Jane Addams was a pioneering American social reformer, the founder of Hull House, and the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Born in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6, 1860, into a prosperous family, she was among the first generation of college-educated American women. Troubled by the poverty and dislocation of the industrial age, in 1889 she and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House, a settlement house in a crowded immigrant district of Chicago.
Hull House became a model for the settlement movement across the country, offering education, child care, health services, and cultural programs to its working-class and immigrant neighbors while training a generation of reformers. From this base Addams campaigned tirelessly for labor laws, women's suffrage, public health, and the welfare of children. A committed pacifist, she opposed American entry into the First World War and led international women's peace efforts, work for which she shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She died in 1935, honored as one of the most influential reformers of her era.