Jane Addams: our WILPF heroine.

Many wonderful women were involved in the 1915 founding of the Woman's Peace Party (the precursor of WILPF), but none is as widely known and respected as Jane Addams. There are many reasons for Addams' reputation. For most people in the United States, Addams was best known for her creation of the Chicago settlement house, Hull House, which brought her much notoriety during her lifetime. In 1931, she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with WILPF. Addams, however, was not simply an activist. She was also a philosopher and theorist about peace. Her life's journey took her from being a social reformer to being a feminist pacifist. It was not always an easy path.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Addams was born on September 6, 1860 into an upper middle-class Illinois family. Her father, John Huy Addams, was a prosperous miller and banker who was also committed to community work and social justice. Addams' mother, Sarah Weber Addams, died when Jane was only two years old. When she was seven, her father married Anna H. Haldeman who became an important emotional support for her step-daughter. In 1877, Addams obediently honored her father's request that she attend the Rockford Female Seminary in Illinois rather that Smith College in Massachusetts, which she would have preferred. Four years later, she graduated and enrolled in the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, but soon decided medicine was not for her. Following spinal surgery and a long recuperation period, Anna Haldeman Addams took her stepdaughter on a trip to Europe where she witnessed the effects of urban poverty for the first time. Upon returning home after a second trip to Europe in 1887 and 1888, Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr decided to open their own settlement house.

Hull House was established in Chicago, where Addams and Starr rented a decaying mansion in the midst of a crowded, poor immigrant community. Within four years of its inception, Hull House boasted an array of clubs and functions, a day nursery, gymnasium, dispensary, playground, and a cooperative boarding house for single working women, known as the Jane Club. Hull House made Jane Addams famous. Her work in the settlement led to her election in 1909 as the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (later known as the National Conference of Social Work.) In 1910, she became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, and in 1911, she was named the first head of the National Federation of Settlements, a position she held until her death. As a respected public figure, Addams was called upon to second Teddy Roosevelt's nomination to run for President in 1912 on the Progressive party ticket.

Logically, Addams also stood for woman suffrage. From 1911 through 1914, she held the position of first Vice-President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and in 1913 attended the convention of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance held in Budapest. In other words, Hull House took Jane Addams into the public sphere, making her into a political force even though, as a woman, she did not hold even the simplest means of political power--the vote.

Jane Addams had initially shown her disdain for war by becoming a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, founded to protest the results of the Spanish-American-Filipino-Cuban War of 1898, which established U.S. colonies abroad. At that time, she openly deplored the racist and imperialistic implications of the war, stating that patriotism and duty had to be separated from warmongering. In 1902, she formalized her ideas in Democracy and Social Ethics where she stated that the need for war would gradually disappear once the larger society developed the type of collective social morality she had found existed in the crowded immigrant tenement quarters surrounding Hull House. Five years later, in Newer Ideals of Peace, she introduced the idea that the world needed to substitute "nurture for warfare" and no one could do this more effectively than women who needed to have a voice and presence in the political forum.

Jane Addams was naturally distraught when war broke out in Europe in August, 1914. In an attempt to curtail the fighting, she joined in various efforts. In September of 1914, she and other social-work professionals organized the American Union Against Militarism. The group's main concern was that war would harm their efforts to improve inter-ethnic relations. At the urging of both U.S. and European suffragists, she took on the leadership role of organizing the Woman's Peace Party, a uniquely feminist group which sought to empower women. The "Preamble" of its founding document proclaimed that women had "a peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and waste of war" and were fed up with the "reckless destruction" caused by men in powerful positions. Women wanted "a share in deciding between war and peace," and that share included equality in all aspects of public and private life.

The Woman's Peace Party attracted thousands of members in at least 200 local groups and affiliates by early 1917. While this organizing was going on, Addams cast her eyes on Europe where in April 1915, she joined over 1,000 women from both the neutral and fighting nations at a meeting at The Hague. The concluding document of the International Congress of Women made clear that women's voices in governments would not just encourage peace through mediation but would demand those economic, political, and social conditions which would remove all sorts of violence from women's lives.

Addams returned home as the first President of the newly formed International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace. Upon her arrival, she addressed a mass meeting in Carnegie Hall where she revealed her dismay that stimulants such as alcohol were being used in battlefields to make it easier for men to kill each other. The press lambasted her for her views, and for several years to come, the press, the U.S. government, and various conservative organizations portrayed her as an unpatriotic subversive out to demasculinize the nation's sons. Although the bad press did not deter Addams from trying to achieve an end to the war, it damaged her reputation and made life in the U.S. uncomfortable for her through the 1920s. While still revered as a social reformer, it was not until she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 that people finally forgave her for her protests during World War I.

Throughout World War I, Jane Addams continued to head the Woman's Peace Party, although the organization was fairly quiet. Addams herself volunteered to work for Herbert Hoover's federal Department of Food Administration, traveling to many states urging women to conserve food and to help increase food production. From this work, Addams developed her philosophy that women's responsibility was to nurture the world and thereby to create a healthier, more politically responsible population. As she later stated in The Second Twenty Years at Hull House and in Peace and Bread in Time of War, "I firmly believed that through an effort to feed people, a new and powerful force might be unloosed in the world and would in the future have to be reckoned with as a factor in international affairs."

In May, 1919, the women who had met at The Hague gathered in Zurich to create WILPF, and Addams, the woman whom so many around the world admired, was elected the first international president. At home, however, her name appeared in such Red Scare reports as "Who's Who of Pacifists and Radicals," New York State's Lusk report on "Revolutionary Radicalism," and on various versions of the Spider Web chart which singled out dangerous and subversive characters for the general public to watch out for. Harassment and blacklisting at home may have been one of the reasons why Addams, although tired and aging, spent large chunks of the 1920s traveling around the world organizing for WILPF. She spent extended amounts of time traveling through Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. During this period, she also gained tremendous respect for Mohandas Gandhi and espoused his ideas at many WILPF gatherings. She was, however, very careful not to push for a strict adherence to nonviolent principles within WILPF. It was more important for her to gain members than to limit the philosophy of the group. As long as women were against war as a means of settling disputes, the organization was open to them.

In 1935, Addams was diagnosed with cancer and died on May 21. For two days her body lay in state at Hull House, where as many as 2,000 people an hour paid their respects. She was then buried in her hometown of Cedarville, Illinois, where her tombstone reads: "Jane Addams of Hull-House and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom."

Harriet Hyman Alonso has written extensively about women and peace. She is a professor of History at the City College of New York. WILPF members might find her book, Peace as a Women's Issue (Syracuse University Press, 1993), of particular interest as it covers a great deal of the organization's history. In 2002, her prize-winning book, Growing Up Abolitionist: The Story of the Garrison Children, was published (University of Massachusetts Press). Also of note is the The Women's Peace Union (Syracuse University Press, 1997). All of her books are available in paperback; members of WILPF might also like to check out the University of Illinois Press for its inexpensive paperback reprints of books by Jane Addams. Alonso can be contacted via e-mail at: [e-mail].