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NARRATOR: Jane Addams was a soft spoken woman from a prosperous family. In 1889, she established one of the nation's first settlement houses in a poor Chicago neighborhood. In doing so, she helped to launch a philanthropic movement that continues to this day.

Addams and other settlement house founders lived in the houses they founded. They taught English, provided child care for working mothers, and counseled poor immigrants who were struggling to adapt to city life in a new country. It was a new way of thinking about social work. Operating under the slogan neighboring with the poor, the settlement founders didn't look down upon the people they were helping, but instead, treated them as neighbors.

As Adams wrote in her 1910 autobiography 20 Years at Hull House, "The Settlement is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems, which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overt accumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other."

The roots of Jane Addams' activism came from her upbringing, as well as the progressive era of social activism and political reform sweeping the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Addams grew up in rural Illinois. Her mother died when she was two, and she was brought up by her father, a prosperous businessman with strong Quaker values. After graduating from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, Addams became what the public and press named at the time a new woman, a young college educated woman who did not have many opportunities for starting her own career. So Addams decided to make her career by helping others.

She began by acquiring a decaying mansion called Hull House in a neighborhood mainly populated by poor immigrants. Hull House offered neighborhood residents an art gallery, coffee house, gym, public kitchen, and a music school. But Addams realized these social and cultural services had to be supplemented by political activism to truly help the poor.

Addams worked to improve education and workplace conditions, an agenda that mirrored the progressive reform movement happening on a national scale. In 1893, Addams, her activist friend, Florence Kelly, and a number of other reformers in Chicago successfully pressed for a law that protected sweatshop workers and banned child labor in Illinois. Addams' reform work earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Her success inspired other middle class, college educated women to found hundreds of settlement houses across the nation. Their work laid the foundation for the professional field of social work in the United States.

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