(Laura) Jane Addams was a social reformer and a pacifist, a woman ahead of her time in realizing that caring intervention may be the best crime deterrent. She is known as the founder of Hull House in Chicago, one of the first social settlements in North America. Addams was the cowinner, with Nicholas Murray Butler, of the 1931 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Born Laura Jane Addams, she was the eighth and last child born to a wealthy family in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860. Her father, John, was a banker, state senator, and mill owner. Her mother, Sarah, died when Jane was three years old. Ignoring the conventions of the day that kept most women at work inside the home, John Addams decided that his youngest child should be college educated to pursue a career if she so chose. He sent her to Rockford Seminary for Females, now Rockford College, in...