Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a prominent American social reformer of the Progressive Era. Addams co-founded Hull-House, the most famous Settlement House in the United States, and she helped to establish social work as a profession. Addams expanded the traditional domestic conception of women’s sphere by demonstrating that nursing the sick, protecting children, and maintaining sanitation required government lobbying by women as well as careful investigations of problematic conditions that led to reform legislation. Addams also became active in the international peace movement, viewing social justice, democracy, and peace as inextricably linked. In 1931, Addams became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881. Addams’s health complications caused by a spinal difficulty, and the depression she suffered following her father’s death, prevented her from completing her studies at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. On her subsequent trip to Europe in 1883-1885, Addams was shocked by the wretched poverty she witnessed in East London. During a second trip to Europe in 1887-1888, Addams formulated a plan to start a Settlement House in a poor neighborhood in Chicago and visited

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