I’m Mr. Beat Here’s the story of one of the most important
people in American history.
But her impact as a reformer goes way beyond the United States.
In my opinion, she’s the face of the entire Progressive Era, that period of widespread
reform and activism between the 1890s and 1920s.
Who am I talking about?
Why Jane Addams, of course.
Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois on September 6, 1860.
The youngest of eight children, by most measures Jane’s family was very well off.
Her dad, John, was a successful businessman and a member of the Illinois Senate who even
knew Abraham Lincoln.
Jane adored her father.
He definitely was a big influence on her life.
Sadly, she never really knew her mother, who died in childbirth when Jane was just two.
Growing up, Jane was mostly taken care of by her older sisters.
When Jane was four, she got Pott’s disease, which was basically tuberculosis of the spine.
This caused a curvature in her spine, which led to health problems the rest of her life.
Growing up, she had a limp due to this, and often could not run as quickly as the kids
she played with.
Jane’s father remarried when she was eight to Anna Haldeman.
Jane and Anna got along quite well, and Jane was quite influenced by Anna’s devotion
to the poor who lived in Cedarville.
That, combined with reading about the poor in Charles Dickens novels, would eventually
cause Jane to want to devote her life to helping the poor.
With the encouragement of her father, Jane decided to attend college, which is not something
most girls did in the 1870s.
But Jane was extremely smart, and college wasn’t no thing, yo.
She graduated from Rockford Female Seminary, which is now Rockford University, in 1881
at the top of her class, also among the first there to ever get a bachelor’s degree.
That summer, Jane’s father suddenly died of appendicitis.
I’ve had appendicitis, by the way, and it sucks.
I didn’t die from it, though.
Anyway, this video isn’t about me.
Jane and her sibling each inherited $50,000, which today translates to nearly $1.3 million.
Jane decided she wanted to study medicine.
That fall, she joined her sister Alice to go to the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia.
While she was ambitious, a few things came up that took her away from her
goals.
First of all, she still had health problems.
Her spine was still giving her trouble, and her brother-in-law Harry performed surgery
to attempt to straighten it.
She ended up having a nervous breakdown which caused her to have to withdraw from med school.
After this, Jane returned to Cedarville to take care of her stepmom, Anna, who had gotten
very sick.
Meanwhile, Jane was in a funk, now not knowing what to do with her life.
So she went to Europe.
Beginning in August 1883, and over the following four years, she would travel all over Europe,
occasionally coming back home, but constantly looking for direction while struggling with
the despair associated with not knowing her true purpose.
Through her travels, research, and conversion to Presbyterianism, she realized she didn’t
have to be a doctor to help the poor.
She also realized she didn’t need a man.
Indeed, many historians today speculate that she was not sexually attracted to men at all,
and in fact was in at least two romantic relationships with other women.
In the summer of 1887, Addams read a magazine article that would change her life forever.
The article was about a new idea called a settlement house.
A settlement house was a safe place in the middle of the city, usually poverty-stricken,
immigrant neighborhoods, where folks could get medical care, food, and job, education,
and other services.
Jane loved the idea.
In December 1887, she and some of her friends went to London to check out Toynbee Hall,
the first settlement house.
Jane was amazed.
She later described it: “It is so free of 'professional doing good,' so unaffectedly
sincere and so productive of good results in its classes.”
Addams came back home wanting to start her own settlement house.
She told her good friend, who today historians call her first girlfriend, Ellen Gates Starr,
and Starr was so excited about it that she wanted to join her.
The two found a run-down mansion in the Near West Side area of Chicago that had been built
by a dude named Charles Hull back in 1856.
That’s why folks called it Hull House.
Due to some donations, Addams and Starr were able to start renting the house.
However, Jane invested much of her own money into repair costs and buying furniture for it.
Eventually, wealthy folks like Helen Culver, Louise DeKoven Bowen, and others contributed
to rent and maintenance costs.
Addams and Starr were the first two to live in the house, but eventually they were joined
by 23 other women.
They opened it up to the public on September 18, 1889.
Word got out, and soon the Hull House became not only a place that offered social services,
but it became kind of like a college, as it became a center for research, study, and debate.
Some of the research included looking at housing concerns, the spread of diseases, drug use,
and kids not going to school.
One big goal of Addams and Starr was to get young, educated folks in direct contact with
the rest of the city.
In other words, get them out of their bubbles.
Once Hull House started offering services to anyone who showed up, this happened quite
a bit.
In 1891, Dr. Harriett Rice, an African American who could not practice medicine in any American
hospital due to the racism of the time, joined the Hull House to offer medical treatment
for poor families.
That same year, Hull House was already hosting 2,000 folks each week.
The first facility Jane added to the Hull House was an art gallery.
She took great pride in her art program.
Addams designed it to challenge the industrialized education of the time, in which students were
only trained for one specific job.
She saw the arts as a way to break free from that system, allowing students to expand their
horizons.
The second facility Jane added was a public kitchen, open to anyone who wanted a free meal.
Next came a coffee house, a gym, a swimming pool, a boarding club for girls, a book bindery,
an art studio, a music school, a drama club, a library, an employment bureau, and even
a museum.
Eventually, Hull House expanded to 13 buildings.
Hull House also offered night school for working adults, various clubs for kids, a day care,
a bathhouse, and a theater.
Addams and her colleagues helped people get jobs through training programs.
With the help of folks like Florence Kelly, the country began to take notice of Hull House.
Kelley, who deserves a video all her own, lived at Hull House from 1891 to 1899, and
was instrumental getting laws passed based on what they were researching there.
