In September 6, 1860 Jane Addams was born in Cedarville.
Jane Addams was the youngest of eight children. Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors and reading indoors.
When Jenny was only three her mother became very ill and died. As a result of not having any siblings her , disliked greatly being reprimanded. When she was age four, she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, which caused a curvature in her back and lifelong health problems. As a child, she thought she was "ugly". In her teens, Addams had big dreams which is to do something useful in the world. Long interested in the poor from her reading of Dickens and inspired by her mother's kindness to the Cedarville poor , so she decided to address this social problem.

Addams's father encouraged her to pursue higher education, but not too far from home. She was eager to attend the brand new college for women, Smith College, but her father required Jane to attended Rockford Female Seminary. The principal of Rockford was a feminist who believed women deserved the same quality education that men received and that women had a supreme duty to preserve morality, culture and the heritage of western civilization.
In 1881 Jane Addams was graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor's degree only after the school became accredited the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be.

At the age of twenty seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London's East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago, which was the Hull House, the first settlement house in the United States. The house had been built by Charles Hull in 1856. Initially, Addams paid for all of the capital expenses (repairing the roof of the porch, repainting the rooms they were renting, purchasing the furniture) and the bulk of the operating costs.

Addams and Starr were the first two occupants of the house, which would later become the residence of about 25 women. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, and a library, as well as labor-related divisions. In addition to making available social services and cultural events for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training.

Eventually, Hull House became a 13-building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp (known as Bowen Country Club). Starr and Addams developed three ethical principles for social settlements: to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy, that is, egalitarian, or democratic, social relations across class lines. Hull House therefore offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world, they were all designed to foster democratic cooperation and collective action and downplay individualism.

In the 1890s Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and other residents of the house made it a world center of social reform activity. Hull House used the latest methodology to study overcrowding, truancy, typhoid fever, cocaine, children's reading, newsboys, infant mortality, and midwifery. Starting with efforts to improve the immediate neighborhood, the Hull House group became involved in city- and state-wide campaigns for better housing, improvements in public welfare, stricter child-labor laws, and protection of working women. Addams brought in prominent visitors from around the world, and had close links with leading Chicago intellectuals and philanthropists. Addams at Hull House stressed the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants, and fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services.

In 1919, she was a main concern for the US and the most labelled dangerous woman in America. This seems to be the point where her role in sociology fell. Although she made great contributions to the field of sociology, she is rarely acknowledged. She was looking for it to develop in a different direction. One very important reason Jane was not looked at as a sociologist was because she was female. Social work, which is mainly seen as dominated by women, and sociology, as dominated by men, formed shortly after W.W.I. Those women trained in Chicago before 1918 were then pushed toward social work and were rarely hired in sociology within universities. The American Sociological Society restricted women's participation to the office. This patriarchal monopoly was very much present at the University of Chicago and disagreed with Addam's philosophy. This field may have been different had Jane stayed with it, resulting in more professional careers in sociology . Although she truly loved to learn, she had several reasons to question universities. One of them being that they cautioned young women about preparing for a new life that would include a husband and family . Although Jane has been labeled a social worker, it is very apparent that she played a large role in sociology.

In 1935, three days after it was discovered that Jane had cancer, she died . It has been estimated that the service in the Hull House courthouse was visited by more than 2,000 people an hour. At the time of her death she had written ten books, more than two thousand articles and had given hundreds of speeches.
It is apparent that Jane Addams was an extraordinary woman. She has done several things to improve lives from the private to the public sphere. She is one of the reasons society lives the way they do.

References :

"Jane_Addams." Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org>.
"Addams_Bio." Nobel_Prizes. Web. <http://nobelprize.org>.
"Janeadams." Web. <http://www.webster.edu>.

"hull_house." Jaddams. Web. <http://www.uic.edu>.

"JaneAddams." Web. <http://www.america.gov>.

"JaneAddams ." Social_worker . Web. <http://www.socwork.net>.