Jane Addams
| Jane Addams | |
 |
|
| Born | September 6, 1860 Cedarville, Illinois |
|---|---|
| Died | May 21, 1935 (aged 74) Chicago, Illinois |
| Occupation | Activist |
| Parents | John H. Addams and Sarah Weber |
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.
Contents |
Biography
Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the eighth of nine children born into a prosperous, loving family.[1] Although she was the eighth child, three of her siblings died in infancy leaving only four to mature. [2] Her mother, Sarah Addams (née Weber), died from tuberculosis during pregnancy when Jane was just two years old. Jane's father, John H. Addams, was the President of The Second National Bank of Freeport, the Senator of Illinois from 1854 to 1870, and owned the local grain mill. Her father also was a founding member of the Republican Party and supported Abraham Lincoln. Jane was a first cousin twice removed to Charles Addams, noted cartoonist for The New Yorker.[3] She was born with Pott's disease which caused a curvature of the spine and health problems for Jane throughout her life.
Addams' father 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. She was educated in the United States and Europe, graduating from the Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in Rockford, Illinois. After Rockford, she wanted to pursue a degree in medicine, but her parents felt that she should not forget the common path of upper class young women. After her father's sudden death, Jane inherited $50,000 which she used to attend the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia. In 1885, Jane set off for a two year tour of Europe and went back again for a second tour in 1887. During her second tour, Jane visited London's Toynbee Hall which was a settlement house for boys based on the new philosophy of charity. Toynbee Hall was Jane's main inspiration for Hull House.
Hull House
In 1889 she and her college friend, Ellen Gates Starr,[4] co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, the first settlement house in the United States. The house was named after Charles Hull, who built the building in 1856. When starting out, all of the funding for the Hull House came from the $50,000 estate she inherited after her father passed away. Later in time, the Hull House was sponsored by Helen Culver, a wealthy real estate agent who had leased the house to the women at the start.[5] Jane and Ellen were the first two occupants of the house, which would later be the residence of about 25 women. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around 2000 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. Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In addition to making available services and cultural opportunities for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, the Hull House became a 13 building settlement and included a playground.
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. [6]
Addams worked with labour as well as other reform groups toward goals including the first juvenile-court law, tenement-house regulation, an eight-hour working day for women, factory inspection, and workers' compensation. She strove in addition for justice for immigrants and blacks, advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and supported woman suffrage. 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 United States, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic.[7]
Following the example of the original settlement house, Toynbee Hall (founded in 1885 in the East End of London as center for social reform), Hull House had, at its inception five years later, the main purpose of providing social and educational opportunities for working class people (many of them recent immigrants) in the surrounding neighborhood. The Hull House conducted careful studies of the Near West Side, Chicago community area, which housed many of Chicago's most recent European immigrants. The "residents" (volunteers at Hull were given this title) held classes in literature, history, art, domestic activities (such as sewing), and many other subjects. Hull House also held concerts that were free to everyone, offered free lectures on current issues, and operated clubs for both children and adults.
= The Hull House Neighborhood
Williard Motley, one of Hull House's resident writers, used the neighborhood: its geography, its people and its culture, in writing his 1949 best selling novel, Knock on Any Door. Symbolic interactionism was the guiding theory upon which Jane Addams and Ellen Starr based their assumptions when they embarked upon their Hull House experiment. Willard Motley's novel, Knock on Any Door, also was a treatise of sorts, on human behavior. The novel was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and John Derek. (John Derek's wife, Bo Derek, is best remembered for her role in the blockbuster movie, "10.")
Peace Movement
The harsh criticism received by Addams never stopped her from putting forth a great amount of effort and energy into Hull House. She even had the time to work on international peace efforts.
Jane was elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom which entailed her to traveled often to Europe and Asia. During these travels, she would spend time meeting with a wide variety of diplomats and civic leaders and reiterating her Victorian belief in women's special mission to preserve peace. Recognition of these efforts came with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Addams in 1931. As the first U.S. woman to win the prize, Addams was applauded for her "expression of an essentially American democracy of spirit."
Personal relationships
Throughout her life Addams was close to many women and was very good at eliciting the involvement of women from different classes in Hull House's programs. Her closest adult companion and friend was Mary Rozet Smith, who supported Addams's work at Hull House, and with whom she owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine.
The exact nature of their relationship has become a controversy after her death, with some historians believing Addams was a lesbian and in love with Smith, and others calling their relationship a romantic friendship, saying that while the women loved each other and lived together, that did not necessarily indicate a sexual relationship.[8][9][10][11][12]
Legacy
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. In 1901 she founded the Juvenile Court Committee which has since become the Juvenile Protective Association, a private nonprofit organization in Chicago that protects children from abuse and neglect. 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 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.
Jane Addams House is a residence hall built in 1947 at Connecticut College.
Hull House had to be demolished for the establishment of the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois in 1963 and relocated. The Hull residence itself was preserved as a monument to Jane Addams.
Jane Addams Business Careers Center is a high school in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Jane Addams Trail is a bicycling, hiking, snowmobiling, and cross country skiing trail which stretches from Freeport, Illinois to the Wisconsin state line. It is 12.85 miles (20.68 km) long, and is part of the larger Grand Illinois Trail, which is over 575 miles (925 km) long. [13] The trail is located near her birthplace of Cedarville, Illinois.[14]
See also
- Florence Kelley
- Flora Dunlap
- Mary Treglia
- Jane Addams Burial Site
- Jane Addams School for Democracy
- John H. Addams Homestead
- John Dewey
- Community practice social work
- Stanton Street Settlement
References
{{reflis
Further reading
- Bowen, Louise de Koven. Growing up with Pity. 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.
- Stiehm, Judith Hicks. "Champions for Peace : Women Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.” Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
External links
- Jane Addams entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Maurice Hamington Looks at her as "the first woman 'public philosopher' in United States history".
- Works by Jane Addams at Project Gutenberg
- Harvard University Library Open Collections Program. Women Working, 1870-1930. Jane Addams (1860-1935). A full-text searchable online database with complete access to publications written by Jane Addams.
- Works by Jane Addams listed at the Online Books Page
- Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
- The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Rev. Andrew Mearns
- Online photograph exhibit of Jane Addams from Swarthmore College's Peace Collection
- Gay Great article in Fyne Times magazine
- Taylor Street Archives; Hull House: Bowen Country Club
- Hull House-Wikipedia
|
||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 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 | |