Jane Addams
Jane Addams
1860 - 1935

Jane Addams won worldwide recognition for her work as a pioneer social worker in America, as a feminist, and as an internationalist.

In 1889 she and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around two thousand people. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. She is probably most remembered for her adult night school, a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today.

Jane Addams
Instructional Unit

Dr. Jean Elshtain,
University of Chicago
Lecture given on
February 25, 2005 by Dr. Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and is a contributing editor for The New Republic. She has published over five-hundred essays and authored and/or edited over twenty books, including Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy.

Louise W. Knight,
Northwestern University

Louise (Lucy) W. Knight, an independent scholar, has studied Jane Addams’s life for two decades. She first became interested in Jane Addams in college after reading Twenty Years at Hull House.  She currently consults on management and planning for foundations and nonprofit organizations and teaches a course in the history of public persuasion in the Communication Studies Department of the School of Communication at Northwestern University.

Lecture given on March 26, 2007
by Louise W. Knight

Jane Addams Lecture

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