"The Greatest Woman in the World"

​@iammrbeat tells you all about Jane Addams, one of the most important figures in American history. This is part of another mega-collaboration of a bunch of history YouTubers to celebrate women's history month. We're calling it #ProjectHerStory.

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Produced by Matt Beat. Music by Electric Needle Room (Mr. Beat's band). All images and video either by Matt Beat, found in the public domain, or used under fair use guidelines. #janeaddams #hullhouse

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Jeremy Butler

Chicago Architecture Today

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Here’s the story of one of the most important people in American history...Jane Addams. But her impact as a reformer went way beyond the United States. In my opinion, she’s the face of the entire Progressive Era, that period of widespread reform and activism between the 1890s and 1920s.

Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois on September 6, 1860. The youngest of eight children, by most measures Jane’s family was very well off. Her dad, John, was a successful businessman and a member of the Illinois Senate who even knew Abraham Lincoln. Jane adored her father. He definitely was a big influence on her life. Sadly, she never really knew her mother, who died in childbirth when Jane was just two. Growing up, Jane was mostly taken care of by her older sisters.

When Jane was four, she got Pott’s disease, which was basically tuberculosis of the spine. This caused a curvature in her spine, which led to health problems the rest of her life. Growing up, she had a limp due to this, and often could not run as quickly as the kids she played with.

Jane’s father remarried when she was eight to Anna Haldeman. Jane and Anna got along quite well, and Jane was quite influenced by Anna’s devotion to the poor who lived in Cedarville. That, combined with reading about the poor in Charles Dickens novels, would eventually cause Jane to want to devote her life to helping the poor.

With the encouragement of her father, Jane decided to attend college, which is not something most girls did in the 1870s. But Jane was extremely smart, and college wasn’t no thing, yo. She graduated from Rockford Female Seminary, which is now Rockford University, in 1881 at the top of her class, also among the first there to ever get a bachelor’s degree.

That summer, Jane’s father suddenly died of appendicitis. I’ve had appendicitis, by the way, and it sucks. I didn’t die from it, though. Anyway, this video isn’t about me. Jane and her sibling each inherited $50,000, which today translates to nearly $1.3 million.

Jane decided she wanted to study medicine. That fall, she joined her sister Alice to go to the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. While she was driven and ambitious, a few things came up that took her away from her goals. First of all, she still had health problems. Her spine was still giving her trouble, and her brother-in-law Harry performed surgery to attempt to straighten it. She ended up having a nervous breakdown which caused her to have to withdraw from med school. After this, Jane returned to Cedarville to take care of her stepmom, Anna, who had gotten very sick.

Meanwhile, Jane was in a funk, now not knowing what to do with her life. So she went to Europe. Beginning in August 1883, and over the following four years, she would travel all over Europe, constantly looking for direction.