98 Facts About Jane Addams

1.

Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author.

2.

Jane Addams was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States.

3.

In 1910, Jane Addams was awarded an honorary master of arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school.

4.

An advocate for world peace, and recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States, in 1931 Jane Addams became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

5.

Jane Addams was a radical pragmatist and arguably the first woman "public philosopher" in the United States.

6.

Jane Addams helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace.

7.

When Jane Addams died in 1935, she was the best-known female public figure in the United States.

8.

In 1863, when Jane Addams was two years old, her mother, Sarah Jane Addams, died while pregnant with her ninth child.

9.

Thereafter Jane Addams was cared for mostly by her older sisters.

10.

Jane Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, and attending Sunday school.

11.

Jane Addams adored her father, John H Addams, when she was a child, as she made clear in the stories in her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House.

12.

Jane Addams was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party, served as an Illinois State Senator, and supported his friend Abraham Lincoln in his candidacies for senator and the presidency.

13.

Jane Addams kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk, and Addams loved to look at it as a child.

14.

Jane Addams's father was an agricultural businessman with large timber, cattle, and agricultural holdings; flour and timber mills and a wool factory.

15.

Jane Addams was the president of The Second National Bank of Freeport.

16.

Jane Addams remarried in 1868 when Addams was eight years old.

17.

Jane Addams's father encouraged her to pursue higher education but close to home.

18.

Jane Addams was eager to attend the new college for women, Smith College in Massachusetts; but her father required her to attend nearby Rockford Female Seminary, in Rockford, Illinois.

19.

Jane Addams then advised that she not pursue studies but, instead, travel.

20.

Jane Addams decided that she did not have to become a doctor to be able to help the poor.

21.

Jane Addams, still filled with vague ambition, sank into depression, unsure of her future and feeling useless leading the conventional life expected of a well-to-do young woman.

22.

Jane Addams wrote long letters to her friend from Rockford Seminary, Ellen Gates Starr, mostly about Christianity and books but sometimes about her despair.

23.

Jane Addams's nephew was James Weber Linn who taught English at the University of Chicago and served in the Illinois General Assembly.

24.

Jane Addams decided to visit the world's first, Toynbee Hall, in London.

25.

At first, Jane Addams told no one about her dream to start a settlement house; but, she felt increasingly guilty for not acting on her dream.

26.

Starr loved the idea and agreed to join Jane Addams in starting a settlement house.

27.

The settlement house as Jane Addams discovered was a space within which unexpected cultural connections could be made and where the narrow boundaries of culture, class, and education could be expanded.

28.

However gifts from individuals supported the House beginning in its first year and Jane Addams was able to reduce the proportion of her contributions, although the annual budget grew rapidly.

29.

Jane Addams's adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today.

30.

One aspect of the Hull House that was very important to Jane Addams was the Art Program.

31.

Jane Addams wanted the house to provide a space, time and tools to encourage people to think independently.

32.

Jane Addams saw art as the key to unlocking the diversity of the city through collective interaction, mutual self-discovery, recreation and the imagination.

33.

Jane Addams used it to generate system-directed change, on the principle that to keep families safe, community and societal conditions had to be improved.

34.

Jane Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists.

35.

Jane Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth.

36.

Jane Addams helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws.

37.

Jane Addams identified the political corruption and business avarice that caused the city bureaucracy to ignore health, sanitation, and building codes.

38.

In 1912, Jane Addams published A New Conscience and Ancient Evil, about prostitution.

39.

Jane Addams believed that prostitution was a result of kidnapping only.

40.

Jane Addams called on women, especially middle class women with leisure time and energy as well as rich philanthropists, to exercise their civic duty to become involved in municipal affairs as a matter of "civic housekeeping".

41.

Jane Addams thereby enlarged the concept of civic duty to include roles for women beyond motherhood.

42.

Jane Addams argued that women, as opposed to men, were trained in the delicate matters of human welfare and needed to build upon their traditional roles of housekeeping to be civic housekeepers.

43.

Jane Addams led the "garbage wars"; in 1894 she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago's 19th Ward.

44.

Jane Addams had long discussions with philosopher John Dewey in which they redefined democracy in terms of pragmatism and civic activism, with an emphasis more on duty and less on rights.

45.

Jane Addams kept up her heavy schedule of public lectures around the country, especially at college campuses.

46.

Jane Addams declined offers from the university to become directly affiliated with it, including an offer from Albion Small, chair of the Department of Sociology, of a graduate faculty position.

47.

Jane Addams declined in order to maintain her independent role outside of academia.

48.

Jane Addams was appointed to serve on the Chicago Board of Education.

49.

Jane Addams was a charter member of the American Sociological Society, founded in 1905.

50.

Jane Addams gave papers to it in 1912,1915, and 1919.

51.

Jane Addams was the most prominent woman member during her lifetime.

52.

Generally, Jane Addams was close to a wide set of other women and was very good at eliciting their involvement from different classes in Hull House's programs.

53.

Nevertheless, throughout her life Jane Addams did have romantic relationships with a few of these women, including Mary Rozet Smith and Ellen Starr.

