Jane Addams

Jane Addams was born into a prosperous Illinois family with a curved spine that made her self-conscious and often in pain. Her father, whom she idolised, died soon after she left college, and she spent much of her twenties ill, depressed and drifting through Europe, unsure what a well-off, educated woman was supposed to do with herself.

A visit to Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in the East End of London, gave her the answer. In 1889 she and her friend Ellen Gates Starr rented a shabby mansion on Halsted Street in Chicago, in a ward crowded with Italian, Greek, Jewish and Irish immigrants, and simply moved in. Hull House offered a kindergarten, a night school, an employment bureau, a gymnasium, art classes and a place to complain. Within a few years it had a dozen buildings and two thousand visitors a week.

The residents, most of them women, investigated the ward's sweatshops and tenements and pushed through laws on child labour and factory inspection. When the streets stayed filthy, Addams got herself appointed garbage inspector and followed the carts at six in the morning.

Her opposition to the First World War cost her most of her popularity; she was denounced as unpatriotic and expelled by the Daughters of the American Revolution. She kept working for peace and relief through the 1920s, and in 1931 became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in 1935 and lay in state at Hull House.