Jane Addams and Hull House

Laura Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the daughter of John Addams, a prominent businessman who served eight terms in the Illinois Senate. Strongly influenced by her father, who was also a Quaker, abolitionist and friend of Abraham Lincoln, Addams developed an early concern for social justice.

Addams attended Rockford Female Seminary (later renamed Rockford College), graduating as class valedictorian in 1881. Her life’s path became clear in 1888, when she visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London’s East End where Oxford and Cambridge students lived and worked alongside residents contending with material poverty. The first settlement house of its kind, Toynbee sought to demonstrate that the problem of poverty could best  – and perhaps only – be solved by those who experienced its conditions and effects first-hand.

Inspired by her experience at Toynbee, Addams decided to conduct a similar experiment in Chicago. In September 1889 she and Ellen Gates Star, a friend from college, opened Hull House in an abandoned mansion on the city’s industrial West Side. The first settlement house in the United States, Hull House addressed the needs of the neighborhood’s recently arrived European immigrants, offering educational and artistic programs, health services, childcare, a job-placement bureau and other resources to expand opportunities for immigrants trying to gain a foothold in American society.

As Hull House gained a national reputation, volunteers from across the country – primarily socially conscious, college-educated women – came to live and work at the settlement. Several Hull House residents – including Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelly and Alice Hamilton -- became prominent social reformers in their own right. By 1911, Hull House occupied 13 buildings over half a city block. At the height of its activity, it received some two thousand visitors every week. By 1920, it had inspired the establishment of more than 400 other settlement houses across the U.S.

As the head of Hull House, Addams also advocated for housing regulation, child labor laws, factory inspections and other legal protections for the working class. At the national level, she championed women’s suffrage and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

A lifelong pacifist, Addams protested U.S. entry into  World War I and helped to galvanize an international movement to end the conflict. Although her anti-war stance was initially criticized as unpatriotic, in 1931 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership on behalf of world peace.

Contributors: Maha Tazi, Erin Brown