Jane Addams: “Why Women Should Vote”

About the Author

Jane Addams, the eighth of nine children, was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois, into a wealthy family of Quaker background. Addams was a member of the first generation of American women to attend college. She graduated in 1881 from Rockford Female Seminary, in Illinois, which the following year became Rockford College for Women, allowing Addams to obtain her bachelor's degree. In the 1880s Addams began studying medicine at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia, but she had to suspend her studies because of poor health. Throughout the decade Addams also suffered from depression owing to her father's sudden death in 1881. Her physical and mental conditions, however, did not prevent her from traveling extensively in Europe. During one of her voyages, Addams visited London's original settlement house of Toynbee Hall, established in 1884, with her companion, Ellen Gates Starr. The visit led the two women to establish the Chicago settlement house of Hull House in 1889, the second such house to be established in America. (Dr. Stanton Coit and Charles B. Stover had founded the first American settlement house, the Neighborhood Guild of New York City, in 1886.) Through Hull House, Addams found a vocation for her adult life, overcoming the sense of uselessness that had besieged her for most of the 1880s.

Addams campaigned for every major reform issue of her era, such as fairer workplace conditions for men and women, tenement regulation, juvenile-court law, women's suffrage, and women's rights. She worked closely with social workers, politicians, and labor and immigrant groups to achieve her purposes, and she was not afraid to take controversial stances, as when she decided to campaign against U.S. entry into World War I. While in the first part of her life Addams was mainly involved in social work in Hull House, in the twentieth century she used her notoriety to advance political causes and became a well-known public figure. In 1910 she was the first woman president of the National Conference of Social Work, and in 1912 she actively campaigned for the Progressive presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, becoming the first woman to give a nominating speech at a party convention. Addams was also a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In conjunction with her antiwar efforts, she became the president of the Woman's Peace Party in 1915 and chaired the International Women's Congress for Peace and Freedom at The Hague, Netherlands. That congress led to the foundation of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which Addams chaired until 1929, when she was made honorary president for the remainder of her life. Americans were not unanimous in their praise for Addams's campaigning for peace. On the contrary, she was bitterly attacked by the press and was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1931, however, Addams's antiwar efforts won her the Nobel Peace Prize, which she shared with Nicholas Murray Butler. Because of her declining health, she was unable to collect the prize in person. Addams died in Chicago on May 21, 1935, three days after being diagnosed with cancer.

Addams's life, speeches, and writings are typical of middle-class reformers at the turn of the century. She was widely acknowledged as a pioneer social worker, and she spoke vigorously in favor of social reform. Her addresses and public interventions show her to have been idealistic yet committed to concrete action. Like other Progressive thinkers, such as John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Addams was deeply concerned with the changing nature of human ties and the meaning of community in an increasingly industrialized and urbanized world. Taking a critical stance toward the laissez-faire capitalism that had characterized the Gilded Age, a period of excessive displays of wealth in the late nineteenth century, Progressives like Addams expanded the authority to solve private and public problems to include not only the individual but also the government. They charged the state with the task of intervening in social and economic matters when appropriate, to defeat self-interest in the name of the common good.