Jane Addams

Addams was a young woman of means with a degree and no permitted use for it, ill and adrift for years, until a visit to a settlement house in the East End of London showed her a model she could copy. In 1889 she and Ellen Gates Starr rented a decaying mansion on Halsted Street in Chicago, in a district of Italian, Greek, Russian and Bohemian immigrants, and simply moved in. Hull House grew to thirteen buildings and offered a kindergarten, night classes, a labour museum, a gymnasium, the city's first public playground and a place for unions to meet.

The residents also counted things. Their surveys of wages, sanitation, child labour and typhoid gave reformers the numbers that produced Illinois's first factory inspection law, juvenile court and eight-hour day for women. Addams was for two decades one of the most admired people in America. Then in 1915 she opposed entry into the war, chaired an international women's congress at The Hague, and was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution and watched by federal agents. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and is buried in the village where she was born.