54.

Jane Addams's relationships offered her the time and energy to pursue her social work while being supported emotionally and romantically.

55.

Jane Addams would write to Smith, "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death".

56.

The letters show that the women saw themselves as a married couple: "There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together", Jane Addams wrote to Smith.

57.

Jane Addams saw her settlement work as part of the "social Christian" movement.

58.

Jane Addams learned about social Christianity from the co-founders of Toynbee Hall, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett.

59.

Hilda Satt Polacheck, a former resident of Hull House, stated that Jane Addams firmly believed in religious freedom and bringing people of all faiths into the social, secular fold of Hull House.

60.

The one exception, she notes, was the annual Christmas Party, although Jane Addams left the religious side to the church.

61.

In 1898, Jane Addams joined the Anti-Imperialist League, in opposition to the US annexation of the Philippines.

62.

Jane Addams signed up on the party platform, even though it called for building more battleships.

63.

Jane Addams went on to speak and campaign extensively for Roosevelt's 1912 presidential campaign.

64.

Miss Jane Addams shines, so respectful of everyone's views, so eager to understand and sympathize, so patient of anarchy and even ego, yet always there, strong, wise and in the lead.

65.

Jane Addams was elected president of the International Committee of Women for a Permanent Peace, established to continue the work of the Hague Congress, at a conference in 1919 in Zurich, Switzerland.

66.

Jane Addams continued as president, a position that entailed frequent travel to Europe and Asia.

67.

Jane Addams faced increasingly harsh rebukes and criticism as a pacifist.

68.

Jane Addams was a major synthesizing figure in the domestic and international peace movements, serving as both a figurehead and leading theoretician; she was influenced especially by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and by the pragmatism of philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.

69.

Jane Addams envisioned democracy, social justice and peace as mutually reinforcing; they all had to advance together to achieve any one.

70.

Jane Addams recruited social justice reformers like Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Emily Greene Balch to join her in the new international women's peace movement after 1914.

71.

Jane Addams's work came to fruition after World War I, when major institutional bodies began to link peace with social justice and probe the underlying causes of war and conflict.

72.

Jane Addams chaired this pathbreaking International Congress of Women at the Hague, which included almost 1,200 participants from 12 warring and neutral countries.

73.

Jane Addams was opposed to US interventionism and expansionism and ultimately was against those who sought American dominance abroad.

74.

Jane Addams's philosophy of peace is a type of positive peace.

75.

Jane Addams supported eugenics and was vice president of the American Social Hygiene Association, which advocated eugenics in an effort to improve the social 'hygiene' of American society.

76.

Jane Addams was a close friend of noted eugenicists David Starr Jordan and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and was an avid proponent of the ideas of G Stanley Hall.

77.

Jane Addams died on May 21,1935, at the age of 74, in Chicago and is buried in her hometown of Cedarville, Illinois.

78.

Jane Addams worked with other reform groups toward goals including the first juvenile court law, tenement-house regulation, an eight-hour working day for women, factory inspection, and workers' compensation.

79.

Jane Addams advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and she supported women's suffrage.

80.

Jane Addams was a strong advocate of justice for immigrants, African Americans, and minority groups by becoming a chartered member of the NAACP.

81.

Jane Addams sponsored the work of Neva Boyd, who founded the Recreational Training School at Hull House, a one-year educational program in group games, gymnastics, dancing, dramatic arts, play theory, and social problems.

82.

The main legacy left by Jane Addams includes her involvement in the creation of the Hull House, impacting communities and the whole social structure, reaching out to colleges and universities in hopes of bettering the educational system, and passing on her knowledge to others through speeches and books.

83.

Jane Addams paved the way for women by publishing several books and co-winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 with Starr.

84.

Jane Addams was intimately involved with the founding of sociology as a field in the United States.

85.

Hull House enabled Jane Addams to befriend and become a colleague to early members of the Chicago School of Sociology.

86.

Jane Addams actively contributed to the sociology academic literature, publishing five articles in the American Journal of Sociology between 1896 and 1914.

87.

Jane Addams worked with American philosopher George H Mead and John Dewey on social reform issues, including promoting women's rights, ending child labor, and mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers' Strike.

88.

All of these subjects were key items that Jane Addams wanted to see in society.

89.

Jane Addams Day was initiated by a dedicated school teacher from Dongola, Illinois, assisted by the Illinois Division of the American Association of University Women.

90.

The Jane Addams College of Social Work is a professional school at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

91.

Jane Addams Business Careers Center is a high school in Cleveland, Ohio.

92.

Jane Addams High School For Academic Careers is a high school in The Bronx, NY.

93.

Jane Addams House is a residence hall built in 1936 at Connecticut College.

94.

In 1973, Jane Addams was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

95.

In 2008 Jane Addams was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

96.

Jane Addams was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2012.

97.

In 2015, Jane Addams was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.

98.

Jane Addams was possibly the inspiration of the character of Edith Keeler in the Hugo Award winning 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which is widely considered to be one of the best episodes in the Star Trek series.