Jane Addams

Activist

A co-founder of Chicago's Hull-House social settlement, Jane Addams was a reformer whose efforts earned her the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize (shared with Nicholas Murray Butler). Addams and her longtime companion Ellen Gates Starr founded the Hull-House settlement in 1889 as a center for social services for poor immigrants. Within a few years Addams had broadened her goals to include legislative protection for women and children, advocating women's suffrage, a juvenile court system, labor laws and compulsory education. She also became internationally famous as an advocate for peace and was a founder of the Women's Peace Party and the International League for Peace and Freedom. Although her pacifism and efforts at social reform led some to denounce her as an anarchist, socialist or communist, by the end of her career many of the social reforms she advocated had become federal policy.

Extra credit: Addams was educated at Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) and graduated in 1881... Her father was a friend of Abraham Lincoln's... Addams was the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize... She was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).