Jane Addams was a Victorian woman born into a male-dominated society on September 6, 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois. Her father was a wealthy landowner and an Illinois senator who did not object to his daughter’s choice to further her education, but who wanted her to have a traditional life. For years after his death, Addams tried to reconcile the family role she was expected to play with her need to achieve personal fulfillment.

Jane was born into a rich family and could have very easily become a housewife with few worries. As a little girl, she once tried on a beautiful coat and asked her father, John Addams, if she could wear it to church. Jane’s father advised her to wear an old cloak instead, which would keep here warm without making the other girls at Sunday school feel badly about their own clothes. He added that, "it was very stupid to wear the sort of clothes that made it harder to have equality even (in church.)"

John Addams was a rich man who was respected by his neighbors and practically worshipped by Jane. Although he was not a member of any particular religious sect, he helped build the first Methodist Church in Cedarville, Ill., and the area’s first library was housed in the Addams’ home. A miller by trade, he invested in railroads, helped construct a school for area children and was a founder of the Second National Bank of Freeport. When he sought a Senate seat as a Whig in 1854, he easily won and was elected seven more times as a Republican.

Sarah Addams died when on January 14, 1863, when Jane was only a girl. Her father remarried in 1867 to a widow named Anna Hostetter Haldeman, who had two sons that John Addams raised as if they were his own. The new couple fought a great deal over money and Jane had a problematic relationship with her stepmother throughout her life.

John Addams ran a strict household, requiring his three girls who lived past infancy to bake him a perfect loaf of bread when they became twelve. Jane was sent to Rockford Female Seminary in 1877, but desperately wanted to one day attend Smith College, where she could earn a respectable degree.

Although the Seminary was not considered a college when Jane enrolled, it was a respected institution that was mostly attended by white, Protestant, middle-class women. However, Jane could not fit into even those broad categories. She was constantly asked to declare her faith and pressured to become a foreign missionary. But Jane never could accept Christ’s divinity. Writing to Ellen Gates Starr, a religious friend she met at Rockford and a lifelong friend, she said of Jesus, "I think of him simply as a Jew living hundreds of years ago, surrounding whom there is a mystery (and) a beauty incomprehensible to me. I feel a little as I do when I hear very fine music – that I am incapable of understanding."

Jane was elected president of her class and was adored by her classmates. One of them would write, "However mopey it might be elsewhere, there was intellectual ozone in (Jane’s) vicinity." Yet Jane struggled at Rockford to find a sense of direction and purpose, eventually deciding that she would study medicine after graduation. It was a difficult time for her and she would later write that women were not educated to become leaders, but to be "a symbol of her father’s protection and prosperity." Despite her bitterness, she graduated as valedictorian and was given a bachelor’s degree when Rockford earned college status soon after she left.

Though she was still trying to discover her purpose, Jane gave indications at Rockford that she would one day become a great reformer. She arranged the girls in her graduation class to dress alike so that no one would look much worse than any other. In a junior exhibition, she said to a gathered crowd that woman "wishes not to be a man, nor like man, but she claims the same right to independent thought and action."

Shortly after Jane’s return from Rockford, her father died of a ruptured appendix. Jane was devastated, but inherited property and stocks worth about $50,000 – worth nearly $1 million today. She was also given a 247-acre farm and other land. She enrolled at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia but dropped out after she was once again urged to become a missionary. She fell into a deep depression and suffered back pain and other ailments for the next eight years. It was the most difficult period of her life. In the midst of her depression, Jane decided to travel to Europe. She wrote her Rockford classmate Starr, "It seems quite essential for the establishment of my health and temper that I have a radical change. So I have accepted the advice given to every exhausted American – ‘go abroad’’’

But it wasn’t until Jane returned to Europe at the end of 1887 with Starr and another friend, Sarah Anderson, that her spirits improved. The 1888 tour of Europe was a turning point in Jane’s life. While there, she investigated the settlement house Toynbee Hall in Britain. Describing Toynbee Hall, she wrote to her sister, "It is a community for university men who live there, have their recreation and clubs and society all among the poor people, yet in the same style they would live in their own circle." She went on to say that Toynbee Hall was "so productive of good results in its classes and libraries so that it seems perfectly ideal."

