Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the youngest of eight children born into a prosperous Yankee family; her father was politically prominent. She was the eighth child but three of her siblings died in infancy, and another died at age 16, leaving only four by the time Addams was age eight. Her mother, Sarah Addams (née Weber), died during birth when Jane was two years old.

Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, and attending Sunday school. When she was age four, she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, Potts's disease, which caused a curvature in her back and lifelong health problems. As a child, she thought she was "ugly" and later remembered wanting not to embarrass her father, when he was dressed in his Sunday best, by walking down the street with him.

Addams adored her father when she was a child, as she made clear in the stories she told in her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). John Huey Addams was an agricultural businessman owning large timber, cattle and agricultural holdings, flour and timber mills and a woolen factory. He was the president of The Second National Bank of Free-port. He remarried in 1868, when Jane was eight years old. His second wife was Anna Hostetter Haldeman, the widow of a miller in Freeport. She had two sons: Harry, age 20, and George, age 7.

John Addams was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party, served as an Illinois State Senator (1855 – 70), and supported his friend Abraham Lincoln in his candidacies, for Illinois senator (1854) and the presidency (1860). John Addams kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk, and Jane Addams loved to look at it as a child.

In her teens, Addams had big dreams — to do something useful in the world. Long interested in the poor from her reading of Dickens and inspired by her mother's kindness to the Cedarville poor, she decided to become a doctor so that she could live and work among the poor. It was a vague idea, nurtured by the delights of fiction. She was a voracious reader.

In 1875, Addams's sister Alice married their stepbrother Harry Haldeman. This was despite John and Anna's opposition. However, they could not mount a unified campaign against it. Each was in the awkward position of thinking the others child was an unworthy partner for his or her own offspring.

Addams's father encouraged her to pursue higher education, but not too far from home. She was eager to attend the brand new college for women, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; but her father required Addams to attend Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College), in Rockford, Illinois. After graduating from Rockford in 1881, with a collegiate certificate, she still hoped to attend Smith to earn a proper B.A. That summer, her father died unexpectedly from an appendicitis. Each child inherited roughly $50,000 (equivalent to $1.13 million today).

That fall, Addams, her sister Alice, Alice's husband Harry, and their stepmother, Anna Haldeman Addams, moved to Philadelphia so that the three young people could pursue medical educations. Harry was already trained in medicine and did further studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Jane and Alice completed their first year of medical school at the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia, but Jane's health problems — a painful back and a nervous breakdown — prevented her from completing the degree. She was filled with sadness at her failure. Stepmother Anna was also ill, so the entire family canceled their plans to stay two years and returned to Cedarville.

The following fall her brother - in - law / stepbrother Harry performed surgery on her back, to straighten it. He then advised that she not pursue studies but, instead, travel. In August 1883, she set off for a two - year tour of Europe with her stepmother, traveling some of the time with friends and family who joined them. Visiting the Catacombs in Rome, where the early Christians — a community of people faithful to Jesus Christ from all walks of life — worshiped in secret and were buried when they died, Addams decided that she did not have to become a doctor to be able to help the poor. But, what then should she do?

Upon her return home, in June 1885, she lived with her stepmother, in Cedarville, and spent the winters with her in Baltimore, where Jane's other stepbrother George Haldeman was earning his Ph.D., in Biology, at Johns Hopkins University. Addams, still filled with vague ambition, sank into depression, unsure of her future and feeling useless leading the conventional life expected of a well - to - do young woman. She wrote long letters to her friend from Rockford Seminary, Ellen Gates Starr, mostly about Christianity and books but sometimes about her despair.

Meanwhile, she was gathering clues about her choices from what she read. Fascinated by the early Christians and Tolstoy's book My Religion, she was baptized a Christian in the Cedarville Presbyterian Church, in the summer of 1886. Reading Giuseppe Mazzini's Duties of Man, she began to be inspired by the idea of democracy as a social ideal. She still felt confused about her role as a woman, though. John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women made her question the social pressures on a woman to marry and devote her life to family.

Then, finally, she read about something she could actually do. In the summer of 1887, she read in a magazine about the new idea of a settlement house. She decided to visit the world's first, in London, on a second trip to Europe. It was called Toynbee Hall. She and several friends, including Ellen Gates Starr, traveled in Europe from December 1887 through the summer of 1888. Addams told no one of her dream to start a settlement house at first; but, as she traveled, she felt increasingly guilty that she was just being a tourist and not acting.

Her feelings finally overwhelmed her after watching a bullfight in Madrid. While her friends soon left the arena, too horrified by the great bloody gore of the event to remain, Addams stayed, mesmerized by what she saw as an exotic cultural tradition. Afterward, she condemned her fascination with the bullfight and her inability to feel outraged at the suffering of the horses and bulls that had been killed. She blamed her love of culture for hardening her heart to suffering, for inhibiting her from acting. And was not that the underlying reason she still had not started a settlement house? Believing that if she told someone her dream, she might finally do something, she told Ellen Gates Starr. Starr loved the idea of starting a settlement house and agreed to join Addams in pursuing her dream.

