In 1881 Jane Addams was graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor's degree only after the school became accredited the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be. At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London's East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being «to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago»1.
Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from troubled people. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull-House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, a labor museum.
As her reputation grew, Miss Addams was drawn into larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed to Chicago's Board of Education and subsequently made chairman of the School Management Committee; in 1908 she participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and in the next year became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In her own area of Chicago she led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, and sanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910 she received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman by Yale University.
Jane Addams was an ardent feminist by philosophy. In those days before women's suffrage she believed that women should make their voices heard in legislation and therefore should have the right to vote, but more comprehensively, she thought that women should generate aspirations and search out opportunities to realize them.
For her own aspiration to rid the world of war, Jane Addams created opportunities or seized those offered to her to advance the cause. In 1906 she gave a course of lectures at the University of Wisconsin summer session which she published the next year as a book, Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke for peace in 1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of the Peace Palace at The Hague and in the next two years, as a lecturer sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, spoke against America's entry into the First World War. In January, 1915, she accepted the chairmanship of the Women's Peace Party, an American organization, and four months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened at The Hague largely upon the initiative of Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist leader of many and varied talents. When this congress later founded the organization called the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Jane Addams served as president until 1929, as presiding officer of its six international conferences in those years, and as honorary president for the remainder of her life.
Publicly opposed to America's entry into the war, Miss Addams was attacked in the press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she found an outlet for her humanitarian impulses as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women and children of the enemy nations, the story of which she told in her book Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).
After sustaining a heart attack in 1926, Miss Addams never fully regained her health. Indeed, she was being admitted to a Baltimore hospital on the very day, December 10, 1931, that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo. She died in 1935 three days after an operation revealed unsuspected cancer. The funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull-House.
Frances Willard promoted the cause of women and reform as a pioneer educator and especially as the most prominent leader of the nineteenth century movement to end alcohol abuse.
One of the most influential women of the nineteenth century, Frances Willard’s name is inseparable from that of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), but her life embodied little of the conservatism that came to be associated with the WCTU after her death.
Instead, Willard’s upbringing encouraged fresh ideas. Her mother set the precedent for unconventionality, for Mary Willard had taken college courses at Oberlin College when both that institution and her daughter were only a few years old. Frances’ father, who was a full-time Oberlin student, tended her while his wife went to classes in the early 1840s. Both parents thus exhibited a very unusual willingness to experiment with new roles, for married men in this era seldom took care of children, while female college students of any marital status were a rarity. Indeed, Mary Thompson Willard may have been the first college student who was also a young mother.
In 1845, this intrepid young couple pioneered in Wisconsin. There Frances lived an outdoor life, joining in her brothers’ activities and even referring to herself as “Frank.” The children were educated largely by their mother until their father, who had become a state legislator, finally succeeded in getting a school for their area when Frances was fifteen. At seventeen, she traveled to Milwaukee Female College, and the following year, went to Illinois, where she studied at Northwestern Female College, from which she graduated in 1859.
She taught for the next few years before traveling to Europe from 1868 to 1870.. Upon her return, Willard was named president of the Evanston College for Ladies, a new school founded in 1871 with links to Northwestern, which it soon absorbed. Willard then was named dean of women, one of the first female administrators to hold a high position at a major co-educational university. After less than a year as dean of women, Willard ended her career as a college administrator in June 1874 to begin what became her true life’s work with the newly organized Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
As head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) from 1879 until her death, Willard changed the WCTU from a conservative temperance organization into a broader woman’s rights movement with a range of social concerns, including the right to vote. She coined the phrase “Home Protection” to encourage women to expand their influence beyond the family circle, including fighting prostitution and venereal disease.
In 1884, Willard wrote the “polyglot petition,” which urged world leaders to enact total prohibition, not only of alcohol, but also opium and other addictives. She led the WCTU in gathering signatures from 7,500,000 men and women from 50 countries. The petition was unveiled in 1891, the same year in which Willard was able to extend WCTU into an international organization, becoming president of the World’s WCTU at a Boston meeting. Willard’s health began to deteriorate from chronic anemia and she passed away in 1898 at the age of fifty-eight. Two thousand people attended her funeral at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City, and an estimated twenty thousand more viewed her casket at the Women’s Temple in Chicago.