| Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) won the Nobel Peace Prize and was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House Movement. Addams was educated in the United States and Europe, graduating from the Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in Rockford, Illinois. While in London, she was influenced by Andrew Mearn's essay, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which highlighted slum conditions.[3] She visit to Europe when she was 27 years old, visiting Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in the East End of London.[3] Settlement houses provided welfare for a neighborhood's poor and a center for social reform. In 1889 she and Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around two thousand people. Its facilities included a night school for adults; kindergarten classes; clubs for older children; a public kitchen; an art gallery; a coffeehouse; a gymnasium; a girls club; a swimming pool; a book bindery; a music school; a drama group; a library; and labor-related divisions. Reference |  |