"Jane Addams" was a pioneer American settlement movement/settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped turn America to issues of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatism/American pragmatist school of philosophy. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.

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The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.

The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.

Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.