Sculpture and children in fountains - Jane Addams Houses

Chicago or: Chi-Town or Chitown, Chicagoland, The White City, City by the Lake, City of the Big Shoulders, City of Broad Shoulders, City of the Century, The 312, City on the Make, The City That Works, The Big Onion, City in a Garden, Hog-Butcher to the World, Beirut by the Lake, New York Done Right, Illville, I Will City, Paris on the Prairie, Sweet Home, Heart of America, The 773, The Alley Capital of America

Jane Addams (1860–1935), American social reformer and pacifist, cowinner (with Nicholas Murray Butler) of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931. She is probably best known as a cofounder of Hull House in Chicago, one of the first social settlements in North America. Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in Illinois in 1881 and was granted a degree the following year when the institution became Rockford College. Following the death of her father in 1881, her own health problems, and an unhappy year at the Woman’s Medical College, Philadelphia, she was an invalid for two years. During neither subsequent travel in Europe in 1883–85 nor her stay in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1885–87 did she find a vocation. In 1887–88 Addams returned to Europe with a Rockford classmate, Ellen Gates Starr. On a visit to the Toynbee Hall settlement house (founded 1884) in the Whitechapel industrial district in London, Addams’s vague leanings toward reform work crystallized. Upon returning to the United States, she and Starr determined to create something like Toynbee Hall. In a working-class immigrant district in Chicago, they acquired a large vacant residence built by Charles Hull in 1856, and, calling it Hull House, they moved into it on September 18, 1889. Eventually the settlement included 13 buildings and a playground, as well as a camp near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Many prominent social workers and reformers—Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and Grace and Edith Abbott—came to live at Hull House, as did others who continued to make their living in business or the arts while helping Addams in settlement activities.