American social reformer, pragmatist philosopher, peace activist, and co-founder of Hull House, the Chicago settlement that from 1889 onward became the institutional and intellectual center of the American settlement movement. Addams was the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), a co-founder of the NAACP and the ACLU, and the single most important American public figure for a generation in the construction of what would eventually become the social-service architecture of the American welfare state.
Hull House — established in an old mansion in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago's Near West Side populated by Italian, Greek, Russian Jewish, Bohemian, and Polish immigrants — grew within twenty years into a thirteen-building complex providing kindergartens, adult education, art and music classes, a public kitchen, a labor museum, a coffee house, a theater, meeting space for unions, and a residence where reformers lived alongside the people they served. Out of the social research conducted from Hull House came some of the earliest systematic American urban sociology (Hull-House Maps and Papers, 1895), the reporting that drove legislative victories on child labor, the eight-hour day for women workers, juvenile courts, tenement housing, industrial safety, and public health.
Her writing — Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916), Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922) — belongs to the American pragmatist tradition and was read as such by John Dewey, who counted her among his most important philosophical influences. Addams argued, against the charity paradigm of the 19th century, that social ethics required the privileged to live in actual relation with the poor, to learn from them before attempting to help them, and to pursue structural reforms — wages, housing, working conditions, the vote — rather than individual moral uplift. Her pacifism during the First World War cost her much of her public standing; the later Nobel restored it.