Jane Addams

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Jane Addams
Born	September 6, 1860 Cedarville, Illinois
Died	May 21, 1935 Chicago, Illinois
Occupation	American social reformer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) won the Nobel Peace Prize and was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House Movement.

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the eighth of nine children born into a prosperous miller family.^[1] 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] Settlement houses provided welfare for a neighborhood's poor and a center for social reform.

1 Hull House
2 Publications
3 References
- 3.1 Other reference
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Hull House

In 1889 she and 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 was probably most remembered through the institution of her adult night school which set the stage for 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 women's rights, ending child-labor, and the 1910 Garment Workers' Strike in which she was a mediator. 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). She was also actively involved with Pi Gamma Mu, the social science honor society, in 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 since has 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.

Jane Addams was also a charter member of the NAACP and the first vice-president of the National American Women's Suffrage Association in 1911. Some sources have documented that Addams spent little of her time around men and have speculated that Addams may have been homosexual.^{[citation needed]} Addams destroyed all letters she wrote to a close female companion, Mary Smith so their true relationship remains unclear.^{[citation needed]}

Jane Addams' work has influenced many other people, projects and organizations including for example the Highlander School of Myles Horton in New Market, Tennessee.

[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 Adams. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912. Copyright 1910. ,whats up 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.

[edit] References

Jane Addams on a US postage stamp of 1940

^ Jane Addams - Biography. The Nobel Foundation.
^ Davis, Linda H. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Random House, Inc. 2006.
^ ^a ^b Hall, Peter (2002). "Chapter 2", Cities of Tomorrow. Blackwell Publishing.

[edit] Other reference

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.