Jane Addams

From Philosopedia

Addams, Jane (6 September 1860 - 21 May 1935) Addams, winner in 1931 of the Nobel Peace Prize, founded Chicago’s Hull House. In view of her prominent position, Joseph McCabe noted,

• Miss Addams, who was the aunt of the late Marcet Haldeman-Julius, had to be reticent about religion, but her biographer F. W. Linn says that she never departed from the Rationalism which her father had taught her and "just joined the Congregational Church as she might join a labor-union.”

In Twenty Years at Hull-House, she wrote,

• A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in."

She was active in the women’s suffrage and pacifist movements. Although she attended All Souls’ Unitarian Church in Chicago and was briefly an interim lecturer at Chicago’s Ethical Culture Society, she retained a membership in a Presbyterian congregation.

Malcolm Bush has written that Addams “was the original secular humanist, rejecting Christianity and socialism alike as formal beliefs though she took inspiration from both.”

Strongly supported by John Haynes Holmes and the intellectual Unitarians of her day, Addams has been called, if not a Unitarian, certainly a unitarian. Her funeral, by her direction, was unsectarian. She was buried in Cedarville, Illinois, her childhood home.

{CE; Free Inquiry, Fall, 1993; HNS2; JM; RE; TSV; WWS}