Jane Addams

Jane Addams was an American social reformer, settlement-house founder, and peace activist who became, in 1931, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was born Laura Jane Addams in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, the youngest of nine children of a state senator and miller, and grew up in a household shaped by Quaker-influenced ideals of public service.

Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881 and briefly attended the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania before health problems forced her to withdraw. Travels in Europe in the 1880s, including a visit to Toynbee Hall in London's East End, gave her the model for the kind of urban institution she would build in the United States.

In 1889, with her college friend Ellen Gates Starr, she opened Hull House on Chicago's near west side, providing classes, child care, a kindergarten, art programs, and meeting space for the immigrant neighborhood around it. Hull House grew into a cluster of more than a dozen buildings and helped shape the developing field of social work in the United States.

Addams campaigned for child labor laws, women's suffrage, public sanitation, and labor protections, and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. As a pacifist she chaired the Woman's Peace Party and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom during and after the First World War.

The name Jane is an English form of the French Jehanne, ultimately from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning "Yahweh is gracious." Common in England since the sixteenth century, it spread through Britain's North American colonies and remains one of the most enduring English female names.