Jane Addams
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Jane Addams
The Nobel Peace Prize 1931
Born: 6 September 1860, Cedarville, IL, USA
Died: 21 May 1935, Chicago, IL, USA
Residence at the time of the award: USA
Role: Sociologist; International President, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Prize motivation: “for their assiduous effort to revive the ideal of peace and to rekindle the spirit of peace in their own nation and in the whole of mankind”
Prize share: 1/2
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Jane Addams was the second woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, and worked for many years to get the great powers to disarm and conclude peace agreements.
In the USA, Jane Addams worked to help the poor and to stop the use of children as industrial laborers. She ran Hull House in Chicago, a center which helped immigrants in particular.
During World War I, she chaired a women's conference for peace held in the Hague in the Netherlands, and tried in vain to get President Woodrow Wilson of the USA to mediate peace between the warring countries. When the USA entered the war instead, Jane Addams spoke out loudly against this. She was consequently stamped a dangerous radical and a danger to US security.
Addams was critical of the peace treaty that was forced on Germany in 1919, maintaining that it was so humiliating that it would lead to a German war of revenge. At the end of her life, Jane Addams was honored by the American government for her efforts for peace.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
