
Jane Laura Addams (6 September 1860 – 21 May 1935) was an American social reformer. She was known to be one of the most prominent reformers of the progressive era of the 1910s, and she was a leader of the women's suffrage and world peace movement.
Biography[]
Jane Laura Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois on 6 September 1860, and she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rockford College in 1881. With her friend Ellen Gates Starr, she opened the Hull House in Chicago in 1889, a settlement-house for immigrants and workers on the model of Toynbee Hall in London. As a pioneer in the new discipline of sociology, she had considerable influence over the planning of neighborhood welfare institutions throughout the United States. She was a progressive whose views encapsulated the movement, and she also supported Prohibition, women's suffrage, the African-American civil rights cause (co-founding the NAACP in 1909), child labor activism, and pacifism. In 1931, she received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She died in Chicago in 1935 at the age of 74.