Jane Addams did many things in her lifetime that still have an impact on today's society. Jane, the vice president of National Woman's Trade Union League in 1903, also helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was elected first woman president of National Conference of Charities and Corrections (which later became National Conference of Social Work) and during this time she published many books, including, Twenty Years at Hull-House. She was the first vice president of National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first head of National Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers, she was elected first chairman of the Women's Peace party, which she helped found, and she founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and served as its president from 1919-1929. And to top it off, she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1931, Jane Addams was the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. !.
She passed away in Chicago, the town that she loved, on May 21, 1935. She is buried in her hometown of Cedarville, IL. .
Jane Addams, born in Cedarville, Illinois on September 6th, 1860, was born into a privileged family. Her father was a strong abolitionist miller who had been a state senator who passed many social reform legislation bills. Her father told Jane that she could do whatever she wanted with her life. As a small child, she had hopes of becoming a doctor but an illness put an end to her dream. Therefore, she only had a few choices. She could marry, have children, and become a matron of society; or she might be able to become a schoolteacher; or she could simply be an aunt to the children of her elder sisters. Her mother died when she was really young, and her father and her sisters spoiled her. .
About five years after her mother's death, her father remarried. Her stepmother was a woman whose appreciation of the arts rubbed off on the Addams girls.