Addams and another friend traveled to London without Starr, who was tied up. Visiting Toynbee Hall, Addams was enchanted. She described it as "a community of University men who live there, have their recreation clubs and society all among the poor people, yet, in the same style in which they would live in their own circle. It is so free of 'professional doing good,' so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries that it seems perfectly ideal." Addams's dream of the classes mingling socially to mutual benefit, as they had in early Christian circles, seemed embodied in the new type of institution.

In fact, the co-founders of Toynbee Hall, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, shared Addams's desire to bring Christianity back to its roots. Part of what was called the "social Christian" movement, the Barnetts had no interest in converting anyone to Christianity, but they did feel that Christians should be more engaged with the world, and, in the words of one of the leaders of the movement in England, W.H. Fremantle, "imbue all human relations with the spirit of Christ's self - renouncing love." Addams learned about social Christianity from them, soon considered herself one, and soon made friends among the leaders of the "social Christian" movement in the United States.

Jane Addams's religious faith was thus a central motive in co-founding Hull House with Starr, but the settlement was never religious. It did not seek to convert others to Christianity. A brief experiment in weekly prayer among the residents of the settlement house, requested by some of them was so ecumenical in its approach that it soon fizzled. (However, other settlements in both Great Britain and the United States would be religious and seek conversions).

Addams's own religious beliefs were shaped by her wide reading and life experience. By the time she had graduated from Rockford Seminary, she knew the Bible and especially the New Testament, thoroughly, having studied it throughout her young life, including in college courses. She had also been required to memorize a verse from the Bible every day at Rockford, and listen to a short sermon on the daily verse by the school's principal. Evidence of this deep familiarity with Scripture can be found throughout her later writings.

While she remained a member of a Presbyterian Church, Addams regularly attended a Unitarian Church and Ethical Society in Chicago. And at one point was appointed "interim lecturer" at the Ethical Society.

In 1897 she and her college friend and intimate partner, Ellen Gates Starr, co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, the first settlement house in the United States.

The house had been built by Charles Hull in 1887. Initially, Addams paid for all of the capital expenses (repairing the roof of the porch, repainting the rooms they were renting, purchasing the furniture) and the bulk of the operating costs. But gifts from individuals supported the House from its first year and over time, Addams was able to reduce the proportion of her contributions, although the annual budget grew rapidly. A number of wealthy women became important long term donors to the House, including Helen Culver, who managed her first cousin Charles Hull's estate, and who eventually allowed them to use the house rent free, Louise deKoven Bowen, Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, and others.

Addams and Starr were the first two occupants of the house, which would later become 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 gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, and a library, as well as 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 social services and cultural events for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, Hull House became a 13 building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp (known as Bowen Country Club).

The Hull House neighborhood was a mix of various European ethnic groups that had immigrated to Chicago around the start of the twentieth century. The Bethlehem - Howard Neighborhood Center Records that mix of immigrants which comprised the social laboratory upon which the social and philanthropic elitists comprising Hull House's inner sanctum tested their theories and based their challenges to the establishment. "Germans and Jews resided south of that inner core (south of Twelfth Street) [...] The Greek delta formed by Harrison, Halsted, and Blue Island Streets served as a buffer to the Irish residing to the north and the Canadian – French to the northwest." Italians resided within the inner core of the Hull House Neighborhood [...] from the river on the east end, on out to the western ends of what came to be known as Little Italy. Greeks and Jews, along with the remnants of other immigrant groups, began their exodus from the neighborhood during the early part of the twentieth century. The Italians were the only ethnic group to continue as an intact and thriving community through the Great Depression, World War II, and well beyond the ultimate demise of Hull House proper in 1963.

Hull House, as Addams named it, became America's best known settlement house. She used Hull House to generate system - directed change, on the principle that to keep families safe, community and societal conditions had to be improved. The neighborhood was controlled by local political bosses. At one point Addams ran for alderman against the local boss, Johnnie Powers, and lost.

Starr and Addams developed three "ethical principles" for social settlements: "to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy, that is, egalitarian, or democratic, social relations across class lines." Hull House therefore offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world, including William Lyon MacKenzie King, a graduate student from Harvard who later became prime minister of Canada. In the 1890s Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents of the house made it a world center of social reform activity. Hull House used the latest methodology (pioneering in statistical mapping) to study overcrowding, truancy, typhoid fever, cocaine, children's reading, newsboys, infant mortality, and midwifery. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city- and state- wide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child - labor laws, and protection of working women. Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world, and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. Some of the Hull House residents were socialists, but Addams was committed to capitalism and its reform. In 1912 she helped start the new Progressive Party and supported the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt.

