Blackwell Reference Online

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Jane Addams spent much of her life working to achieve a revolutionary vision that government should support the development of its citizens' full potential. She also fought to protect freedom of speech as a form of protest essential to the advance of social justice. Addams grew up in Cedarville, Illinois. Her father, a successful agribusinessman and politician, was one of the wealthiest men in the region. Addams's stepmother (her own mother died when she was two and a half) was a socially ambitious, cultured woman. Jane Addams earned a college degree from nearby Rockford Female Seminary, at a time when very few women did so. Though raised in an evangelical Protestant household and a graduate of an evangelical Protestant college, she rejected the conviction that Christ was her savior. She did, however, absorb fully the evangelical fire for transformational change, known as social Christianity. As a teen reading her stepmother's Atlantic Monthly magazine, she was fascinated to learn about the radical reform visions promoted by abolitionist John Brown and economic and social Utopian Robert Owen . She also had an early, passionate belief that women should be free to shape their lives. By her twenties, Addams was caught in a contradiction – like her hero John Brown, she was impatient to “make something happen” but, unlike Brown, she felt severely constrained by societal expectations ... log in or subscribe to read full text