Jane Addams - Biography

Biography

Early Life

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the youngest of nine children born into a prosperous northern Illinois family of English-American descent which went back to colonial New England; her father was politically prominent. Three of her siblings died in infancy, and another died at sixteen, leaving only four by the time Addams was age eight. Her mother, Sarah Addams (née Weber), died in childbirth when Jane was two years old.

Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, and attending Sunday school. When she was 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 with large timber, cattle, and agricultural holdings; flour and timber mills; and a woolen factory. He was the president of The Second National Bank of Freeport. He remarried in 1868, when Jane was eight years old. His second wife was Anna Hostetter Haldeman, the widow of a miller in Freeport.

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 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.

Education

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 Massachusetts; but her father required Addams to attend nearby 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 a sudden case of appendicitis. Each child inherited roughly $50,000 (equivalent to $1.2 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 spinal operation 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. Addams decided that she did not have to become a doctor to be able to help the poor.

Upon her return home, in June 1885, she lived with her stepmother in Cedarville, and spent the winters with her in Baltimore. 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.

Deciding to begin a settlement house

Meanwhile, she was gathering clues about her future 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. 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.