Jane Addams
Jane Addams
Jane Addamswas a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She created the first Hull House. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped America to address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCivil Rights Leader
Date of Birth6 September 1860
CityCedarville, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Jane Addams quotes about
I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father’s had become, during his earlier years of a miller’s life.
This dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.
I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.
If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.
Must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.
The things that make us alike are stronger and finer than the things that make us different.
The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.
Of all aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.
Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party.
A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted.
We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.
We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.
If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.