. On a visit to London in 1888 she toured Toynbee Hall, a 'settlement house' where educated volunteers lived among the poor. In 1889 she and her friend Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in a poor immigrant neighborhood of Chicago. It offered a kindergarten, classes, clubs, a public kitchen, an art gallery and many other services, and its residents studied conditions in the neighborhood and campaigned for laws on child labor, safe workplaces and juvenile courts. Addams described this work in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). She supported women's suffrage and was a leading pacifist; she opposed American entry into the First World War and became the first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1931 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in Chicago in 1935.

Jane Addams is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Inspired by Toynbee Hall, a Christian settlement house in London. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy