Addams, Jane

Jane Addams (1860–1935) intended to live a life of purpose. A social activist and reformminded woman of the late 19th century, she initiated the settlement movement in the United States when Hull-House opened in 1889. Addams was born to a middle-class family in Cedarville, Illinois in 1860, and thus the world offered her a life of idleness befitting a woman of her status. Jane Addams, however, wanted to accomplish more with her life. While on a Grand Tour of Europe in 1887, she made a visit to Toynbee Hall. Named for its founder, Arnold Toynbee, an Oxford-educated gentleman, the settlement house, located in the deplorable Whitechapel district of London, sought to bring education and social uplift to the poor.

Jane Addams modeled Hull-House after Toynbee Hall. Located on Halsted Street, in a working-class district of Chicago, Hull-House sought to remedy the disparity that existed between the classes in many industrial cities. With the rise of industrialization in Northern cities, the United States experienced an influx of European immigration. These immigrants represented the working-class residents who made their homes in ramshackle tenement houses amid filth and disease. To remedy such conditions of early urbanization, Hull-House's philosophy rejected religious tenets for scientific theory. Victorian-era [Page 4]reformers, such as Addams, dismissed the biblical foundations of the inherent depravity of the individual and instead proposed that their environment influenced humans' condition. The women of Hull-House provided various intellectual and cultural programs as a means to foster self-improvement among those in Chicago's new immigrant populations.

Jane Addams faded into obscurity in the early 20th century with the start of the First World War. As a pacifist and Women's Peace Party chairperson, she vigorously protested the morality of the war. Her unpopular political views made her a target of the Red Scare of approximately 1918 to 1920. Nevertheless, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her work. With the government's proactive stance to its citizenry, most notably in the New Deal, the nature of charity changed. The state took up the burden of the nation's poor, and Jane Addams died after years of illness on May 31, 1935.