Jane Addams

Jane Addams (1860–1935) was born in Cedarville, Illinois, and in 1889 co-founded Hull House in Chicago, one of the first and most influential American settlement houses, offering education, childcare, and social services to the surrounding immigrant working-class neighborhood while pioneering methods of social work and social research still used today. A leading figure of the Progressive Era women's movement, she was also a prominent pacifist, helping found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom during the First World War, work for which she shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize — the first American woman to receive it. Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) is her own account of the settlement's founding and its first two decades. She died in Chicago at seventy-four.