Jane decided to found a settlement house of her own, with a key difference. Instead of being for men, it would be organized by and run for women trying to escape the family claim. She went to Chicago and, even though she did not believe in the divinity of Christ, she was baptized to gain the support of its religious community. She and Starr toured the city with an armada of politicians and reporters, all searching for an appropriate home in which to start her venture. On Halsted Street, she came upon a large house of a real-estate tycoon Charles J. Hull, who had died only weeks before. She negotiated with its current owner and was able to rent the second floor and a first floor reception room for $720 a year. She would eventually be given use of the entire house. Jane and Starr, who is recognized as a co-founder of Hull House, spent their first night in the mansion with housekeeper Mary Keyser on September 18, 1889.

Hull House was one of the first settlement houses in America, and became the best known. Within two years, the settlement was servicing 1,000 people a week and offered more than 50 clubs and classes on such topics as gymnastics, piano, Latin, art history and cooking. It catered mostly to the immigrant community in Chicago, and especially to women and children. Its success was largely responsible for the spread of settlements. In 1892, there were only six settlement houses in the United States, but there were 74 by 1897. Hull House was founded three years before the University of Chicago. Jane would lecture at the college’s School of Social Economics, the first U.S. school to teach social work to students. She was made a trustee of the school, which is now called the School of Social Service. On an Internet site, the school credits Hull House residents Sophonisba Breckenridge, Grace and Edith Abbott and Julia Lathrop with making the school nationally recognized. Despite the long list of materials that can be found on Jane by conducting a search on the University of Chicago’s official homepage (http://www.uchicago.edu/), she never did accept a full-time position there or at any other college.

Even though Jane's major concern in founding Hull House was to bring personal fulfillment to established women, she did a great deal of good for the community. She helped immigrants learn American ways and provided them with the means to procure jobs and shelter. She taught children and adults and gained visits and support from people such as Theodore Roosevelt, Clarence Darrrow, political economist Richard T. Ely and Henry Demarest Lloyd. One of its biggest supporters was the famous educator John Dewey, who became a Hull House trustee in 1897. After visiting Hull House for the first time in 1892, Dewey wrote to Adams, "Every day I stayed there only added to my conviction that you had taken the right way." The settlement was a great success and Jane became popular.

The ventures of Hull House were seemingly never-ending. In June of 1892, Addams and her longtime companion Mary Rozet Smith, an asthmatic woman who arrived at Hull House in 1890, opened up a boardinghouse for women that supplied its residents with emergency funds if they lost their jobs or were on strike. The boardinghouse became known as the "Jane Club" and eventually housed 50 women. In 1896, special quarters were built for male residents who also wanted to help the poor. Thirteen buildings would eventually surround the original Hull House.

Hull House also helped Chicago’s poor endure unforeseen hardships such as the Pullman Strike that began in June of 1894, when George Pullman of the Sleeping Car Factory laid off workers and slashed the wages of his remaining employees by 30 percent. Five thousand workers went on strike in protest and labor leader Eugene Victor Debs of the American Railroad Union organized a sympathy strike, in which he urged members of his massive union to detach Pullman cars from trains across the country. As riots broke out in Illinois and surrounding states, Jane was appointed to a six-member commission that sought to bring the two sides to arbitration.

Although Pullman refused to submit the dispute to arbitration, the commission continued its efforts to open up a dialogue between the two sides, When Debs was jailed for allegedly conspiring to obstruct the delivery of the mail, the Hull House helped raise money to pay his bail. The situation in Chicago became so serious that President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to maintain order and to ensure that trains could deliver the mail. The strike was finally broken when federal troops confronted rioters in Hammond, Indiana. George Pullman, who had treated his workers so badly, was hailed for saving the nation from lawless workers. When Pullman hired new workers, they signed a contract that prohibited them from becoming members of any union.

The same year of the Pullman Strike, Jane had become increasingly concerned with the filthiness of her neighborhood. Insisting that the streets be cleaned, she won a garbage collection contract that had previously been given out as a political favor because it paid $1,000 a year. Jane oversaw the cleanup of area streets for only a matter of months before giving the job to Hull House resident Amanda Johnson, but she was thrust into the national spotlight for taking a stand against corrupt politicians.

