Jane Addams

Jane Addams (1860–1935) was an American social reformer, writer and peace activist. In 1889 she and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house that offered education, child care and cultural activities to immigrant neighbors and became a center of research and reform. Addams campaigned for child labor laws, women's suffrage and better housing, and wrote books including Democracy and Social Ethics and Twenty Years at Hull-House. A leading pacifist during the First World War, she helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and in 1931 she became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.