Jane Addams

Addams was two when her mother died, and by eight she had lost four siblings besides. A childhood bout of spinal tuberculosis left her back curved and made her, by her own account, ashamed to be looked at. Her father John, an Illinois state senator and friend of Abraham Lincoln, sent her to Rockford Female Seminary instead of the Smith College she wanted — she finished valedictorian in 1881 and read Carlyle and Tolstoy on her own time. Then her father dropped dead of appendicitis that same summer, and the inheritance took her to Philadelphia to study medicine. Her spine gave out again — a brother-in-law operated on her back, her nerves collapsed with it, and she left the program for good.

What came after the collapse was Hull House, founded with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 in a decaying mansion on Halsted Street. It grew to 13 buildings and 2,000 visitors a week, and turned Addams into the country's most trusted voice on urban poverty — trusted enough to survive being denounced as a traitor for opposing the First World War, and to win a Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 anyway. BriefHistory covers the institution and what it built into national policy. What follows is the rest of the house she actually lived in.

She never lived alone. Her first partner was Ellen Starr, whom she had met at Rockford — her second was Mary Rozet Smith, a donor's daughter, with whom she shared a house for 40 years, until Smith died of pneumonia in 1934. Historians now generally describe the relationship as a lesbian partnership, though nothing about it was said aloud in Addams's lifetime. None of that slowed her down. What did was the war: she was booed off a Carnegie Hall stage, expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and put under FBI surveillance for arguing America should stay out of it. She also lent her name and Hull House's credibility to the American Social Hygiene Association's eugenics-era campaigns, a fact that gets far less attention than either the war years or the Nobel.

Addams died in Chicago on May 21, 1935, nine years after a heart attack had already worn her down, and was buried in Cedarville, the town she grew up in. She was by then the most celebrated woman in the country, and honors kept arriving long after: the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2008, an LGBT History Month icon designation in 2015 that would have meant nothing to the public in 1889. Hull House itself closed as a social-service agency on January 27, 2012, bankrupt after nearly 122 years, though the original mansion survives as a museum on the University of Illinois Chicago campus.

Jane Addams's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Hull House building
  Founded with Ellen Gates Starr, grew to 13 buildings 1889
• Democracy and Social Ethics book 1902
• Newer Ideals of Peace book 1907
• Twenty Years at Hull-House book
  Her best-known memoir 1910
• Woman's Peace Party company
  Founded and chaired, later became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom 1915

• September 6, 1860 aged 0 Born in Cedarville, Illinois
• 1881 aged ~21 Graduates valedictorian of Rockford Female Seminary, then loses her father
• 1889 aged ~29 Co-founds Hull House with Ellen Gates Starr
• 1909 aged ~49 Helps found the NAACP
• 1915 aged ~55 Forms and chairs the Woman's Peace Party as war opposition grows
• 1920 aged ~60 Co-founds the American Civil Liberties Union
• 1931 aged ~71 Becomes the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• 1934 aged ~74 Mary Rozet Smith, her partner of 40 years, dies of pneumonia
• May 21, 1935 aged 74 Dies in Chicago

• Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903
  Landscape architect who designed Central Park and established public parks as essential American civic infrastructure. co-founded Hull House with
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. fellow reformer, contested her methods
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. successor generation of reform
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. co-founded the NAACP with