That battle continued when she campaigned for candidates trying to defeat the corrupt Johnny Powers, alderman of the 19^th Ward. Despite her best efforts, Powers never was unseated. Jane would later write, "We doubtless depended too much upon the idealistic appeal for we did not yet comprehend the element of reality always brought into the political struggle in such a neighborhood where politics deal so directly with getting a job and earning a living."

Jane also became convinced that the justice system mistreated juvenile delinquents. She would serve on a justice committee that wrote a bill creating a juvenile court. The bill was passed in February of 1899 and was the first law of its kind. Jane had participated in another great reform. By 1920, all but three states had created juvenile courts and the idea spread to Europe. Besides sympathizing with immigrants, women and children, Jane also wanted to improve conditions for blacks. She was a close friend of Mary White Ovington and William English Walling, who were founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Jane was not invited to the first NAACP meeting, but she soon became a member of its executive committee.

Despite her long list of accomplishments, Jane was not universally loved. Despite her baptism, many continued to call attention to the fact that Hull House did not preach the faith to the masses it clothed, fed and educated. The Chronicle announced, "The fact that Hull House conducts its great work for the uplifting of humanity without religious teaching of any kind will be news to many people who as Christians or as members of Christian organizations have given support to that enterprise."

Jane brushed off such complaints and residents at Hull House continued to play cards on Sundays. In the meantime, Jane gained prominence as a researcher, speaker and author. In 1895, Hull House published Hull House Maps and Papers, the first American attempt to systematically study a slum. Adams herself would write books such as The Spirit of Youth & the City Streets, which detailed cases that went through juvenile court and was published in 1909, Democracy and Social Ethics, published in 1902 and based on a series of lectures regarding interpersonal relationships that she gave at the University of Chicago in 1899, and My Friend, Julia Lathrop, published in 1935 shortly before her death.

One of Jane’s most controversial books, however, was A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, published in 1912. It detailed the lives of prostitutes Jane had personally interviewed and claimed that they lived such a life not because they lacked morality, but because of coercion and their lack of money. She went on to say prostitution would not be as prevalent if women could vote and call attention to the evils of prostitution. Jane had always believed women should vote, but did not focus on the issue early on in her philanthropic career because she believed there were too many other issues that needed attention. However, she became an outspoken suffragist as her career went on and was named vice president of the national American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911.

At perhaps the peak of her popularity in 1912, Jane became the first women ever to second the nomination of a presidential candidate when she nominated Theodore Roosevelt for the Progressive party. The press idolized her and Roosevelt gained the support of many women across the country because of Jane’s endorsement. The Philadelphia North American published an editorial that said, "When Jane Addams, the foremost citizen of Illinois rose in the Progressive convention and seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for President, it marked an important step forward in the cause of social and industrial justice. Jane Addams is one of the 10 greatest citizens of this republic. She is, moreover, probably the most widely beloved of her sex in all the world." Furthermore, Jane’s did not support the Progressive platform halfheartedly. She campaigned for Roosevelt by writing a series of six syndicated newspaper articles promoting his cause and was a member of the National Progressive Committee, the Illinois State Progressive Committee and the Cook County Progressive Committee.

However, Roosevelt and much of the country would denounce Jane when she expressed her opposition to World War I as chairman of the Women’s Peace Party. Jane once again became ill and was called a communist as Americans reacted to the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was only during the Great Depression that she was able to regain some of her previous popularity. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in May of 1931, but was too sick to journey to Oslo to collect the prize. She died as one of the most respected women in American history on May 21, 1935. She never married and apparently never had a romantic relationship with a man. Today, modern scholars debate whether or not Addams ever had an intimate relationship with Mary Rozet Smith or other women at Hull House, but the question has never been definitively resolved.

While Addams was a great organizer and reformer, it must be noted that she had the help of several ambitious women at Hull House who were progressive thinkers in their own right. Furthermore, she would have never been able to achieve so much without the many donations that she was able to secure from philanthropists. Today, the 13 buildings that surrounded the Hull House settlement have been destroyed, but the original mansion still stands as a museum. The Jane Addams Hull-House Association still operates in Chicago.