She went around talking about crazy ideas like an 8-hour work day, a minimum wage, and
children not working in factories.
By 1893, the Illinois legislature had passed the first law limiting factory work for women
to 8 hours a day and a law banning children under age 14 from working.
This was the beginning of the Progressive Era, and much of the credit went back to Jane
Addams, who was now asked to go around and speak about her PROGRESS at Hull House.
See what I did there?
In addition to going around giving speeches and writing articles for Ladies Home Journal,
Addams began to lobby for progressive legislation just like Kelly did.
Issues important to Jane included giving women the right to vote, getting kids out of factories
and in school, establishing safe areas where children could play, and increasing the political
power of the poor and immigrants.
Addams literally was a big reason why the entire field of sociology became a thing.
Thanks to her efforts at Hull House, the University of Chicago established the first Sociology
department in 1892.
Addams would later teach at that university, by the way.
In 1894, Jane founded the Chicago Federation of Settlements to promote expanding the settlement
house movement in the city.
The next year, Jane became fed up with the nasty conditions around Hull House that caused
rats to terrorize the alleys and streets nearby.
The root of the problem?
People just dumping their trash wherever.
She had complained to the city for years, but they ignored her, so she installed garbage
incinerators near Hull House herself.
Chicago did recognize her efforts, and appointed her the garbage inspector of the 19th Ward,
paying her $1,000 a year.
In 1898, she joined the Anti-Imperialist League to protest the United States annexing the
Philippines.
In 1901, Jane, along with her colleagues at Hull House, founded what would later evolve
into the Juvenile Protective Association, an organization that created a special court
for kids who got in trouble with the law….this was all before the government handled this,
mind you.
Meanwhile, she had become very close to Mary Rozet Smith, a fellow activist and rich donor
of Hull House.
The two eventually also had a romantic relationship and lived exclusively together.
Even though women could not marry other women back then, they acted as a married couple
for at least 30 years.
In 1905, Chicago’s Board of Education appointed Addams chairman of the School Management Committee.
Three years later, she helped found the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy.
In 1909, she went national, becoming the first female president of the National Conference
of Charities and Corrections.
By this time, Jane Addams was not only well known in the country, but well known in the
world for her work, and she had already traveled all over the place letting everyone know what
she and her colleagues had learned at Hull House.
Many of her lectures were turned into books.
In 1911, members of the extremely influential National American Women’s Suffrage Association
elected Addams as their Vice President.
The next year, she supported the newly created Progressive Party, aka Bull Moose Party, the
political party led by followers of Teddy Roosevelt.
She nominated Roosevelt at the party convention on August 5, 1912, even though she disagreed
with Roosevelt’s more aggressive foreign policy.
After World War One broke out in 1914, Addams decided to dedicate the rest of her life making
war no longer a thing.
For starters, she was a vocal opponent of the United States entering that war.
In 1915, members of the Woman’s Peace Party elected her to be the national chairman, and
she also presided over the International Congress of Women, the first international effort to
end the war.
Emily Balch, who worked with Jane at the conference, wrote about her in her journal: “Miss Addams
shines, so respectful of everyone's views, so eager to understand and sympathize, so
patient of anarchy and even ego, yet always there, strong, wise and in the lead.
No 'managing', no keeping dark and bringing things subtly to pass, just a radiating wisdom
and power of judgement.”
Regardless, in 1917 the United States joined the war, and many Americans turned on her,
calling her a traitor to her country, a naive idealistic reformer, and even calling her
“emotional.”
Heck, the Daughters of the American Revolution even kicked her out.
Still, she assisted Herbert Hoover providing humanitarian aid to women and children displaced
by the war.
After the war was over, Jane escalated her pacifism activism. Hey that rhymes!
She helped start the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and denounced
the Treaty of Versailles, which they said would ultimately not help bring world peace
since it was all about revenge.
Hmmm.
I think they were later proved right?
Yeah.
In 1920, she helped start the American Civil Liberties Union.
That same year, women FINALLY got the right to vote.
By the 1920s, there were around 500 settlement houses in the United States.
Remember, Jane started the very first one, and Hull House continued to be a powerhouse at
this time.
And Addams continued to travel everywhere giving lectures.
Eventually this would take a toll on her health.
In 1926, Jane suffered her first heart attack, and she was never quite the same after it.
She suffered her second heart attack on the same day she also became the very first American
woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
December 10, 1931.
She never fully regained her health.
She died of abdominal cancer on May 21, 1935.
Her family buried her in her hometown of Cedarville.
The next day, the New York Times wrote of the most flattering obituaries I’ve ever seen:
Miss Addams has been called ‘the greatest woman in the world,’ the ‘mother of social
service,’ ‘the greatest woman internationalist’ and the ‘first citizen of Chicago.’
With her idealism, serene, unafraid, militant, was always paramount.
Devoted to the cause of social and political reform, to the betterment of the economic
condition of the masses, to world peace and to internationalism, Miss Addams’s influence
was world-wide.
She was, perhaps, the world’s best-known and best-loved woman.
Dang, New York Times.
That sums it up way better than I ever could.
So I guess we’ll end the video right there.
So this video is part of a collaboration called Project Herstory.
It features a bunch of history YouTubers, and we all released videos about important
women throughout all of history.
So check out the entire playlist. I've linked it in the description.
In case you didn’t know, March is Women’s History Month, but I challenge us to
make EVERY freaking month women’s history month.
Eh?
Thanks for watching.