Jane Addams
Jane Addams
Jane Addamswas a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She created the first Hull House. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped America to address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCivil Rights Leader
Date of Birth6 September 1860
CityCedarville, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Jane Addams quotes about
With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!
That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.
Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.
I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process.
A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in."
The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed.
The supreme religious test of our social order is the hideous commerce of prostitution.
A long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.
Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.
Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.
The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...
As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be.
We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory.
One's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations.