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(Laura) Jane Addams (September 6, 1860-May 21, 1935) won worldwide recognition in the first third of the twentieth century as a pioneer social worker in America, as a feminist, and as an internationalist.
She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous miller and local political leader who served for sixteen years as a state senator and fought as an officer in the Civil War; he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln whose letters to him began «My Dear Double D-'ed Addams». Because of a congenital spinal defect, Jane was not physically vigorous when young nor truly robust even later in life, but her spinal difficulty was remedied by surgery.
In 1881 Jane Addams was graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor's degree only after the school became accred the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be. At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London's East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being «to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago»1.
Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from troubled people. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull-House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, a labor museum.
As her reputation grew, Miss Addams was drawn into larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed to Chicago's Board of Education and subsequently made chairman of the School Management Committee; in 1908 she participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and in the next year became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In her own area of Chicago she led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, and sanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910 she received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman by Yale University.
Jane Addams was an ardent feminist by philosophy. In those days before women's suffrage she believed that women should make their voices heard in legislation and therefore should have the right to vote, but more comprehensively, she thought that women should generate aspirations and search out opportunities to realize them.
For her own aspiration to rid the world of war, Jane Addams created opportunities or seized those offered to her to advance the cause. In 1906 she gave a course of lectures at the University of Wisconsin summer session which she published the next year as a book, Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke for peace in 1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of the Peace Palace at The Hague and in the next two years, as a lecturer sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, spoke against America's entry into the First World War. In January, 1915, she accepted the chairmanship of the Women's Peace Party, an American organization, and four months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened at The Hague largely upon the initiative of Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist leader of many and varied talents. When this congress later founded the organization called the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Jane Addams served as president until 1929, as presiding officer of its six international conferences in those years, and as honorary president for the remainder of her life.
Publicly opposed to America's entry into the war, Miss Addams was attacked in the press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she found an outlet for her humanitarian impulses as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women and children of the enemy nations, the story of which she told in her book Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).
After sustaining a heart attack in 1926, Miss Addams never fully regained her health. Indeed, she was being admitted to a Baltimore hospital on the very day, December 10, 1931, that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo. She died in 1935 three days after an operation revealed unsuspected cancer. The funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull-House.Jane's work on peace:Jane did an enormous amount
when it came to peace. The American Union Against Militarism worked to
keep the US out of the war and received acknowledgment from the
government for allowing the Hull House to be used as a "conscription
center" (19952, 306). In 1915, the year after W.W.I began, she became
involved in the Woman's Peace Party and was elected national chairman.
With this she went to the International Woman's Conference in The Hague
and was chosen to head the commission to find an end to the war. This
included meeting ten leaders in neutral countries as well as those at
war to discuss mediation. This was the first significant international
effort by women against the war and was documented along with
co-workers Emily Balch and Alice Hamilton in Women at The Hague (1960, XI).
"At last I came upon a clearing in the FOREST, and by a well-worn path
approached the portal of a little white chapel whose gleaming I had
seen through the trees. I lifted the latch and entered through the
beautiful door. I gazed about me in wonder: I found myself standing in
a vast CATHEDRAL! I had entered into the mind and heart of a
COMPASSIONATE WOMAN" (1955, 1).
It was in 1917,
when the US joined the war, that Jane started to be strongly criticized
(www.lkwdpl.org/wihio/adda-jan.htm). In 1919, Jane was the American
delegate for the Second Women's Peace Conference where the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom began. Jane was elected the
first president, a position she held until her death (1960). She
assisted Herbert Hoover by supplying food and other necessities to
women and children of the opposing side. This is explained in further
detail in Peace and Bread in Time of War which she wrote in
1922 (http:nobel.sdsc.edu/laureates/peace-1931-1-bio.html). It has been
suggested that she was capable of criticism because her beliefs derived
from experiences in her neighborhood and "could always go back to the
source of her strength" (1960, 3). Community service:
When speaking about a co-worker, Jane once said, "It is good for a
social worker to be an artist too" (1960, 4). It was this creative and
compassionate mind that developed several organizations throughout the
community to help those in need. Jane not only helped those stricken by
poverty; she tried to get at the source. She believed that by changing
the laws, the poor would benefit. She worked on just about every aspect
of the lives of the poor from factory inspection to setting hours for
women workers. She also mandated schooling for children and stood up
for labor unions. Putting herself on the line for others was not
uncommon. During the Haymarket riot she supported the workers at a loss
of support for the Hull House. Instead of giving up she wrote articles
and toured the country lecturing in order to raise money
(www.lkwdpl.org/wihio/adda-jan.htm). She also helped lead
investigations on just about every issue around including narcotics,
milk supplies, sanitary conditions, and lead an investigation on
garbage collection. This led the mayor to assign her as the inspector
of garbage pickup in her ward
(http:www.sojourners.com/sojourners/970722.html). The women would
follow the trucks starting at six in the morning and made reports
including citizens arrests of landlords whose properties were unhealthy
ward (http:www.sojourners.com/sojourners/970722.html). Among other
children's issues, Jane was concerned with the working conditions of
young adults. After she spoke to the head of the Illinois Bureau of
Labor, he had a commission investigate. When they reported back, it was
the beginning of regulations which became the first laws in Illinois
concerning factories (1995). It was not only women and children's
issues she was concerned with, but also race issues, which led her to
help form the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP which
provoked people's criticism even more than her pacifism during the war.
