Easton Press Jane Addams books
Franklin Library Jane Addams books
Who was Jane Addams?
Jane Addams was a soft-spoken woman from a prosperous family. In 1889, she established the nation’s first settlement house in a poor Chicago neighborhood. In doing so, she launched a philanthropic movement that continues to this day.
Addams and other settlement house founders lived in the houses they founded. They taught English, provided childcare for working mothers, and counseled poor immigrants who were struggling to adapt to city life in a new country.
The idea behind the settlement house was that it was not a charity, which was a big departure from previous work by middle-class white women very much like Jane Addams’s mother’s generation. People who started settlement houses thought of the people surrounding them as their neighbors, not as their beneficiaries. The slogan was “neighboring with the poor.” Instead of a noblesse oblige approach to philanthropy, where wealthy people would go into poor neighborhoods and tell people what to do, settlement workers decided to live in the neighborhoods of the people they were seeking to help.
As Adams wrote in her 1910 autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull House, “The settlement is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve at the same time the over-accumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.”
Jane Addams grew up in rural Illinois. Her mother died when she was two, and she was brought up by her father, a prosperous businessman with strong Quaker values. When she graduated from college, she was part of a group of women born in the 1860s and 1870s who were called “New Women.” They were college educated but did not really have careers to go into, so Addams made her career helping others.
She began by acquiring a decaying mansion called Hull House in a neighborhood mainly populated by poor immigrants. They came to the United States with almost nothing and moved into conditions that were very different from the mostly rural areas they were used to.
Hull House offered neighborhood residents an art gallery, coffee house, gym, public kitchen, and music school. But Addams realized these social and cultural services had to be supplemented by political activism to truly help the poor.
She worked to improve education and workplace conditions, so the settlement house saw itself as advocating for social change. In 1893, Addams, her activist friend Florence Kelley, and a number of other reformers in Chicago successfully pressed for a law that protected sweatshop workers and banned child labor in Illinois.
Addams’s reform work earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Her success inspired other middle-class, college-educated women to found hundreds of settlement houses across the nation. Their work laid the foundation for the professional field of social work in the United States.
Jane Addams quotes
"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life."
"Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men."
"Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics."
"Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation."
"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself."
"Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled."
"America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live."
"The good we seek for ourselves is uncertain until it is secure for all of us."