Jane Addams

Jane Adams was born September 6, 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois. She died May 21 1935. She was the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous miller and local political leader who served for sixteen years as a state senator and fought as an officer in the civil war. She had a congenital spinal defect, because of it she was not physically vigorous when young. In 1881 she graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelors degree only after the school became accredited the next year. The next six years she began the study of medicine but left because of poor health, she was hospitalized intermittently. Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from troubled people. In its second year Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week. As her reputation grew Miss Adams was drawn into larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed to Chicago's Board of education and subsequently made chairman of the School Management Committee.In her own area of Chicago she led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, and sanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910 she received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a women by Yale University. Jane Adams was an ardent feminist by philosophy, In those days before women's suffrage she believed that women should make their voices heard in legislation and therefore should have the right to vote, but more comprehensively, she thought that women should generate aspirations and search out opportunities to realize them.In January, 1915, she accepted the chairmanship of the Women's Peace Party, an American organization, and four months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened at The Hague largely upon the initiative of Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist leader of many and varied talents. When this congress later found ed the organization called the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, She served as president until 1929. After sustaining a heart attack in 1926 Miss Adams never fully regained her health.

Sources janeadams.com