Jane Addams, from a wealthy and politically active family, personified all the ideals of the Progressive Era by working with social reform movements such as the settler house movement , workers' rights, children's rights. , civil rights and women's right to vote and constantly tries to make life better for those less fortunate than her. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay She was born Laura Jane Addams in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6, 1860, the youngest of eight children. Her mother died when she was two years old. When she was seven, she asked her father, a Republican senator, why some people lived in slums. He explained that some people don't have as much privilege as others. She decided to dedicate her life to helping people (Kent 3). At Rockford College, Addams was class president from 1877 to 1881 and valedictorian. She continued to study medicine, but she dropped out, deciding she could do a better job of helping people. However, she became depressed and her doctor sent her to Europe with a friend, Ellen Gates Starr. There, she saw a poverty-stricken market. On a later trip to London, she saw a Settlement Home, so named because the wealthier people settled there to mingle with the poor, called Toynbee Hall. This inspired her to build a colony house in the United States (Curtis). She and Starr rented "Hull House", a dilapidated mansion in a poor section of Chicago, inhabited mainly by immigrants. Eventually, the entire house was donated to the cause. Addams wrote that "the colony is therefore an experimental effort aimed at contributing to the solution of the social and industrial problems engendered by modern conditions of life in a large city" (Addams). His philosophy was that the rich and the poor could learn from each other and that the world could improve through democratic reform based on each side's understanding of the other (Curtis). It opened on September 18, 1889. By 1890, 2,000 people per week attended day care, hot lunches, kindergarten, club meetings, parties, union meetings and evening classes for adults. Residents hiked, walked in the park and rode bikes together. Other reformers came to work for women's rights and against poverty and child labor in the thirteen new House buildings. Addams also served on the Chicago school board, co-founded the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, was the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work, was a founding member of the NAACP, and became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Administration. She became Chicago's garbage inspector in 1895 after complaining to City Hall that the garbage administration was leaving the streets too dirty. She lobbied the Chicago government to build playgrounds, parks, kindergartens, and bathhouses in poor neighborhoods. She helped found the University of Chicago School of Social Work. She wrote ten books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of speeches in which she argued that true democracy requires the political and economic empowerment of all citizens, denounced war, and supported the negotiated settlement of political problems. Addams, a pacifist, was extremely against the United States joining World War I in 1914. In 1917, she and Crystal Eastman founded the National Bureau of..