laura jane addams

7/30/2019 Laura Jane Addams

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Peace Maker


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Laura Jane Addams

A recognized peace maker in the first third of the

twentieth century a pioneer in social worker in America,

a feminist and internationalist.

She was born on September 6, 1860 in Cedarville,Illinois, U.S.A.


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The eight of nine children. Her mother is Sarah WeberAddams and her father is John Addams, a prosperousmiller and a local political leader who was said to be agood friends with Abraham Lincoln, whose letters tohim began MyDear Double D-'edAddams.


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SchoolingAccumulative GPA out of 10 was a 9.862;

Class president

Head of the literary society Editor of the school magazine

Valedictorian of her class.

She received her bachelor's degree one year later whenthe school became accredited and changed its name tothe Rockford College for Women (1910).


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When graduation approached, Jane and her classmates

reminded each other of their "early ideals." In Twenty

Years at Hull House she states:

We believed, in our sublime self-conceit, that the difficulty

of life would lie solely in the direction of losing these

precious ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of

martyrdom and high purpose we had marked out forourselves, and we had no notion of the obscure paths of

tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame wherein, if we

held our minds open, we might learn something of the

mystery and complexity of life's purposes (1910, 63).

This statement shows how even in her younger years

Jane's beliefs were to help others.


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At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour toEurope with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited asettlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London's East End.

This visit helped to finalize the idea then current inher mind, that of opening a similar house in anunderprivileged area of Chicago.


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In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built byCharles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets.The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressedlater, being;

to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; toinstitute and maintain educational and philanthropic

enterprises and to investigate and improve theconditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.


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Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the

needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced

young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of

children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from

troubled people. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week.

There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club

meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for

adults in the evening more clubs or courses in whatbecame virtually a night school.


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The first facility added to Hull-House was an artgallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperativeboarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, amusic school, a drama group, a circulating library, anemployment bureau, a labor museum.


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As her reputation grew, Miss Addams was drawn intolarger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she wasappointed to Chicago's Board of Education andsubsequently made chairman of the School

Management Committee; in 1908 she participated inthe founding of the Chicago School of Civics andPhilanthropy and in the next year became the firstwoman president of the National Conference of

Charities and Corrections.


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In her own area of Chicago she led investigations onmidwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, andsanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept theofficial post of garbage inspector of the NineteenthWard, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910she received the first honorary degree ever awarded toa woman by Yale University.


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Jane Addams was an ardent feminist by philosophy. Inthose days before women's suffrage she believed thatwomen should make their voices heard in legislationand therefore should have the right to vote, but morecomprehensively, she thought that women shouldgenerate aspirations and search out opportunities torealize them.


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For her own aspiration to rid the world of war, JaneAddams created opportunities or seized those offered

to her to advance the cause. In 1906 she gave a courseof lectures at the University of Wisconsin summersession which she published the next year as abook,Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke for peace in

1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of thePeace Palace at The Hague and in the next two years,as a lecturer sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation,spoke against America's entry into the First World

War.


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In January, 1915, she accepted the chairmanship of theWomen's Peace Party, an American organization, and

four months later the presidency of the InternationalCongress of Women convened at The Hague largelyupon the initiative of Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutchsuffragist leader of many and varied talents. When this

congress later founded the organization called theWomen's International League for Peace andFreedom, Jane Addams served as president until 1929,as presiding officer of its six international conferences

in those years, and as honorary president for theremainder of her life.


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Publicly opposed to America's entry into the war, MissAddams was attacked in the press and expelled fromthe Daughters of the American Revolution, but shefound an outlet for her humanitarian impulses as anassistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief suppliesof food to the women and children of the enemynations, the story of which she told in her book Peaceand Bread in Time of War(1922).


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After sustaining a heart attack in 1926, Miss Addamsnever fully regained her health. She was beingadmitted to a Baltimore hospital on the very day,December 10, 1931, that the Nobel Peace Prize wasbeing awarded to her in Oslo. She died in 1935 threedays after an operation revealed unsuspected cancer.The funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull-

House.


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Sources

Bettis, Nicolle. Jane Addams. 8 Dec 2012

http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/janeadams.htmlJane Addams - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 8 Dec 2012

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.htmlhttp://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.htmlhttp://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.htmlhttp://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.htmlhttp://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.htmlhttp://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.html

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