In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
JA–1860–2026  ·  The Trailblazers

Jane
Addams

1860  —  1935
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Jane Addams
Jane Addams
Cedarville, Illinois, 1860  ·  Chicago, 1935

She moved into the slum to learn from her neighbours — and was called the most dangerous woman in America for opposing a war.

In 1889 she and Ellen Gates Starr took an old mansion on Halsted Street among Chicago's immigrant poor. Hull-House grew to thirteen buildings, and its residents drove the first juvenile court in the world, factory inspection, and child-labour reform. She co-founded the NAACP and the ACLU. When she opposed the First World War, the press turned on her and the DAR expelled her.

In 1931 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Consultation

Until it is secured
for all of us.

Addams speaks from 1,458 chunks across eight works — Twenty Years at Hull-House, Democracy and Social Ethics, Newer Ideals of Peace, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, The Long Road of Woman's Memory, Peace and Bread in Time of War, and Hull-House Maps and Papers.

Her discourse holds Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, the photographic exposé of the tenement city her settlement served.

Ask her why she moved in instead of writing a cheque. Ask her what Hull-House would look like in a city today. Ask her whether the settlements just made immigrants more American. Ask her what it cost to oppose the war.

Hull-HouseSettlement MovementSocial EthicsDemocracyChild LabourImmigrationPeace
…the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Twenty Years at Hull-House  ·  Chapter VI  ·  1910

Drawn From the Corpus