a day of her own

A day of her own

"The leading
woman in the nation,
one might almost say
its leading citizen."

Halvdan Koht,
upon presenting the
1931 Nobel Peace Prize
to Jane Addams

By Mark Sorensen

Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 71.

Local girl makes good. College class president, founder of a settlement house, civic leader, Nobel Prize winner and now, on December 10th, the first woman in the United States to have her own state commemorative day.

Born in the small Stephenson County town of Cedarville on September 6, 1860, Jane Addams struggled to find a meaningful role for herself in a world where men dominated civic, economic and government functions. In 1889 she and lifelong friend Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in Chicago, one on the first settlement houses in the nation. Over the next 40 years she became a leader in the Chicago schools, women's suffrage movement, American Civil Liberties Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the American Association of University Women. On December 10, 1931, she and Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams died in Chicago on May 21, 1935. She was buried in Cedarville, her childhood home town.

Fast forward to the tiny Southern Illinois town of Dongola where teacher Cindy Vines asked students in her eighth-grade social studies class to "do a project that would make a difference." Five students (John Cauble, Katie Forcht, Brittany Lannom, Jennifer Medlin, and Chayse Swink) decided their goal was to advocate for a state holiday honoring Addams after discovering that there were no state or national holidays honoring women anywhere in the United States. On

These students from the Dongola Unit School District and their teacher, Cindy Vines, led the push in 2005 to get "Jane Addams Day" on the calendar.

May 11, 2005, students went to the State Capitol to lobby legislators to make this a reality. Although one legislator said that a holiday for women was "long overdue," nothing happened. It wasn't until Vines and her students got support from their local Representative and the Carbondale AAUW chapter that things got moving. With the help of Chicago Democrats Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie and Sen. Mattie Hunter, and support from Lt. Governor Pat Quinn, HB 5243 was introduced in 2006 and signed into law on May 21, 2006. The State Commemorative Dates Act (5 ILCS 490/115) now declares "December 10 of each year is designated as Jane Addams Day, to be observed throughout the State as a day to remember her and teach about her great accomplishments, compassion, and social conscience." (The Illinois General Assembly this summer also renamed the Northwest Tollway (I-90), the "Jane Addams Toll way.)

In a 1972 AAUW tribute to Addams and the women of Hull House, Louise V. Molkup wrote, "These gentlewomen were imbued with the ideals of altruism and service. They believed they had a duty to share the fruits of their superior education. In a neighborhood of immigrants [Addams] became personally concerned with

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To Learn More:
Read about Jane Addams at the Hull House Museum
http://wall.aa.uic.edu:62730/artifact/HullHouse.asp

Find lists of books about Addams on the AALUW website—
http://www.aauw-il.org/addamsbooks.pdf

Jane Addams and Gender—
http://aauw-il.org/information/herstory/Jun2007.pdf

Read Addam's Twenty Years at Hull House free online —
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/addams/hullhouse/hullhouse.html

Governor Blagojevich's "Jane Addams Day" bill signing press release
http://www.illinois.gov/PressReleases/ShowPressRelease.cfm?RecNum=4904&SubjectID=43

the health and education of the people, especially the young. She believed children younger than age fourteen should not be permitted to work; nor should their non-English speaking parents be exploited. Along with working increasingly for the passage of child labor laws and the establishment of unions, Jane Addams was concerned for the quality of life of her neighbors. She invited them into Hull-House as she would have invited them into her own home. She and her associates taught the women English, cooking and sewing. The men were given tools and a workbench and were encouraged to speak English to each other. The young had materials for crafts of all kinds, for art work, for social games, for music and for drama."

Patrick Quinn hopes that organizations use "this new holiday as an opportunity to express their pride in one of Illinois' most famous citizens, and teach young people throughout or state that one person really can make a difference." Addams, he said, "proved that when people work together for reform, they can change the world."

Both the AAUW and the Illinois Women's Press Association are promoting this new state commemorative day. According to Jan Lisa Huttner of AAUW-Illinois, "our goal is to make sure everyone knows to mark December 10, 2007 on their calendars right away; great things will happen in Illinois on that date!"

ISHS vice president Mark Sorensen teaches history at Millikin University in Decatur.

"The Key" opens the heart of Addams' mission

By Mark Sorenson

In "The Key," a mural in the Illinois State Capitol, Jane Addams is depicted seated, nurturing children who were forced to work at an early age, as well as standing, allegorically passing on her spirit and compassion to future generations. The painting was unveiled in September 1989. Artist Billy Morrow Jackson's painting depicts the compassion for suffering humanity and the desire for social change that Jane Addams embodied. Beginning at the lower right, Jackson shows people of all races trying to escape the bonds of poverty by helping each other unlock the knowledge and education needed to succeed in America.

In the upper left of the painting, Hull House is depicted along with all of the activities that Addams and her settlement house workers supported. These included art classes, musical and dramatic productions, early childhood education, physical education, homemaking and hygiene instruction, civics lessons, and in order to get the neighborhood garbage picked up, the down and dirty reality of Chicago ward politics. A former University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign art instructor, Jackson (1926-2006) inserted himself on the left edge of the painting as the capped artist executing a self-portrait.

Finally, in the lower left of the canvas, women are carving suffrage into stone. Addams was a leader in the national suffrage movement and felt that until women could get to vote for all offices they could not protect themselves from discriminatory laws and practices.

"The Key" is only the second work of art in the State Capitol depicting an identifiable historical female. The other is the 1976 statue of Lottie Holman O'Neill, the first women legislator elected in Illinois. In addition, of the over 100 pieces of sculpture and paintings found inside the State House and on the Capitol grounds, only two were created by women artists: Julia Bracken Wendt's 1895 rotunda statue, "Illinois Welcoming the World," and Ellen Lanyon's 1988 mural, "The Rise of Chicago."

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Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library