Addams at Hull House stressed the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants, and fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth. Addams feared that cities and playgrounds were killing the spirit of youth; recreation and play were healthy mediums to channel the spirit of youth. Hull - House featured multiple programs in art and drama, kindergarten classes, boys' and girls' clubs, language classes, reading groups, college extension courses, along with public baths, a free speech atmosphere, a gymnasium, a labor museum and playground. They were all designed to foster democratic cooperation and collective action and downplay individualism. She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws.

Addams and her colleagues documented the geography of typhoid fever and reported that poor workers bore the brunt of illness. She identified the political corruption and business avarice that caused the city bureaucracy to ignore health, sanitation, and building codes. Linking environmental justice and municipal reform, she eventually defeated the bosses and fostered a more equitable distribution of city services and modernized inspection practices. Addams spoke of the "undoubted powers of public recreation to bring together the classes of a community in the modern city unhappily so full of devices for keeping them apart." Addams worked with the Chicago Board of Health and served as the first vice - president of the Playground Association of America.

Addams lectured throughout the United States, at various colleges and social settlements. For example:

In February 13, 1899, she went on a typical lecture tour — leaving Chicago on February 13, she spoke at Wells College in Aurora, New York on the 14th; at Auburn Seminary the next day; at Wells again on the 16th; then to New York for a quick stopover; then to Boston where she made two appearances at woman's clubs on the 18th; two more appearances on Sunday; on to the University of Vermont on Monday; back to Boston for two more appearance [sic] on Tuesday; two more on Wednesday, and two on Thursday; then she was off to Meadville, Pennsylvania; to Harrisburg, Richmond, Virginia, and Columbia, South Carolina, before returning home.

Although many of these speeches were not academic, others were, and Addams' division between academic and everyday thought was dramatically different from that of her typical male academic colleagues. In addition, she offered college courses through the Extension Division of the University of Chicago. She declined offers from the university to become directly affiliated with it, including an offer from Albion Small, chair of the Department of Sociology, of a graduate faculty position. She declined in order to maintain her independent role outside of academia. Her goal was to teach adults not enrolled in formal academic institutions, because of their poverty and/or lack of credentials. Furthermore, she wanted no university controls over her political activism.

Addams was a charter member of the American Sociological Society, founded in 1905. She gave papers to it in 1912, 1915, and 1919. She was the most prominent woman member during this period.

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 shared a romantic friendship. Together they owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine.

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.

In 1915, the year after World War I began, she became involved in the Woman's Peace Party and was elected national chairman. Addams was elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, a position that entailed frequent travel to Europe (during and after World War I) and Asia. With this she also attended the International Woman's Conference in The Hague and was chosen to head the commission to find an end to the war. This included meeting ten leaders in neutral countries as well as those at war to discuss mediation. This was the first significant international effort against the war. Addams along with co-delegates Emily Balch and Alice Hamilton documented their experiences of this period and was published as a book Women at The Hague (University of Illinois).

In her journal, Balch recorded her impression of Jane Addams (April 1915):

"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."

In 1917, when the US joined the war, Addams started to be strongly criticized. She faced increasingly harsh rebukes and criticism as a pacifist. Her 1915 speech on pacifism at Carnegie Hall received negative coverage by newspapers such as the New York Times, which branded her as unpatriotic. Later, during her 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."

Hull House and the Peace Movement are widely recognized as the key tangible pillars of Addams' legacy. While her life focused on the development of individuals, her ideas continue to influence social, political and economic reform in the United States as well as internationally.

Willard Motley, a resident artist of Hull House, extracting from Addams' central theory on symbolic interactionism, used the neighborhood and its people to write his 1948 best seller, Knock on Any Door.

Addams' role as reformer enabled her to petition the establishment and alter the social and physical geography of her Chicago neighborhood. Although contemporary academic sociologists defined her engagement as "social work," Addams' efforts differed significantly from activities typically labeled as "social work" during that time period. Before Addams' powerful influence on the profession, social work was largely informed by a "friendly visitor" model in which typically wealthy women of high public stature visited impoverished individuals and, through systematic assessment and intervention, aimed to improve the lives of the poor. Addams rejected the friendly visitor model in favor of a model of social reform / social theory - building, thereby introducing the now central tenets of social justice and reform to the field of social work.

Hull House enabled Addams to befriend and become a colleague to early members of the Chicago School of Sociology. Her influence, through her work in applied sociology, impacted their thoughts and their direction. In 1893, she co-authored 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 mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers' Strike.

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 advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and supported women's suffrage. She was a strong advocate of justice for immigrants and blacks, becoming a chartered member of the NAACP. 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.

Addams' writings and speeches, on behalf of the formation of the League of Nations and as peace advocate, are well documented; influencing the later shape of the United Nations.

In 2007, the state renamed 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 museum and monument to Jane Addams. Jane Addams Business Careers Center is a high school in Cleveland, Ohio. Jane Addams High School For Academic Careers is a high school in The Bronx, NY.