In the autumn of 1894 the philosopher John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, told the head of a settlement house on Halsted Street that conflict was inevitable and possibly a good thing. Jane Addams answered that antagonism was useless and unnecessary, because it arose from what people felt about one another and never from a real difference between them. She was thirty-four years old and held no university post. That summer she had sat on the citizens' board that tried to arbitrate the strike at the Pullman railway-car works, and George Pullman, the company's president, had refused to meet her. Two days after the conversation Dewey sent her a note conceding her point about where antagonism begins.
The position she defended that autumn runs through everything she later wrote, and its plainest statement is her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902). Her readers had been raised on a plain morality: be honest, be thrifty, look after your own family. That morality, she argued, was made for dealings between one person and another, and it fails wherever one person decides for many. Pullman is her example, though the book does not name him: he built his workmen a model town, did not seek their consent to it, and judged his goodness by his own feelings. Democracy, for Addams, is therefore more than a way of choosing governments. It is a rule of conduct, and the rule is that nobody can know what is good for other people without sharing their life and asking them. Dewey later credited her with the first definite statement that democracy means certain kinds of experience.
None of this came from a university. The daughter of an Illinois mill owner and state senator, she graduated first in her class at Rockford Female Seminary in 1881. Her father died that August; she entered a medical college in October and was home by March. Eight years followed, filled by illness, an operation on her spine and two long tours of Europe. In June 1888, in London, she visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement where graduates of Oxford and Cambridge lived among the poor of the East End. On 18 September 1889 she and Ellen Gates Starr, a friend from Rockford, opened Hull-House in Chicago's Nineteenth Ward and furnished it with reproductions of European art. The neighbourhood changed the plan. By 1894 the house had opened the first playground in the city; in 1895 its residents published a survey of the ward, Hull-House Maps and Papers, and Addams took her first paid job, as the ward's garbage inspector.
She headed Hull-House until she died, and she wrote from what she saw there. She refused offers to join the University of Chicago's faculty, though she taught courses for its extension division for a decade. Her books argue from cases: a charity visitor, a ward alderman, the boys charged in Chicago's Juvenile Court. The philosopher William James signed a letter to her in 1909 as her pupil in sociology. Yet for most of the twentieth century she was remembered as a social worker who had applied the ideas of Dewey and James. The sociologist Mary Jo Deegan, in 1988, and the philosopher Charlene Haddock Seigfried, in 1996, documented how much the men had taken from her. Since the 1990s her books have come back into print, and she is read as a philosopher in her own right.
The First World War put her position to the test. Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) had claimed that war would be replaced: people would find, in keeping one another alive, the loyalty they had once found only in fighting. In 1915 she presided over a congress of women at The Hague and carried its plan for mediation by neutral countries to seven capitals; after a speech she gave on her return, one newspaper called her a traitor and a fool. In 1917 Dewey supported American entry into the war, and Addams opposed it. In January 1919 her name stood on a list of radicals and pacifists submitted to the Senate. Once the country was at war she lectured for the federal Food Administration on saving food for Europe, and she drew a second argument from that work, set out in Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922): feeding people is an older human habit than fighting, and a firmer base for peace.
In 1931 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which she shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University. Of the $16,367 it brought her, she set aside $12,000 for the Geneva office of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, whose first president she had been.