Jane Muuans (1000-1991) Jane Addams was born in 1860 in the small town of Cedarville, Illinois. She was the eighth
of nine children. Her father was a state senator and a friend of Abraham Lincoln. He also
ran a profitable grain mill and provided well for his children.
Addams graduated in 1881 from the Rockford Female Seminary (a seminary is a school that
prepares people for religious work) as valedictorian of her class of seventeen. That same
year, her father died of a ruptured appendix. Grieving his death and troubled by her own
health problems (depression and chronic back pain), she spent the next six years seeking a
direction for her life. She took up the study of medicine in Philadelphia but came to realize
that she didn't care for it. She also toured Europe twice.
During an 1887 visit to London with her lifelong friend Ellen Start, Addams came upon the
Whitechapel District's Toynbee Hall, where activists worked to improve life in that
impoverished area. What she saw there inspired her.
In 1889, she and Miss Starr leased a large, vacant home in a working-class immigrant
district of Chicago. They called it Hull House. The two women worked hard to raise money
and were joined by prominent social reformers and wealthy local women who simply
wanted to help. Within two years. Hull House routinely served two thousand people a
There were kindergarten classes for the young, supervised social activities for older
children, and college-level courses for adults in the evenings, along with various clubs for
all ages and housing for single, working women.
Eventually "Hull House" became a complex of thirteen buildings, including an art gallery, a
public kitchen, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, and a playground. An outdoor camp was
also established near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
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In the wake of Jane's success, her influence and activism expanded. She worked to improve
the education system and in 1909 became the first woman president the National
Conference of Charities and Corrections. She also fought for labor reform and workers
rights, sponsored research into the causes of poverty and crime, and pressed for health and
housing regulation. In 1910, she was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from
Yale University. During that same year, she became president of the National Conference of , what is the setting