Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860 to John and Sarah Addams in the small town of Cedarville, Illinois. Jane’s mother died when she was very young. John was a wealthy gristmill owner and a sixteen-year Illinois state senator. Jane’s father, although remarried when she was eight years of age was her sole supervising source therefore, her greatest influence. Jane’s childhood was pleasant however, she always fretted over embarrassing her father by what she felt wer

Addams viewed the immigrant community as people divided by race, religion and prejudices. She saw them unwilling to become Americanized and holding strongly to their old countries ways of life. It was hard to build relationships with some of them and she found them loosing touch with their Americanized children. Jane stated, “ It seemed to me that Hull-House ought to be able to devise some educational enterprise which should build a bridge between European and American experiences in such wise as to give them both more meaning and a sense of relation. I meditated that perhaps the power to see life as a whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of a large city than anywhere else…”.

e her own physical flaws. Henry Steele Commager wrote the FORWORD in Twenty Years At Hull-House states, “…she was herself a misfit—so she felt anyway—“ an ugly, pigeon-toed little girl whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held very much upon one side,” who was constantly afraid that she might embarrass the handsome father she adored.” Due to these concerns a strong bond grew with her accepting confidant and kind mentor, uncle James.

Hull-House combined the three trends: first, the desire to interpret democracy and social terms; secondly, the impulse beating at the very source of our lives, urging us to aid in the race progress; and, thirdly, the Christian movement toward humanitarianism”. Jane Addams and the residents of Hull-House influenced people to become more involved in their own lives and in the improvement of society. Through the efforts of Hull-House many new investigations, reforms and laws were enacted.

Jane reflected back to her first experience of death at age fifteen when Polly, an old nurse who had cared for and followed her mother to Illinois to raise a second generation of children, died. During one of Polly’s annual visits to her cousins, the Addams’ were notified that she was taken ill. As Jane sat with her dying friend she felt a sense of solitude and heard Polly call out “Sarah”, Jane’s mother’s name. The experience of looking death in the eyes brought Jane into the mysteries of the unknown. Jane’s father pointed out what was most important and because of his comfort and wisdom she stated, “ I felt a new fellowship with him because we had discussed it together.”

Some of Jane’s feelings of kinship with the immigrants and attitudes towards her social work may have come from an incident she describes in her book about an argument with her father. In 1872, Jane found her father upset over the death of Joseph Mazzini and like most eleven-year old children she could not understand why he was grieving for a man he did not know. She argued that this man was not American and that they should not feel badly for him. Through this argument with her father and the death of a man she did not know, she had learned a lesson that she held priceless for the rest of her life. On page 14, Jane stated, “ …in the end I obtained that which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality, language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy” which proves

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