Jane Addams dropped out of medical school and invented American social work
Jane Addams wanted to be a doctor so she could live among the poor. Illness and a breakdown ended that plan after one year. Instead, after visiting a London settlement house, she opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889, and in 1931 became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Born on 6 September 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois, she was the youngest of eight children in a prosperous family. Her mother died when Jane was two, and by eight she had lost four siblings. Spinal tuberculosis at four left her with a curved back and a limp; she later recalled feeling too plain to walk beside her father in his Sunday clothes. That father, John H. Addams, was a mill owner, bank president and Illinois state senator who had backed his friend Abraham Lincoln, and she treasured a Lincoln letter kept in his desk.
He insisted she study close to home, so instead of Smith College she went to Rockford Female Seminary, where she edited the paper and was valedictorian of the class of 1881. That summer he died suddenly of appendicitis. She began medicine at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, but back trouble, surgery and a nervous breakdown stopped her, and a long European tour followed. Reading Tolstoy, Mazzini and John Stuart Mill fed a restless sense that a comfortable, conventional life was wasted.
In 1887 she read about settlement houses, where educated people lived among the urban poor. Visiting Toynbee Hall in London, the first such house, she was struck that it avoided what she called professional doing good. With her friend Ellen Gates Starr she took over a run-down Chicago mansion built by Charles Hull in 1856, paying most costs herself until donors such as Helen Culver let the house operate rent-free. Hull House offered wide-ranging services to poor, mostly immigrant families.
Addams became a leading Progressive Era reformer and is often called the first woman public philosopher in the United States. She argued that city departments such as sanitation and schooling grew out of household work traditionally done by women. Yale gave her an honorary degree in 1910, its first to a woman; she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920; and she shared the 1931 peace prize with Nicholas Murray Butler. By her death on 21 May 1935 she was the country's best-known female public figure.
Source: Jane Addams
