Jane Addams 1860 – 1935

Jane Addams was an American social philosopher, reformer, and pacifist and the most influential American woman public intellectual of her generation. In 1889 she co-founded Hull House in Chicago, the most famous of the American settlement houses, and from that base contributed in close dialogue with John Dewey and other pragmatists to the development of American pragmatism, social ethics, and progressive reform. Her Democracy and Social Ethics, Newer Ideals of Peace, and The Long Road of Woman's Memory took the experience of working women, immigrants, and the poor as central material for ethics and democratic theory. She was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Jane Addams was born at Cedarville, Illinois, in September 1860, the daughter of a state senator and miller who had been a friend of Lincoln. She graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, abandoned medical studies after illness and the death of her father, and after two long European tours opened in 1889, with her college friend Ellen Gates Starr, the settlement house Hull House at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets in Chicago — soon the most famous of America's hundreds of settlements. From 1919 she presided over the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Her books include Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916), Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930).

Addams developed a pragmatist social ethic — close to John Dewey's, who became her friend — in which democracy is a mode of associated living that requires sympathetic understanding across class, gender, and immigrant lines, and 'lateral progress' in which gains for the few become gains for the many. Pacifist opposition to American entry into the First World War cost her popularity but in 1931 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in Chicago in May 1935.