They "accused her of being a socialist, an anarchist and a communist"
(ward (http:www.sojourners.com/sojourners/970722.html). This seems as
though it could not be further from the truth because when it came to
socialism, "she formally rejected it" (1993, 48).
Juvenile courts:
Because she felt it was unfair to try adolescents as adults, she began
to form the juvenile court system in which the juvenile court would act
as a nurturing parent. The first juvenile court opened in 1899 in
Chicago. The probation officer was a resident of the Hull House and was
paid by a committee lead by its trustees and residents. By 1920, only
three states did not have juvenile courts (1995).
Children's issues:Jane
seemed to care a great deal about children and even met with Teddy
Roosevelt in 1909 to discuss a conference about the best type of care
to give children. She states, "It brought the entire subject before the
country as a whole and gave to social work a dignity and a place in the
national life which it had never known before" (1995). Jane, along with
Lillian Wald, wanted to create a United States Children's Bureau to
protect and take care of battered wives and children. They protested
against child labor and wanted decent care for children. In her essay
called "Women War and Babies" Jane states: As
women we are the custodians of the life of the ages and we will no
longer consent to its reckless destruction. We are particularly charged
with the future of childhood, the care of the helpless and the
unfortunate, and we will no longer endure without protest that added
burden of maimed and invalid men and poverty-stricken women and orphans
which war places on us. We have builded by the patient drudgery of the
past the basic foundations of the home and of peaceful industry of the
home and of peaceful industry; we will no longer endure that hoary evil
which in an hour destroys or tolerate that denial of the sovereignty of
reason and justice by which war and all that makes for war today render
important the idealism of the race" (1952, 307).
Sociological influence:In
1919, she was a main concern for the US and labeled the most dangerous
woman in America. This seems to be the point where her role in
sociology fell. Although she made great contributions to the field of
sociology, she is rarely acknowledged. She was looking for it to
develop in a different direction. One very important reason Jane was
not looked at as a sociologist was because she was female. Social work,
which is mainly seen as dominated by women, and sociology, as dominated
by men, formed shortly after W.W.I. Those women trained in Chicago
before 1918 were then pushed toward social work and were rarely hired
in sociology within universities. The American Sociological Society
restricted women's participation to the office. This patriarchal
monopoly was very much present at the University of Chicago and
disagreed with Addam's philosophy. This field may have been different
had Jane stayed with it, resulting in more professional careers in
sociology (1986). Although she truly loved to learn, she had several
reasons to question universities. One of them being that they cautioned
young women about preparing for a new life that would include a husband
and family (1993). Although Jane has been labeled a social worker, it
is very apparent that she played a large role in sociology. It is
difficult to determine where because women were basically discouraged
from entering the field. One author suggests that her work may have
been understood since most sociologists never cited work done by close
colleagues. Kasler who studied early German sociologists formed
criteria to determine whether or not someone is a sociologist which
included: - occupy a chair of sociology or teach it
- membership in the German Sociological Society (changed in this case to the American Sociological Society)
- co-authorship in sociological articles or textbooks
- self-definition as a "sociologists"
- definition by others as a sociologists (1986, 89).
Jane met all of these requirements. Not only was she ignored, but those
she associated with; WEB DuBois, who was a black sociologist, were as
well such as. While she was strongly influenced by the British, the
American white men were following the works of the French and German.
Jane did not let this discourage her; she simply made the Hull House
into a meeting place for both men and women sociologist's of any race
to gather (1988, 13).
In 1935, three days after it was
discovered that Jane had cancer, she died (Committee
http:nobel.sdsc.edu/laureates/peace-1931-1-bio.html). It has been
estimated that the service in the Hull House courthouse was visited by
more than 2,000 people an hour. At the time of her death she had
written ten books, more than two thousand articles and had given
hundreds of speeches (1995). It is apparent that Jane Addams
was an extraordinary woman. She has done several things to improve
lives from the private to the public sphere. She is one of the reasons
society lives the way they do. ""ane Addams founded Hull House with her friend, Ellen Starr. Addams was the first American women to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Jane Addams was an ardent femist, known for works that include: "Democracy and Social Ethics," "The Excellent Becomes the Permanent," "The Long Road of Woman's Memory," "My Friend, Julia Lathrop," and "Newer Ideals of Peace." Read more about the life and works of Jane Addams. Her most popular work was "Twenty Years at Hull House," her autobiography."" Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.
In his own way each man must struggle, lest the normal law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.
Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.
Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt.
Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.
We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or class; but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.
We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all [people], nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all [people], but as that which affords a rule for living as well as a test of faith.
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.
Civilization is a method of living and an attitude of equal respect for all people.
Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.
I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.
National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.
An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply low rental.
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 essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
The excellent becomes the permanent. |
