Jane Addams

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Jane Addams Image:Nobel prize medal.svg
Image:Jane Addams profile.jpg
BornSeptember 6 1860(1860-09-06)
Cedarville, Illinois
DiedMay 21 1935 (aged 74)
Chicago, Illinois
OccupationAmerican social reformer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient
ParentsJohn H. Addams and Sarah Weber

Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House Movement and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the eighth of nine children born into a prosperous miller family.[1] Her father was future state senator John H. Addams. She was first cousin twice removed to Charles Addams, noted macabre cartoonist for The New Yorker.[2]

Addams was educated in the United States and Europe, graduating from the Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in Rockford, Illinois. While in London, she was influenced by Andrew Mearn's essay, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which highlighted slum conditions.[3] She visited Europe when she was 27 years old, visiting Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in the East End of London.[3]

Contents

[edit] Hull House

In 1889 she and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around two thousand people. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. She is probably most remembered for her adult night school, a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many community colleges today.

Hull House also served as a women's sociological institution. Addams was a friend and colleague to the early members of the Chicago School of Sociology, influencing their thought through her work in applied sociology and, in 1893, co-authoring the Hull-House Maps and Papers that came to define the interests and methodologies of the School. She worked with George H. Mead on social reform issues including promoting women's rights, ending child labor, and the mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers' Strike. Although academic sociologists of the time defined her work as "social work", Addams did not consider herself a social worker. She combined the central concepts of symbolic interactionism with the theories of cultural feminism and pragmatism to form her sociological ideas (Deegan, 1988).

Hull House also offered an employment bureau, an art gallery, libraries, and music and art classes. Among the projects that the members of the Hull House opened were the Immigrants' Protective League, The Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the US, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic.[4]

[edit] Peace Movement

Addams helped organize the Women's Peace Party and the International Congress of Women in an effort to avert the first World War. In 1917, after America entered the war, she was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In 1919 she was elected first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the successor organization to the Women's Peace Party. She continued in the presidency until her death.

[edit] Background

Jane's father taught her tolerance, philanthropy, and a strong work ethic. He encouraged her to pursue a higher education, but not at the expense of losing her femininity and the prospect of marriage and motherhood, as expected of upper class young women. After Rockford, Jane wanted to pursue a degree in medicine, but her parents felt that she was sufficiently educated and feared for her marriage prospects. Wanting more in life than marriage, Jane developed the idea for Hull House.

[edit] Legacy

Image:Addams.JPG
A wall-mounted quote by Jane Addams in The American Adventure in the World Showcase pavilion of Walt Disney World's Epcot.

Jane Addams was a member of the NAACP, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and the first vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911. She was also actively involved with Pi Gamma Mu, the social science honor society, from the 1920s until her death, because of its emphasis on social service and the humanization of the social science disciplines. In 1998 the British Columbia Branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom commissioned Canadian artist Christian Cardell Corbet to create a bronze medallion of Jane Addams to celebrate her life and achievements. The medallion has since been collected by several important museums.

The Jane Addams Peace Association, together with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, give the annual Jane Addams Children's Book Awards to children's books that promote peace, equality, multiculturalism, and peaceful solutions.

A 2007 joint resolution of the Illinois General Assembly, HJR 19 (Currie), would rename the Northwest Tollway as the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway.

[edit] Publications

  • Democracy and Social Ethics, New York: Macmillan, 1902.
  • Children in American Street Trades, New York: National Child Labor Committee, 1905.
  • New Ideals of Peace, Chautauqua, N.Y.: Chautauqua Press, 1907.
  • The Wage-Earning Woman and the State, Boston: Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, 1910s.
  • Twenty Years at Hull House. By Jane Addams. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912. Copyright 1910. , On-line edition at the Celebration of Women Writers.
  • Symposium: Child Labor on the Stage, New York: National Child Labor Committee, ?1911.
  • The Long road of woman's memory, New York: Macmillan Co., 1916.
  • The Spirit of youth and the City Streets.(1909)(Dodo Press 2007)

[edit] References

Image:Jane addams stamp.JPG
Jane Addams on a US postage stamp of 1940
  1. ^ Jane Addams - Biography. The Nobel Foundation.
  2. ^ Davis, Linda H. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Random House, Inc. 2006.
  3. ^ a b Hall, Peter (2002). "Chapter 2", Cities of Tomorrow. Blackwell Publishing. 
  4. ^ The "Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic" was later called the "Institute for Juvenile Research", see: Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chigao. Retrieved on 2007-11-24.

[edit] Other reference

  • Bowen, Louise de Koven. Growing up with a City. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926.
  • Deegan, Mary. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, Inc., 1988.
  • Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  • Polacheck, Hilda Satt. I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl. Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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Nobel Peace Prize Laureates


Persondata
NAME Addams, Jane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American activist and pacifist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Cedarville, Illinois, United States
DATE OF DEATH May 21, 1935
PLACE OF DEATH
ar:جان آدمز

bg:Джейн Адамс ca:Jane Addams de:Jane Addams et:Jane Addams es:Jane Addams fr:Jane Addams gl:Jane Addams hr:Jane Addams it:Jane Addams he:ג'יין אדאמס lt:Jane Addams nl:Jane Addams ja:ジェーン・アダムズ no:Jane Addams pl:Jane Addams pt:Jane Addams ru:Аддамс, Джейн sk:Jane Addamsová fi:Jane Addams sv:Jane Addams tr:Jane Addams zh:简·亚当斯

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