Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House movement, and one of the first American women to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the eighth of nine children born into a prosperous, loving family. Although she was the eighth child, three of her siblings died in infancy leaving only six to mature. Her mother, Sarah Addams (née Weber), died from tuberculosis during pregnancy when Jane was just two years old. Jane's father, John H. Addams, was the President of The Second National Bank of Freeport, the Senator of Illinois from 1854 to 1870, and owned the local grain mill; he remarried when Jane was eight. Her father also was a founding member of the Republican Party and supported Abraham Lincoln. Jane was a first cousin twice removed to Charles Addams, noted cartoonist for The New Yorker. She was born with Pott's disease which caused a curvature of the spine and health problems for Jane throughout her life.

Addams's father encouraged her to pursue a higher education, but not at the expense of losing her femininity and the prospect of marriage and motherhood, as expected of upper class young women. She was educated in the United States and Europe, graduating from the Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in Rockford, Illinois. After Rockford, she spent seven months at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia, but dropped out. Her parents felt that she should not forget the common path of upper class young women. After her father's sudden death, Jane inherited $50,000. In 1885, Jane set off for a two year tour of Europe with her stepmother, returned home, and felt bored and restless, indifferent about marriage and wanting more than just the conventional life expected of well-to-do ladies. After painful spinal surgery, she returned to Europe again for a second tour in 1887, this time with her best friend Ellen Starr and a teacher friend. During her second tour, Jane visited London's Toynbee Hall which was a settlement house for boys based on the new philosophy of charity. Toynbee Hall was Jane's main inspiration for Hull House.
In 1889 she and her college friend, Ellen Gates Starr, co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, one of the first settlement house in the United States. The house was named after Charles Hull, who built the building in 1856. When starting out, all of the funding for the Hull House came from the $50,000 estate she inherited after her father passed away. Later, the Hull House was sponsored by Helen Culver, the wealthy real estate agent who had initially leased the house to the women. Jane and Ellen were the first two occupants of the house, which would later be the residence of about 25 women. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around 2000 people. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In addition to making available services and cultural opportunities for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, the Hull House became a 13 building settlement and included a playground.
Jane Addams speaks to a crowd, 1915

Hull House also served as a women's sociological institution. Addams was a friend and colleague to the early members of the Chicago School of Sociology, influencing their thought through her work in applied sociology and, in 1893, co-authoring the Hull-House Maps and Papers that came to define the interests and methodologies of the School. She worked with George H. Mead on social reform issues including promoting women's rights, ending child labor, and the mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers' Strike. Although academic sociologists of the time defined her work as "social work", Addams did not consider herself a social worker. She combined the central concepts of symbolic interactionism with the theories of cultural feminism and pragmatism to form her sociological ideas.

Addams worked with labor as well as 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. She strove in addition for justice for immigrants and blacks, advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and supported woman suffrage. Among the projects that the members of the Hull House opened were the Immigrants' Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the United States, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic.

Following the example of the original settlement house, Toynbee Hall (founded in 1885 in the East End of London as center for social reform), Hull House had, at its inception five years later, the main purpose of providing social and educational opportunities for working class people (many of them recent immigrants) in the surrounding neighborhood. The Hull House conducted careful studies of the Near West Side, Chicago community area, which housed many of Chicago's most recent European immigrants. The "residents" (volunteers at Hull were given this title) held classes in literature, history, art, music, domestic activities (such as sewing), and many other subjects. Hull House also held concerts that were free to everyone, offered free lectures on current issues, operated clubs for both children and adults, and was a regular meeting place for labor unions. Jane encouraged her clients' pride in their ethnic heritage, was not condescending, and felt that the residents (employees) could learn as much from their clients as vice-versa. Several of her residents brought unique talents and backgrounds in industrial medicine research, juvenile justice, labor organizing, arts, and education. Jane also was a pioneer in early childhood education, at a time when many children worked. In conjunction with Frances Crane and Frances' father, Richard Teller Crane, the Mary Crane Center serving preschool age children was built and dedicated in 1908. The Mary Crane Center continues to operate in four Chicago locations, and recently celebrated its Centennial at UIC and Hull House.
The harsh criticism received by Addams, both for her outspoken pacifism during World War I and her defense of immigrants' civil rights during a period when anarchism and socialism were greatly feared in the United States, never stopped her from putting forth a great amount of effort and energy into Hull House. She even had the time to work on international peace efforts. She spoke and campaigned extensively for Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Presidential campaign on the Progressive Party, but was disillusioned in his 1916 campaign when he abandoned his earlier reform platform.

Jane was elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom which entailed her to travel often to Europe (both during and after World War I) and Asia. During these travels, she would spend time meeting with a wide variety of diplomats and civic leaders and reiterating her Victorian belief in women's special mission to preserve peace. Recognition of these efforts came with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Addams in 1931. As the first U.S. woman to win the prize, Addams was applauded for her "expression of an essentially American democracy."

Personal relationships

Throughout her life Addams was close to many women and was very good at eliciting the involvement of women from different classes in Hull House's programs. Her closest adult companion and friend was Mary Rozet Smith, who supported Addams's work at Hull House, and with whom she owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine.

The exact nature of their relationship has become a controversy after her death, with some historians believing Addams was a lesbian and in love with Smith, and others calling their relationship a romantic friendship, saying that while the women loved each other and lived together, that did not necessarily indicate a sexual relationship.
Addams was a member of the NAACP, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and the first vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911. In 1901 she founded the Juvenile Court Committee which has since become the Juvenile Protective Association, a private nonprofit organization in Chicago that protects children from abuse and neglect. She was also actively involved with Pi Gamma Mu, the social science honor society, from the 1920s until her death, because of its emphasis on social service and the humanization of the social science disciplines. In 1998 the British Columbia Branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom commissioned Canadian artist Christian Cardell Corbet to create a bronze medallion of Addams to celebrate her life and achievements. The medallion has since been collected by several important museums.

The Jane Addams Peace Association, together with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, give the annual Jane Addams Children's Book Awards to children's books that promote peace, equality, multiculturalism, and peaceful solutions.

A 2007 joint resolution of the Illinois General Assembly, HJR 19 (Currie), would rename the Northwest Tollway as the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway.

Jane Addams House is a residence hall built in 1947 at Connecticut College.

Hull House had to be demolished for the establishment of the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois in 1963 and relocated. The Hull residence itself was preserved as a monument to Jane Addams.

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

The Jane Addams Trail is a bicycling, hiking, snowmobiling, and cross country skiing trail which stretches from Freeport, Illinois to the Wisconsin state line. It is 12.85 miles (20.68 km) long, and is part of the larger Grand Illinois Trail, which is over 575 miles (925 km) long. The trail is located near her birthplace of Cedarville, Illinois.